sunshine. The sleepy hum of a threshing-machine filled the

neighbouring fields and hung about the quaint street corners. A
little above, the church sits well back on its haunches against the

hillside - an attitude for a church, you know, that makes it look as
if it could be ever so much higher if it liked; and the trees grew

about it thickly, so as to make a density of shade in the churchyard.
A very quiet place it looks; and yet I saw many boards and posters

about threatening dire punishment against those who broke the church
windows or defaced the precinct, and offering rewards for the

apprehension of those who had done the like already. It was fair day
in Great Missenden. There were three stalls set up, SUB JOVE, for

the sale of pastry and cheap toys; and a great number of holiday
children thronged about the stalls and noisily invaded every corner

of the straggling village. They came round me by coveys, blowing
simultaneously upon penny trumpets as though they imagined I should

fall to pieces like the battlements of Jericho. I noticed one among
them who could make a wheel of himself like a London boy, and

seemingly enjoyed a grave pre-eminence upon the strength of the
accomplishment. By and by, however, the trumpets began to weary me,

and I went indoors, leaving the fair, I fancy, at its height.
Night had fallen before I ventured forth again. It was pitch-dark in

the village street, and the darkness seemed only the greater for a
light here and there in an uncurtained window or from an open door.

Into one such window I was rude enough to peep, and saw within a
charming GENRE picture. In a room, all white wainscot and crimson

wall-paper, a perfect gem of colour after the black, empty darkness
in which I had been groping, a pretty girl was telling a story, as

well as I could make out, to an attentive child upon her knee, while
an old woman sat placidly dozing over the fire. You may be sure I

was not behindhand with a story for myself - a good old story after
the manner of G. P. R. James and the village melodramas, with a

wicked squire, and poachers, and an attorney, and a virtuous young
man with a genius for mechanics, who should love, and protect, and

ultimately marry the girl in the crimson room. Baudelaire has a few
dainty sentences on the fancies that we are inspired with when we

look through a window into other people's lives; and I think Dickens
has somewhere enlarged on the same text. The subject, at least, is

one that I am seldom weary of entertaining. I remember, night after
night, at Brussels, watching a good family sup together, make merry,

and retire to rest; and night after night I waited to see the candles
lit, and the salad made, and the last salutations dutifully

exchanged, without any abatement of interest. Night after night I
found the scene rivet my attention and keep me awake in bed with all

manner of quaintimaginations. Much of the pleasure of the ARABIAN
NIGHTS hinges upon this Asmodean interest; and we are not weary of

lifting other people's roofs, and going about behind the scenes of
life with the Caliph and the serviceable Giaffar. It is a salutary

exercise, besides; it is salutary to get out of ourselves and see
people living together in perfect unconsciousness of our existence,

as they will live when we are gone. If to-morrow the blow falls, and
the worst of our ill fears is realised, the girl will none the less

tell stories to the child on her lap in the cottage at Great
Missenden, nor the good Belgians light their candle, and mix their

salad, and go orderly to bed.
The next morning was sunny overhead and damp underfoot, with a thrill

in the air like a reminiscence of frost. I went up into the sloping
garden behind the inn and smoked a pipe pleasantly enough, to the

tune of my landlady's lamentations over sundry cabbages and
cauliflowers that had been spoiled by caterpillars. She had been so

much pleased in the summer-time, she said, to see the garden all
hovered over by white butterflies. And now, look at the end of it!

She could nowise reconcile this with her moral sense. And, indeed,
unless these butterflies are created with a side-look to the

composition of improving apologues, it is not altogether easy, even
for people who have read Hegel and Dr. M'Cosh, to decide intelligibly

upon the issue raised. Then I fell into a long and abstruse
calculation with my landlord; having for object to compare the

distance driven by him during eight years' service on the box of the
Wendover coach with the girth of the round world itself. We tackled

the question most conscientiously, made all necessary allowance for
Sundays and leap-years, and were just coming to a triumphant

conclusion of our labours when we were stayed by a small lacuna in my
information. I did not know the circumference of the earth. The

landlord knew it, to be sure - plainly he had made the same
calculation twice and once before, - but he wanted confidence in his

own figures, and from the moment I showed myself so poor a second
seemed to lose all interest in the result.

Wendover (which was my next stage) lies in the same valley with Great
Missenden, but at the foot of it, where the hills trend off on either

hand like a coast-line, and a great hemisphere of plain lies, like a
sea, before one, I went up a chalky road, until I had a good outlook

over the place. The vale, as it opened out into the plain, was
shallow, and a little bare, perhaps, but full of graceful

convolutions. From the level to which I have now attained the fields
were exposed before me like a map, and I could see all that bustle of

autumn field-work which had been hid from me yesterday behind the
hedgerows, or shown to me only for a moment as I followed the

footpath. Wendover lay well down in the midst, with mountains of
foliage about it. The great plain stretched away to the northward,

variegated near at hand with the quaint pattern of the fields, but
growing ever more and more indistinct, until it became a mere hurly-

burly of trees and bright crescents of river, and snatches of
slanting road, and finally melted into the ambiguous cloud-land over

the horizon. The sky was an opal-grey, touched here and there with
blue, and with certain faint russets that looked as if they were

reflections of the colour of the autumnal woods below. I could hear
the ploughmen shouting to their horses, the uninterrupted carol of

larks innumerableoverhead, and, from a field where the shepherd was
marshalling his flock, a sweet tumultuous tinkle of sheep-bells. All

these noises came to me very thin and distinct in the clear air.
There was a wonderful sentiment of distance and atmosphere about the

day and the place.
I mounted the hill yet farther by a rough staircase of chalky

footholds cut in the turf. The hills about Wendover and, as far as I
could see, all the hills in Buckinghamshire, wear a sort of hood of

beech plantation; but in this particular case the hood had been
suffered to extend itself into something more like a cloak, and hung

down about the shoulders of the hill in wide folds, instead of lying
flatly along the summit. The trees grew so close, and their boughs

were so matted together, that the whole wood looked as dense as a
bush of heather. The prevailing colour was a dull, smouldering red,

touched here and there with vivid yellow. But the autumn had scarce
advanced beyond the outworks; it was still almost summer in the heart

of the wood; and as soon as I had scrambled through the hedge, I
found myself in a dim green forest atmosphere under eaves of virgin

foliage. In places where the wood had itself for a background and
the trees were massed together thickly, the colour became intensified

and almost gem-like: a perfect fire green, that seemed none the less
green for a few specks of autumn gold. None of the trees were of any

considerable age or stature; but they grew well together, I have
said; and as the road turned and wound among them, they fell into

pleasant groupings and broke the light up pleasantly. Sometimes
there would be a colonnade of slim, straight tree-stems with the

light running down them as down the shafts of pillars, that looked as
if it ought to lead to something, and led only to a corner of sombre

and intricatejungle. Sometimes a spray of delicatefoliage would be
thrown out flat, the light lying flatly along the top of it, so that

against a dark background it seemed almost luminous. There was a
great bush over the thicket (for, indeed, it was more of a thicket

than a wood); and the vague rumours that went among the tree-tops,
and the occasional rustling of big birds or hares among the