the Vale of Avalon, of course," and she beckoned in an
earnest-eyed hound of engaging manners and no engagements, who
answered, at times, to the name of Rambler. He led them, after
breakfast, to the rise behind the house where the stile stood
against the skyline, and, "I wonder what we shall find now," said
Sophie, frankly prancing with joy on the grass.

It was a slope of gap-hedged fields possessed to their centres by
clumps of brambles. Gates were not, and the rabbit-mined,
cattle-rubbed posts leaned out and in. A narrow path doubled
among the bushes, scores of white tails twinkled before the
racing hound, and a hawk rose, whistling shrilly.

"No roads, no nothing!" said Sophie, her short skirt hooked by
briers. "I thought all England was a garden. There's your spire,
George, across the valley. How curious!"

They walked toward it through an all abandoned land. Here they
found the ghost of a patch of lucerne that had refused to die:
there a harsh fallow surrendered to yard-high thistles; and here
a breadth of rampant kelk feigning to be lawful crop. In the
ungrazed pastures swaths of dead stuff caught their feet, and the
ground beneath glistened with sweat. At the bottom of the valley
a little brook had undermined its footbridge, and frothed in the
wreckage. But there stood great woods on the slopes beyond--old,
tall, and brilliant, like unfaded tapestries against the walls of
a ruined house.

"All this within a hundred miles of London," he said. "Looks as
if it had had nervous prostration, too." The, footpath turned the