state. The sight of them was enough. I stamped my feet for the kitchen,
and rarely in my life have been happier than there, dining and supping
with John and Martha and the farm-labourers, expecting my father across
the hills, and yet satisfied with the sun. To hope, and not be
impatient, is really to believe, and this was my feeling in my father's
absence. I knew he would come, without wishing to hurry him. He had the
world beyond the hills; I this one, where a slow full river flowed from
the sounding mill under our garden wall, through long meadows. In Winter
the wild ducks made letters of the alphabet flying. On the other side of
the copses bounding our home, there was a park containing trees old as
the History of England, John Thresher said, and the thought of their
venerable age enclosed me comfortably. He could not tell me whether he
meant as old as the book of English History; he fancied he did, for the
furrow-track follows the plough close upon; but no one exactly could
swear when that (the book) was put together. At my suggestion, he fixed
the trees to the date of the Heptarchy, a period of heavy ploughing.
Thus begirt by Saxon times, I regarded Riversley as a place of extreme
baldness, a Greenland, untrodden by my Alfred and my Harold. These
heroes lived in the circle of Dipwell, confidently awaiting the arrival
of my father. He sent me once a glorious letter. Mrs. Waddy took one of
John Thresher's pigeons to London, and in the evening we beheld the bird
cut the sky like an arrow, bringing round his neck a letter warm from him
I loved. Planet communicating with planet would be not more wonderful to
men than words of his to me, travelling in such a manner. I went to
sleep, and awoke imagining the bird bursting out of heaven.

Meanwhile there was an attempt to set me moving again. A strange young
man was noticed in the neighbourhood of the farm, and he accosted me at
Leckham fair. 'I say, don't we know one another? How about your
grandfather the squire, and your aunt, and Mr. Bannerbridge? I've got