cco.
Moreover, Newbury has, in Shaw House, an Elizabethan mansion of the
rarest beauty. Let him that is weary of the ugliness and discords in our
town buildings go and stand by the ancient cedar at the gate and look
across the wide green lawn at this restful house, subdued by time to
a tender rosy-red colour on its walls and a deep dark red on its roof,
clouded with grey of lichen.

From Newbury and the green meadows of the Kennet the Hampshire hills may
be seen, looking like the South Down range at its highest point viewed
from the Sussex Weald. I made for Coombe Hill, the highest hill in
Hampshire, and found it a considerable labour to push my machine up from
the pretty tree-hidden village of East Woodhay at its foot. The top is a
league-long tableland, with stretches of green elastic turf, thickets
of furze and bramble, and clumps of ancient noble beeches--a beautiful
lonely wilderness with rabbits and birds for only inhabitants. From
the highest point where a famous gibbet stands for ever a thousand feet
above the sea and where there is a dew-pond, the highest in England,
which has never dried up although a large flock of sheep drink in it
every summer day, one looks down into an immense hollow, a Devil's Punch
Bowl very many times magnified,--and spies, far away and far below,
a few lonely houses half hidden by trees at the bottom. This is the
romantic village of Coombe, and hither I went and found the vicar busy
in the garden of the small old picturesque parsonage. Here a very pretty
little bird comedy was in progress: a pair of stock-doves which had been
taken from a rabbit-hole in the hill and reared by hand had just escaped
from the large cage where they had always lived, and all the family were
excitedly engaged in trying to recapture them. They were delightful to
see--those two pretty blue birds with red legs running busily about
on the green lawn, eagerly searching for something to eat and finding
nothing. They were quite tame and willing to be fed, so that anyone
could approach them and put as much salt on their tails as he liked, but
they refused to be touched or taken; they were too happy in their new
freedom, running and flying about in that brilliant sunshine, and when I
left towards the evening they were still at large.

But before quitting that small isolated village in its green basin--a
human heart in a chalk hill, almost the highest in England--I wished the
hours I spent in it had been days, so mu