"Well, he smiled and said he would give me a certificate, so I took the certificate and my departure and interviewed the chief in his den! It was as I had anticipated. I was to get away at once. Ten days on the moors would put the wine of life into my blood. That was theory. The practical assumed the form of a five-pound note, which enables me to play the part of the grand lady--a role for which I was designed by nature, but which providence spitefully denied me. I stated my intentions to the Rusty one, who coldly sent you her regards, but I determined to take you by surprise, hoping to catch you unprepared and unadorned, whereas you are neither the one nor the other. Then I boarded the two o'clock Scotch express at St. Pancras, changed trains at Airlee, and _me voila_! By the way, what about my bag?" The bag came all right in due course, and in the days that followed Rose and I gave ourselves up to enjoyment. It was like living one's life twice over to share the delight she showed in her surroundings. Fortunately I had got abreast of my work, and we ordinarily devoted our afternoons to business and spent the mornings and evenings in Nature's wonderland. During those ten glorious days the sun worked overtime for our special benefit, and put in seventeen hours with unfailing regularity. He smiled so fiercely on Rose's cheeks that she would have justified her godmother's choice if she had not preferred the hue of the berry, and turned a rich chestnut. Mowing was in full swing in the meadows, and we took our forks and tossed the hay about and drank barley-water with the rest. We followed the men whose heads were lost in the loads of hay which they carried on their backs, and saw how they dropped their burden in the haymow. We stood like children, open-mouthed, admiring the skill and industry of the man who there gathered it up and scattered it evenly round and round the mow. We went into Reuben Goodenough's farmyard, and I showed her the barn owls which have taken up their abode in his pigeon loft, and which live amicably with their hosts and feed on mice. We descended the fields to the woods, which the recent felling has thinned considerably, but which have all the rank luxuriance of summer, and revelled amid the bracken and trailing roses. We stood by the streamlet where the green dragon-flies flitted in the sunshine, and where millions of midges hovered in the air to become the prey of the swallows which rushed through with widely open mouths and took their fill without effort.