Wheeling her machine back to the open road she sat down on a bank and ate the cold sausage and bread and half of the chocolate and lay down to rest on a level stretch of grass in front of a gate. Light throbbed round the edges of the little high white fleecy clouds. She swung triumphantly up. The earth throbbed beneath her with the throbbing of her heart ... the sky steadied and stood further off, clear peaceful blue with light neat soft bunches of cloud drifting slowly across it. She closed her eyes upon the dazzling growing distances of blue and white and felt the horizon folding down in a firm clear sweep round her green cradle. Within her eyelids fields swung past green, cornfields gold and black, fields with coned clumps of harvested corn, dusty gold, and black, on either side of the bone-white grass trimmed road. The road ran on and on lined by low hedges and the strange everlasting back-flowing fields. Thrilling hedges and outstretched fields of distant light, coming on mile after mile, winding off, left behind ... "it's the Bath Road I shall be riding on; I'm going down to Chiswick to see which way the wind is on the Bath Road...." Trees appeared golden and green and shadowy with warm cool strong shaded trunks coming nearer and larger. They swept by, their shadowy heads sweeping the lower sky. Poplars shot up drawing her eyes to run up their feathered slimness and sweep to the top of the pointed plumes piercing the sky. Trees clumped in masses round houses leading to villages that shut her into little corridors of hard hot light ... the little bright sienna form of the hen she had nearly run over; the land stretching serenely out again, rolling along, rolling along in the hot sunshine with the morning and evening freshness at either end ... sweeping it slowly in and out of the deeps of the country night ... eyelids were transparent. It was _light_ coming through one's eyelids that made that clear soft buff; soft buff light filtering through one's body ... little sounds, insects creeping and humming in the hedge, sounds from the grass. Sudden single quiet sounds going up from distant fields and farms, lost in the sky. 4 I've got my sea-legs ... this is _riding_--not just straining along trying to forget the wobbly bicycle, but feeling it wobble and being able to control it ... being able to look about easily ... there will be a harvest moon this month, rolling up huge and hot, suddenly over the edge of a field; the last moon. I shall see that anyhow whatever the holiday is like. It will be cold again in the winter. Perhaps I shan't feel so cold this winter. 5