p morning air.

What a peaceful world it was! I thought for a moment of the mad rush
of petrol-driven buses along Holtorn, and the surging tide of sombre
humanity which filled the footpaths there. This had been the familiar
moving picture of my morning experience for more years than I care to
remember, and now--this. Beyond, the meadows and the shawl of mist in
the valley, a long stretch of gold and golden-brown where gorse and
bracken company together, the one in its vigorous and glowing prime,
the other in the ruddy evening of its days, but not a whit less
resplendent.

Overhead, a grey-blue sky, with the grey just now predominating, but a
sky of promise, according to Mr. Higgins, with never a hint of
breakdown. By and by the blue was to conquer, and the sportive winds
were to let loose and drive before them the whitest and fleeciest of
clouds, but always far up in high heaven.

In the distance, just that delightful haze which the members of our
Photographic Society so often referred to as "atmosphere"--a mighty
word, full of mystic meaning.

Here and there we pass a clump of trees, heavily hung with bright
scarlet berries, whose abundance, our conductor informs us, foretells a
winter of unusual severity. "That's t' way Providence provides for t'
birds," he says. It may be so, though I daresay naturalists would
offer another explanation. All the same, it is pleasing to see how the
blackbirds and thrushes enjoy the feast, though they have already
stripped some of the trees bare, and to that extent have spoiled the
picture.

Mr. Higgins was not disposed to leave us to the uninterrupted enjoyment
of the landscape. He is a thick-set little man, on the wrong side of
sixty, I should judge, with a clean top lip and a rather heavy beard;
and I suspect that the hair upon his head is growing scanty, but that
is a suspicion founded upon the flimsiest of evidence, as I have never
yet seen him without the old brown hat which does service Sundays and
weekdays alike.

He jogged along by the side of the steady mare, who never varied her
four-miles-an-hour pace, and who, I am sure, treated her master's
reiterated injunction to "come up" with cool contempt; but he fell back
occasionally to jerk a few disjointed remarks towards the occupants of
the cart.

"Fox," he said, inclining his head vaguely in the direction of a lonely
farm away on the hillside to the right. "Caught him yesterda' ... been
playin' Old 'Arry wi'