he other some bottles of
wine.

'D'ye feel ye can meet your fate like a man, neighbour Darton?' asked
Johns, breaking a silence which had lasted while five-and-twenty hedgerow
trees had glided by.

Mr. Darton with a half-laugh murmured, 'Ay--call it my fate! Hanging and
wiving go by destiny.' And then they were silent again.

The darkness thickened rapidly, at intervals shutting down on the land in
a perceptible flap, like the wave of a wing. The customary close of day
was accelerated by a simultaneous blurring of the air. With the fall of
night had come a mist just damp enough to incommode, but not sufficient
to saturate them. Countrymen as they were--born, as may be said, with
only an open door between them and the four seasons--they regarded the
mist but as an added obscuration, and ignored its humid quality.

They were travelling in a direction that was enlivened by no modern
current of traffic, the place of Darton's pilgrimage being an
old-fashioned village--one of the Hintocks (several villages of that
name, with a distinctive prefix or affix, lying thereabout)--where the
people make the best cider and cider-wine in all Wessex, and where the
dunghills smell of pomace instead of stable refuse as elsewhere. The
lane was sometimes so narrow that the brambles of the hedge, which hung
forward like anglers' rods over a stream, scratched their hats and curry-
combed their whiskers as they passed. Yet this neglected lane had been a
highway to Queen Elizabeth's subjects and the cavalcades of the past. Its
day was over now, and its history as a national artery done for ever.

'Why I have decided to marry her,' resumed Darton (in a measured musical
voice of confidence which revealed a good deal of his composition), as he
glanced round to see that the lad was not too near, 'is not only that I
like her, but that I can do no better, even from a fairly practical point
of view. That I might ha' looked higher is possibly true, though it is
really all nonsense. I have had experience enough in looking above me.
"No more superior women for me," said I--you know when. Sally is a
comely, independent, simple character, with no make-up about her, who'll
think me as much a superior to her as I used to think--you know who I
mean--was to me.'

'Ay,' said Johns. 'However, I shouldn't call Sally Hall simple. Primary,
because no Sally is; secondary, because if some could be, this one
wouldn't. 'Tis a wrong denomination to a