Wendover lay well down in the midst, with
mountains of foliage about it. The great plain stretched away to
the northward, variegated near at hand with the quaint pattern of
the fields, but growing ever more and more indistinct, until it
became a mere hurly-burly of trees and bright crescents of river,
and snatches of slanting road, and finally melted into the
ambiguous cloud-land over the horizon. The sky was an opal-grey,
touched here and there with blue, and with certain faint russets
that looked as if they were reflections of the colour of the
autumnal woods below. I could hear the ploughmen shouting to their
horses, the uninterrupted carol of larks innumerable overhead, and,
from a field where the shepherd was marshalling his flock, a sweet
tumultuous tinkle of sheep-bells. All these noises came to me very
thin and distinct in the clear air. There was a wonderful
sentiment of distance and atmosphere about the day and the place.
I mounted the hill yet farther by a rough staircase of chalky
footholds cut in the turf. The hills about Wendover and, as far as
I could see, all the hills in Buckinghamshire, wear a sort of hood
of beech plantation; but in this particular case the hood had been
suffered to extend itself into something more like a cloak, and
hung down about the shoulders of the hill in wide folds, instead of
lying flatly along the summit.
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