the berry, and
turned a rich chestnut.

Mowing was in full swing in the meadows, and we took our forks and
tossed the hay about and drank barley-water with the rest. We followed
the men whose heads were lost in the loads of hay which they carried on
their backs, and saw how they dropped their burden in the haymow. We
stood like children, open-mouthed, admiring the skill and industry of
the man who there gathered it up and scattered it evenly round and
round the mow.

We went into Reuben Goodenough's farmyard, and I showed her the barn
owls which have taken up their abode in his pigeon loft, and which live
amicably with their hosts and feed on mice. We descended the fields to
the woods, which the recent felling has thinned considerably, but which
have all the rank luxuriance of summer, and revelled amid the bracken
and trailing roses. We stood by the streamlet where the green
dragon-flies flitted in the sunshine, and where millions of midges
hovered in the air to become the prey of the swallows which rushed
through with widely open mouths and took their fill without effort.

We spent hours on the moor, where the heather, alas! had not yet
appeared, but which was a perfect storehouse of novelties and marvels.
Who would have thought, for instance, that the little golden bundles
which cling to the furze, and which we thought were moss, were just so
many colonies of baby spiders? We watched the merlins, the fierce
cannibals of the moors, which dash upon the smaller birds and are even
bold enough to attack the young grouse at times. What did we not do!
Where did we not go! And neither of us suffered from surfeit.

"Grace," said Rose, as we lay on our backs in my paddock, and gazed
upon the white cumulus clouds which floated above, "I withdraw all I
have said about your madness, and I now declare you to be particularly
sane. If ever I go back to town, which is doubtful, I will describe
your sanity in terms which will relieve the fears of all at No. 8. My
personal appearance will give colour to my statements, and I shall
probably observe, with the originality which is a mark of genius, that
God made the country and man made the town. But I have not yet decided
to return, although I took a ten days' ticket. Your studio seems to
have served its purpose: is there any opening in Windyridge for a
talented stenographer and typist?"

"The prospects would not appear to be exactly dazzling," I replied,
"but I'm willing