The country is deserted in the rain, and I have the world to myself, a world of frenzied rain among the elms of the lowland, an avenue of elms up to a great house, hidden sheep tinkling and bleating, shepherds muffled, huge slopes of grass and pearled clover above a coombe where a grey heron sails and clanks alone, a farm desolate among elder and ash at the highest part of the hills, and then miles of pathless pasture and stubble descending past an old camp and a tumulus to the submerged vale, where yellow elms tremble about a church tower, a cluster of red cottages and bowed yellow dahlias and chrysanthemums, and a house standing aloof. This house is some way from the Downs themselves, but just at the foot of a lesser slope, a fair golden hill--golden with cowslips in May--that rises on one side with a swift, short ascent and then shoots forward, as if with the impetus, almost level until, after crowning itself with beeches, it descends in a lazy curve to a field, roughened by the foundations of a vanished house, at one corner of which the chimneys join with another group of elms in the haze of rain. Hanging from the wall in rags, too wet even to flap, are the remains of an auctioneer’s announcement of a sale at the house behind. Mahogany--oak chests--certain ounces of silver--two thousand books--portraits and landscapes and pictures of horses and game--of all these and how much else has the red house been disembowelled? It is all shadowy within, behind the windows, like the eyes of a corpse, and without sound, or form, or light, and it is for no one that the creeper magnificently arrays itself in bediamonded crimson and gold that throbs and wavers in the downpour. The martins are still there, and their play up and down before the twenty windows is a senseless thing, like the play of children outside a chamber of agony or grief. They seem to be machines going on and on when their master and purpose are dead. But then, too, there is gradually a consolation, a restfulness, a deceit, a forgetting, in the continuity of their movement and their unchanged voices. The two hundred autumns perpetuated in the tones of the bricks are in vain. Strangers will come, no doubt--I hope they will not--and be pleased, actually proud, at this mellowness, which ought to have died with the last of the family that built the house.