day it was
seriously proposed to erect a "Jubilee Hall" of _red_ brick in our
village. Anything for a change, you see; these people would not be
mortal if they did not love a change. The pure grey limestone is
commonplace hereabouts; I have actually heard it said that it will not
last. Yet in every village stand the old Norman churches, built entirely
of local stone, walls and roof; and many an old manor house as well lies
in our midst, as good as it was three hundred years ago. To me, this
limestone of the hills is one of the most beautiful features of the
Cotswold country. I love to stand in a limestone quarry and mark the
layers and ponderous blocks of clean white virgin rock--a tiny cleft in
"the great stone floor which stretches over the face of the earth and
under the limitless expanse of the sea." That solid cretaceous mass is
but the remnants of the countless inhabitants of the old seas,--life
changed into solid, hard rock; and even now, as the green grass and the
sweet sainfoin spring up on the surface, feeding the flocks and herds
that will soon in their turn feed mankind, earth is turning back again
into life. Thus onwards in an endless cycle, even as the earth goes
round, and the waters return to the place from whence they came, does
nature's work go on; and when we consider these things, eternity and
infinity lose part of their strangeness. Does it seem strange when we
look upon this glorious country?--in May a sea of golden buttercups, in
summer a sea of waving grass, and in the autumn a sea of golden corn;
once it was a sea of salt water. And these great rounded banks, these
hills and valleys, these billowy wolds,--could they but speak to us
might tell strange things of the passing of the waters and of the
inhabitants of the old ocean ages and ages ago; the mystery of the sea
would be sung in every vale and echoed back by every rolling down.

A very wonderful matter it certainly is that the stone in which the
whole history of the country-side is writ, not only in rolling downs and
limestone streams, but even in church, tithe-barn, farm, and cottage, as
well as in the walls and the roads and the very dust that blows upon
them, should be nothing more nor less than a mass of dead animals that
lived generation after generation, thousands of years ago, at the bottom
of the sea.

There is silence in the woods--the drowsy silence of summer. Most of
the birds have gone to the cornfields. An ash copse is never so