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. The trees grew so close, and their boughs
were so matted together, that the whole wood looked as dense as a
bush of heather. The prevailing colour was a dull, smouldering red,
touched here and there with vivid yellow.
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