stream, only to finish we
knew not when, so late into darkness was that "finish" projected. We
could see one of the diners passing along the road from the public
house, an eighth of a mile away, at four, with the _piece de resistance_
of the meal in an ample dish enveloped in a towel. Ten minutes later the
other rushes by, contrariwise of direction, in pursuit of beer and the
forgotten bread. A little later, and a scudding white dust-cloud in the
road informs us that one of the dining 'scapists flees breathlessly
vinegar- or salt-ward. Still another five minutes, and the other diner
hies him in chase of the white scud, calling vigorously to it that there
is no butter for the rice, no sugar for the fruit.

We saw at once that this Berkshire corner abounds more in dulcet and
sylvan landscape bits than in picturesque motifs for those who paint
_genre_. The peasants have a certain inchoate picturesqueness, as of
beings roughly evolved from the life of this fair material nature, and
sometimes, in silhouette against dun-gray skies and amid rugged fields,
give one vague feeling of Millet's pathos of peasant life and labor. The
yokel himself, however,--and particularly _herself_,--seems determined
to deny all poetic and picturesque relations, by clothing himself--and
herself--in coarse, shop-made rubbish, in battered, _demode_ town-hats
and flounced gowns from Petticoat Lane.

From certain points of the "Dean" the distances are dreamy and wide,
with high horizon-lines touching wooded hills and shutting the Thames
into a middle distance toward which a hundred little hills either
descend abruptly or decline gently upon broad green meadows. Nature here
smiles, not with pure pagan blitheness, but with a tenderer grace, as of
a soul grown human and fraught with countless memories of man's smiles
and tears, his hard, bitter labor, his sins, sorrows, and longings. But
it is very tender, and not even the wildest storm-effects raise the
landscape to any expression of tragic grandeur, but only suede its fair
hues and soft outlines to the wan pathos peculiar to English moorlands.

_Ye Hutte_ is a misnomer for the extraordinary establishment, studio and
domicile combined, at which we dismounted. It is not a _hut_, and
neither in architectural motive nor the artistic proclivities of its
inmates has it aught to do with the centuries when our English tongue
was otherwise written or spoken than it is to-day. Ye Hutte is a vast,
barn-like bu