commanding anything except perhaps a wife or a groom or a regiment of townsmen--yet his landlord. Rough grass and scattered thorns and lofty groups of mossy-pedestalled beeches lie on either side of the road, and grassy tracks lead to thatched cottages in the woods. A grey-clouded silver sky moves overhead. Along the road the telegraph wires go humming the one shrill note in this great harmony of men and woods and sky. Beyond, a broad champaign of corn and grey grass heaves from the woodland edge. The road is gay with red polished fruit and equally red soft leaves, with darkest purple and bronze and wine-red and green berries and leaves, and beam foliage still pure green and white. So high now are the unkempt hedges that the land is hid and only the sky appears above the coloured trees: except at a meeting of ways when a triangular patch of turf is sacred to burdock, ragwort and thistle and--touching the dust of the road--the lowly silverweed; an oak overhangs, yet the little open space admits a vision of the elephantine Downs going west in the rain. In a moment the world is once again this narrow one of the high-hedged lane, where I see and touch with the eye and enjoy the shapes of each bole and branch in turn, their bone-like shapes, their many colours of the wood itself, wrinkled and grooved, or overlaid by pale green mould, silver lichen or dark green moss. Each bend in the road is different. At one all the leaves are yellow but green-veined, the bramble, the hazel, the elder; and there is a little chalk pit below, fresh white and overhung by yew and the dark purple elder berries, small but distinct: at another there is a maple of exquisite small leaves and numerous accordingly, a fair-built tree in a lovely attitude and surmounted by a plume, only a small plume, of traveller’s-joy. In Swineherd’s County they call it “Angel’s hair.”