long church beyond them,
which was still used for various purposes by the good folk of Dorchester:
where, by the way, the village guest-house still had the sign of the
Fleur-de-luce which it used to bear in the days when hospitality had to
be bought and sold. This time, however, I made no sign of all this being
familiar to me: though as we sat for a while on the mound of the Dykes
looking up at Sinodun and its clear-cut trench, and its sister _mamelon_
of Whittenham, I felt somewhat uncomfortable under Ellen's serious
attentive look, which almost drew from me the cry, "How little anything
is changed here!"

We stopped again at Abingdon, which, like Wallingford, was in a way both
old and new to me, since it had been lifted out of its nineteenth-century
degradation, and otherwise was as little altered as might be.

Sunset was in the sky as we skirted Oxford by Oseney; we stopped a minute
or two hard by the ancient castle to put Henry Morsom ashore. It was a
matter of course that so far as they could be seen from the river, I
missed none of the towers and spires of that once don-beridden city; but
the meadows all round, which, when I had last passed through them, were
getting daily more and more squalid, more and more impressed with the
seal of the "stir and intellectual life of the nineteenth century," were
no longer intellectual, but had once again become as beautiful as they
should be, and the little hill of Hinksey, with two or three very pretty
stone houses new-grown on it (I use the word advisedly; for they seemed
to belong to it) looked down happily on the full streams and waving
grass, grey now, but for the sunset, with its fast-ripening seeds.

The railway having disappeared, and therewith the various level bridges
over the streams of Thames, we were soon through Medley Lock and in the
wide water that washes Port Meadow, with its numerous population of geese
nowise diminished; and I thought with interest how its name and use had
survived from the older imperfect communal period, through the time of
the confused struggle and tyranny of the rights of property, into the
present rest and happiness of complete Communism.

I was taken ashore again at Godstow, to see the remains of the old
nunnery, pretty nearly in the same condition as I had remembered them;
and from the high bridge over the cut close by, I could see, even in the
twilight, how beautiful the little village with its grey stone houses had
become; for