It began to grow both damp and dusk under the
beeches; and as the day declined the colour faded out of the
foliage; and shadow, without form and void, took the place of all
the fine tracery of leaves and delicate gradations of living green
that had before accompanied my walk. I had been sorry to leave
Peacock Farm, but I was not sorry to find myself once more in the
open road, under a pale and somewhat troubled-looking evening sky,
and put my best foot foremost for the inn at Wendover.
Wendover, in itself, is a straggling, purposeless sort of place.
Everybody seems to have had his own opinion as to how the street
should go; or rather, every now and then a man seems to have arisen
with a new idea on the subject, and led away a little sect of
neighbours to join in his heresy. It would have somewhat the look
of an abortive watering-place, such as we may now see them here and
there along the coast, but for the age of the houses, the comely
quiet design of some of them, and the look of long habitation, of a
life that is settled and rooted, and makes it worth while to train
flowers about the windows, and otherwise shape the dwelling to the
humour of the inhabitant. The church, which might perhaps have
served as rallying-point for these loose houses, and pulled the
township into something like intelligible unity, stands some
distance off among great trees; but the inn (to take the public
buildings in order of importance) is in what I understand to be the
principal street: a pleasant old house, with bay-windows, and
three peaked gables, and many swallows' nests plastered about the
eaves.
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