lation of the blood; the labour of life becomes easier, effort is
reduced and pleasure increased.

Bowling along the smooth road we crossed a small river at Doniford,
where a man was wading the stream below the bridge and fly-fishing for
trout; we passed the farmhouses of Rydon, where the steam-thresher was
whirling, and the wheat was falling in golden heaps, and the
pale-yellow straw was mounded in gigantic ricks; and then we climbed
the hill behind St. Audries, with its pretty gray church, and manor
house half hidden in the great trees of the park.

The view was one of indescribable beauty and charm; soft, tranquil
woods and placid fertile fields; thatched cottages here and there,
sheltered and embowered in green; far away on the shore, the village of
East Quantockshead; beyond that the broad, tossing waters of the
Bristol Channel; and beyond that again, thirty miles away, the silver
coast of Wales and the blue mountains fading into the sky. Ships were
sailing in and out, toy-like in the distance. Far to the north-west, we
could see the cliffs of the Devonshire coast; to the north-east the
islands of Steep Holm and Flat Holm rose from the Severn Sea; and
around the point beyond them, in the little churchyard of Clevedon, I
knew that the dust of Arthur Henry Hallam, whose friendship Tennyson
has immortalized in "In Memoriam," was sleeping

"By the pleasant shore
And in the hearing of the wave."

High overhead the great white clouds were loitering across the
deep-blue heaven. White butterflies wavered above the road. Tall
foxglove spires lit the woodland shadows with rosy gleams. Bluebells
and golden ragwort fringed the hedge-rows. A family of young wrens
fluttered in and out of the hawthorns. A yellow-hammer, with cap of
gold, warbled his sweet, common little song. The colour of the earth
was warm and red; the grass was of a green so living that it seemed to
be full of conscious gladness. It was a day and a scene to calm and
satisfy the heart.

At Kilve, a straggling village along the road-side, I remembered
Wordsworth's poem called "An Anecdote for Fathers." The little boy in
the poem says that he would rather be at Kilve than at Liswyn. When his
father foolishly presses him to give a reason for his preference, he
invents one:

"At Kilve there was no weather-cock,
And that's the reason why."

Naturally, I looked around the village to see whether it would still
answer to the little b