The next day I started for my visit by the railway.

My instructions directed me to travel to the town of Lewes in Sussex.
Arrived there, I was to ask for the pony-chaise of my young lady's
father--described on his card as Reverend Tertius Finch. The chaise was
to take me to the rectory-house in the village of Dimchurch. And the
village of Dimchurch was situated among the South Down Hills, three or
four miles from the coast.

When I stepped into the railway carriage, this was all I knew. After my
adventurous life--after the volcanic agitations of my republican career
in the Doctor's time--was I about to bury myself in a remote English
village, and live a life as monotonous as the life of a sheep on a hill?
Ah, with all my experience, I had yet to learn that the narrowest human
limits are wide enough to contain the grandest human emotions. I had seen
the Drama of Life amid the turmoil of tropical revolutions. I was to see
it again, with all its palpitating interest, in the breezy solitudes of
the South Down Hills.

CHAPTER THE SECOND

Madame Pratolungo makes a Voyage on Land

A WELL-FED boy, with yellow Saxon hair; a little shabby green chaise; and
a rough brown pony--these objects confronted me at the Lewes Station. I
said to the boy, "Are you Reverend Finch's servant?" And the boy
answered, "I be he."

We drove through the town--a hilly town of desolate clean houses. No