and sank into it, down, down, to reveal its infinite depth--Mary! There are parks on both sides of the road, bounded by hedges or high brick walls, and the public road has all the decorum of a drive. For a mile the very ivy which is destined to adorn the goodly wall and spread into forms as grand as those at Godstow Nunnery is protected by wire netting. Doves croon in the oaks: underneath, hazel and birch flicker their new leaves over the pools of bluebells. The swallows fly low over every tuft of the roadside grass and glance into every bay of the wood, and then out above the white road, from which they rebound suddenly and turn, displaying the white rays of their tails. Now and then a gateway reveals the park. The ground undulates, but is ever smooth. It is of the mellow green of late afternoon. Bronzed oak woods bound the undulations, and here and there a solitary tree stands out on the grass and shows its poise and complexity with the added grace of new leaf. The cattle graze as on a painted lawn. A woman in a white dress goes indolent and stately towards the rhododendrons and rook-haunted elms. The scene appears to have its own sun, mellow and serene, that knows not moorland or craggy coast or city. Only a thousand years of settled continuous government, of far-reaching laws, of armies and police, of roadmaking, of bloody tyranny and tyranny that poisons quietly without blows, could have wrought earth and sky into such a harmony. It is a thing as remote from me here on the dusty road as is the green evening sky and all its tranquillity of rose and white, and even more so because the man in the manor house behind the oaks is a puzzle to me, while the sky is always a mystery with which I am content. At such an hour the house and lawns and trees are more wonderfully fortified by the centuries of time than by the walls and gamekeepers. They weave an atmosphere about it. We bow the head and reverence the labour of time in smoothing the grass, mellowing the stone and the manners of the inhabitants, and yet an inevitable conflict ensues in the mind between this respect and the feeling that it is only a respect for surfaces, that a thousand years is a heavy price to pay for the maturing of park and house and gentleman, especially as he is most likely to be a well-meaning parasite on those who are concerned twenty-four hours a day about the difficulty of living and about what to do when they are alive. No, it is the alien remote appearance of the house and land serene in the May evening light which creates this reverence in the mind. It is not feudalism, or the old nobility and gentility, that we are bowing down to, but only to Nature without us and the dream within us. It is certainly not pure envy. Nor yet is it for the same reason as made Borrow reflect when he saw the good house at the end of an avenue of noble oaks near Llandovery--