nd chocolate lozenges for future
consumption, and--thanks to Eleanor's presence of mind and
experience--we got our luggage together, and started in the north train
in a carriage by ourselves.

We talked very little now. Eleanor gazed out of her window, and I out of
mine, in silence. As we got farther north, Eleanor's eyes dilated with a
curious glow of pride and satisfaction. I had then no special attachment
to one part of England more than another, but I had never seen so much
of the country before, and it was a treat which did not lose by
comparison with the limited range of our view at Bush House.

As we ran on, the bright, pretty, sociable-looking suburbs of London
gave way to real country--beautiful, cared-for, garden-like, with grand
timber, big houses, and grey churches, supported by the obvious
parsonage and school; and deep shady lanes, with some little cart
trotting quaintly towards the railway bridge over which we rushed, or
boys in smock-frocks sitting on a gate, and shouting friendly
salutations (as it seemed) to Eleanor and myself. Then came broad, fair
pastures of fairy green, and slow winding rivers that we overtook almost
before we had seen them, with ghostly grey pollard willows in formal
mystical borders, contrasting with such tints of pale yellow and gay
greens, which in their turn shone against low distances of soft blue and
purple, that the sense of colour which my great-grandfather had roused
in me made me almost tremble with a never-to-be-forgotten pleasure. From
this flat but most fair country, the grey towers of Peterborough
Cathedral stood up in ancient dignity; and then we ran on again. After a
while the country became less rich in colour, and grander in form. No
longer stretching flatly to low-lying distances of ethereal hue, it was
broken into wooded hills, which folded one over the other with
ever-increasing boldness of outline. Now and then the line ran through
woods of young oak, with male ferns and bracken at their feet, where the
wild hyacinths, which lie there like a blue mist in May, must for some
weeks past have made way for the present carpet of pink campion.

And now the distance was no longer azure. Over the horizon and the lower
part of the sky a thin grey veil had come--a veil of smoke. We were
approaching the manufacturing districts. Grander and grander grew the
country, less and less pure the colouring. The vegetation was rich
almost to rankness; the well-wooded distances w