The picture in which there is most humanity is that of a high wall, ruinous and overgrown. The deep gap in it is tragical. But even here I am not sure that it is a wall that was raised by hand of mason, and as to the inhabitants who left it desolate I feel more doubtful still, I believe it was built in a dream, long ago lost in some victory gained by the forest over men, and quite forgotten until this artist thought it would be a happy lair for a faun. He has not shown us the faun--I wish he had; he ought to know what it was like--but that gap is its gateway out from the forest into the dew of the river lawns. It induces an awful sense of the infinite variety of human character to think of the love of earth first in this man and then in that cowman old. I wonder tolerance is not deeper as well as wider than it is. CHAPTER XIII AUGUST--GOING WEST--HAMPSHIRE AND WILTSHIRE Rain begins as I set out and mount under the beeches. The sky is dark as a ploughed field, but the leaves overhead are full of light like precious stones. The rain keeps the eyes down so that they see one by one the little things of the wayside, the strings of the grey-green and of the scarlet bryony berries, the stony bark of the young ash unveiled by the moving leaves, the million tall straight shoots which the strong nature of ash and hazel has soared into since the spring. Then follows field after field of corn, of sheep among hurdled squares, of mustard in flower, of grass, interrupted now and then by the massed laurels and rhododendrons and the avenues of monkey puzzles that announce the pleasure grounds of the rich. It is a high land of too level clay, chiefly blest in that it beholds the Downs, their saddles of woodland, and, through the deepest passes, the sea and an island rising out of it like an iceberg; and that it is traversed by the Pilgrims’ Way, which gathers to itself Canterbury-bells and marjoram under its hazels, and pours traveller’s-joy cloudily over the ash and brier that overhang the side of an old chalk pit, long, straight and even like a wall. Just here are many grassy lanes between hazel and blackthorn hedges. An old farmhouse with ivied chimneys and ten blind windows in front stands bereaved with weedy garden, but for miles the air sounds with poultry and the building of bungalows in deal and iron for strangers. It is not a stranger that rides by. I think his fathers must have been in this land when Wolf Hanger was not a strange name for the beeches over the hill. He is a tall straight man with long narrow face, clear, not too irregular features, sallow complexion, black hair and black drooping moustache, and flashing eyes as dark as privet berries in autumn dews.