still it's a good step across the country since morning."

"How far have you come?"

"From the foot of those hills--I forget what they call them--over
there. I have seen bigger ones--but they're steep enough--bleak and
cold, too, especially when one is lying out among the sheep. At a
distance they look pleasant. This is a very pretty view."

Ay, so I had always thought it; more so than ever now, when I had
some one to say to how "very pretty" it was. Let me describe it--
this first landscape, the sole picture of my boyish days, and vivid
as all such pictures are.

At the end of the arbour the wall which enclosed us on the riverward
side was cut down--my father had done it at my asking--so as to make
a seat, something after the fashion of Queen Mary's seat at Stirling,
of which I had read. Thence, one could see a goodly sweep of
country. First, close below, flowed the Avon--Shakspeare's Avon--
here a narrow, sluggish stream, but capable, as we at Norton Bury
sometimes knew to our cost, of being roused into fierceness and foam.
Now it slipped on quietly enough, contenting itself with turning a
flour-mill hard by, the lazy whirr of which made a sleepy, incessant
monotone which I was fond of hearing.

From the opposite bank stretched a wide green level, called the Ham--
dotted with pasturing cattle of all sorts. Beyond it was a second
river, forming an arch of a circle round the verdant flat. But the
stream itself lay so low as to be invisible from where we sat; you
could only trace the line of its course by the small white sails that