wild duck."
Bestowing a penny to encourage him in his promising researches into the
feathered world, I went on by a footpath over a hill, and as I mounted
to the higher ground there before me rose the noble tower of St.
Cuthbert's Church, and a little to the right of it, girt with high
trees, the magnificent pile of the cathedral, with green hills and the
pale sky beyond. O joy to look again on it, to add yet one more enduring
image of it to the number I had long treasured! For the others were
not exactly like this one; the building was not looked at from the same
point of view at the same season and late hour, with the green hills lit
by the departing sun and the clear pale winter sky beyond.
Coming in by the moated palace I stood once more on the Green before
that west front, beautiful beyond all others, in spite of the strange
defeatures Time has written on it. I watched the daws, numerous as ever,
still at their old mad games, now springing into the air to scatter
abroad with ringing cries, only to return the next minute and fling
themselves back on their old perches on a hundred weather-stained broken
statues in the niches. And while I stood watching them from the palace
trees close by came the loud laugh of the green woodpecker. The same
wild, beautiful sound, uttered perhaps by the same bird, which I had
often heard at that spot ten years ago! "You will not hear that woodland
sound in any other city in the kingdom," I wrote in a book of sketches
entitled "Birds and Man", published in 1901.
But of my soul's adventures in Wells on the two or three following days
I will say very little. That laugh of the woodpecker was an assurance
that Nature had suffered no change, and the town too, like the hills and
rocks and running waters, seemed unchanged; but how different and how
sad when I looked for those I once knew, whose hands I had hoped to
grasp again! Yes, some were living still; and a dog too, one I used
to take out for long walks and many a mad rabbit-hunt--a very handsome
white-and-liver coloured spaniel. I found him lying on a sofa, and down
he got and wagged his tail vigorously, pretending, with a pretty human
hypocrisy in his gentle yellow eyes, that he knew me perfectly well,
that I was not a bit changed, and that he was delighted to see me.
On my way back to Bath I had a day at Bristol. It was cattle-market day,
and what with the bellowings, barkings, and shoutings, added to the buzz
and clang of in
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