the soft brown colour of the stone, relieved by the
lighter tone of lintel and window-frame and sill; the dark green of the
ivy; the great, black shadow of the tower on the slated roof where
every jutting dormer window threw its lesser shade; the wide sky
beyond, of a blueness which an artist would have wished to paint.

From the meadow below the plateau came the tinkle of cow-bells, musical
in the distance; and this sound, combined with the note of a bird and
the voices of children from an unseen garden, produced an Arcadian
atmosphere which even the harsh gong of the returning electric car
could not dispel.

As he climbed higher, the houses fell away, disclosing the bare hilltop
over which the road seemed to dip down and disappear; and though he
knew it could not be so, he was half expectant of the sea when he
should have lifted his head above the verge. Instead, he saw a wide
and shallow valley, rich in the varied products of the autumn, with
here and there a bare, reaped field, with many a white farmhouse and
barn of red or grey, till his eye followed the road to the western hill
line and noted a patch of small, white objects which might be a group
of boulders left by a prehistoric glacier, or the houses of a distant
town.

The view on the east, when he turned and faced in the direction from
which he had come, was one of greater interest and of no less beauty.
In the immediate foreground the city of Warwick, in which he had passed
the previous night, thrust its smoking factory chimneys, its spires and
towers, above the shining roofs and lofty elms. But the final element
of charm was found in a broad and sinuous river, blue as the reflected
sky, which flowed past the city's wharves, under a fine stone bridge,
and on through woodland and ploughed land to the sea. Small wonder
that he now forgot for a moment his own ambitions and plans, and
thought only that St. George's Hall lifted its head within an earthly
paradise!

The building, seen from the end, presented the same extraordinary
change that is to be noted when a long ocean steamship which has been
trailing across the horizon turns, shrinks, and comes bow on. In some
such proportion to its length was the width of the Hall; but the tower,
viewed from any angle, was still magnificent. With its four supporting
turrets it appeared rather a group of towers than a single structure.

His immediate curiosity satisfied, the young man now exchanged the
bright su