Little pen, be good and flow with ink (which you do not always do) so that I may tell you what came to me once in a high summer and the happiness I had of it.

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One Summer morning as I was wandering from one house to another among the houses of men, I lifted up a bank from a river to a village and good houses, and there I was well entertained. I wish I could recite the names of those chance companions, but I cannot, for they did not tell me their names. June was just beginning in the middle lands where there are vines, but not many, and where the look of the stonework is still northern. The place was not very far from the Western Sea.

The bank on which the village stood above that river had behind it a solemn slope of [Pg 163]woodland leading up gently to where, two miles or more away, yet not three hundred feet above me, the new green of the tree-tops made a line along the sky. Clouds of a little, happy, hurrying sort ran across the gentle blue of that heaven, and I thought, as I went onward into the forest upland, that I had come to very good things: but indeed I had come to things of a graver kind.

A path went on athwart the woods and upwards. This path was first regular, and then grew less and less marked, though it still preserved a clear-way through the undergrowth. The new leaves were opened all about me, and there was a little breeze: yet the birds piped singly and the height was lonely when I reached it, as though it were engaged in a sort of contemplation. At the summit was first one small clearing and then another, in which coarse grass grew high within the walls of trees; men had not often come that way, and those men only the few of the countryside.

Just where the slope began to go downwards[Pg 164] again upon the further side, these little clearings ceased and the woods closed in again. The path, or what was left of it, wholly failed, and I had now to push my way through many twigs and interlacing brambles, till in a little while that forest ceased abruptly upon the edge of a falling sward, and I saw before me the Valley.

Its floor must have lain higher than that river which I had crossed and left the same morning, for my ascent had been one of two miles or so, and my pushing downward on the further slope far less than one; moreover, that descent had been gentle.

The Valley opened to the right at my issue from the wood. To my left hand was a circle of the same trees as those through which I had passed, but to the right and so away northward, the pleasant empty dale.

Let me describe it.

Upon the further bank (for it was not steep enough to call a wall), the western bank which shut that valley in, grew a thick growth of low chestnuts with here and there a tall silver birch[Pg 165] standing up among them. All this further slope was so held, and the chestnuts made a dark belt from which the tall graces of the birches lifted. The sunlight was behind that long afternoon of hills.

Opposite, the higher eastern slope stood full though gentle to the glorious light, and it was all a rise of pasture land. Its crest, which followed up and away northward for some miles, showed here and there a brown rock, aged and strong but low and half covered in the grass. These rocks were warm and mellow. The height of this eastern boundary was enough to protect the hollow below, but not so high as to carry any sense of savagery. It warned rather than forbade the approach of human kind. Between it and its opposing wooded fellow the narrowing floor of that Eden lay; winding, closing slowly, un............