First beeches line the rising and descending road--past a church whose ivied tombstones commemorate men of Cornish name--as far as an inn and a sycamore nobly balanced upon a pedestal of matted roots. Then there are ash-trees on either side and ricks of straw wetted to an orange hue, and beyond them the open cornland, and rising out of it an all-day-long procession in the south, the great company of the Downs again, some tipped with wood, some bare; in the north, a broken chain of woods upon low but undulating land seem the vertebræ of a forest of old time stretching from east to west like the Downs. Hither and thither the drunken pewits cry over the furrows, and thousands of rocks and daws wheel over the stubble. As the day grows old it grows sweet and golden and the rain ceases, and the beauty of the Downs in the humid clearness does not long allow the eyes to wander away from them. At first, when the sun breaks through, all silver bright and acclaimed by miles of clouds in his own livery, the Downs below are violet, and have no form except where they carve the sky with their long arches. It is the woods northward that are chiefly glorified by the light and warmth, and the glades penetrating them and the shining stubble and the hedges, and the flying wood-pigeons and the cows of richest brown and milky white; the road also gleams blue and wet. But as the sun descends the light falls on the Downs out of a bright cave in the gloomy forest of sky, and their flanks are olive and their outlines intensely clear. From one summit to another runs a string of trees like cavalry connecting one beech clump with another, so that they seem actually to be moving and adding themselves to the clumps. Above all is the abstract beauty of pure line--coupled with the beauty of the serene and the uninhabited and remote--that holds the eye until at length the hills are humbled and dispread as part of the ceremony of sunset in a tranquil, ensanguined, quietly travelling sky. The blue swallows go slowly along the silent road beside me, and the last rays bless a grooved common grazed upon by cows and surrounded by ranges of low white buildings and a row of lichened grotesque limes, dark of bole, golden-leaved, where children are playing and an anvil rings. Frost follows after the blue silence and chill of twilight, and the dawn is dimmest violet in a haze that reveals the candied grass, the soaking blue dark elms painted yellow only in one place, the red roofs, all in a world of the unborn, and the waters steaming around invisible crying coots. Gradually round white clouds--so dim that the sky seems but to dream of round white clouds--appear imbedded in the haze; the beams grow hot, and a breeze joins with them in sucking and scattering all the sweet of the first fallen leaves, the weed fires and the late honeysuckle.