was the journey's-end of the wire, and not the village of
Sleeping-Green.

There was a certain unexpectedness in the fact that the hoary
memorial of a stolid antagonism to the interchange of ideas,
the monument of hard distinctions in blood and race, of deadly
mistrust of one's neighbour in spite of the Church's teaching,
and of a sublime unconsciousness of any other force than a
brute one, should be the goal of a machine which beyond
everything may be said to symbolize cosmopolitan views and the
intellectual and moral kinship of all mankind. In that light
the little buzzing wire had a far finer significance to the
student Somerset than the vast walls which neighboured it.
But the modern fever and fret which consumes people before
they can grow old was also signified by the wire; and this
aspect of to-day did not contrast well with the fairer side of
feudalism--leisure, light-hearted generosity, intense
friendships, hawks, hounds, revels, healthy complexions,
freedom from care, and such a living power in architectural
art as the world may never again see.

Somerset withdrew till neither the singing of the wire nor the
hisses of the irritable owls could be heard any more. A clock
in the castle struck ten, and he recognized the strokes as
those he had heard when sitting on the stile. It was
indispensable that he should retrace his steps and push on to
Sleeping-Green if he wished that night to reach his lodgings,
which had been secured by letter at a little inn in the
straggling line of roadside houses called by the above name,
where his luggage had by this time probably arrived. In a