This day and the next Aderhold walked, by green country and Tudor village and town, by smithy and mill, by country houses set deep in giant trees, by hamlet and tavern, along stretches of lonely road and through whispering, yet unvanished forests. The sun shone, the birds sang, the air was a ripple of zephyrs. The road had its traffic, ran an unwinding ribbon of spectacle. There were the walls of country and the roof of sky and a staccato presence of brute and human life. Now horsemen went by—knightly travel or merchant travel, or a judge or lawyer, or a high ecclesiastic. Serving-men walked or rode, farming folk, a nondescript of trade or leisure. Drovers came by with cattle, country wains, dogs. A pedlar with his pack kept him company for a while. Country women passed, carrying butter and eggs to market, children coming from school, three young girls, lithe, with linked arms, a parson and his clerk, an old seaman, a beggar, a charcoal-burner, a curious small troupe of mummers and mountebanks, and for contrast three or four mounted men somewhat of the stripe of the widow’s sons. One looked a country gentleman and another a minister of the stricter sort. They gazed austerely at the mummers as they passed. Now life flowed in quantity upon the road, now the stream dwindled, now for long distances there was but the life of the dust, tree and plant, and the air. When the second sunset came he was between hedged fields in a quiet, solitary country of tall trees, with swallows circling overhead in a sky all golden like the halos around saints’ heads in pictures that he remembered in Italy. No house was visible, nor, had one been so, had he made up his mind to ask the night’s lodging. The day had been warm, even the light airs had sunk away, the twilight was balm and stillness. He possessed a good cloak, wide and warm. With the fading of the gold from the sky he turned aside from the road upon which, up and down as far as he could see, nothing now moved, broke through the hedge, found an angle and spread his cloak within its two walls of shelter. The cloak was wide enough to lie upon and cover with, his bundle made a pillow. The stars came out; in some neighbouring, marshy place the frogs began their choiring.