My dog had made a point on a piece of fallow-ground, and led the
curate and me two or three hundred yards over that and some stubble
adjoining, in a breathless state of expectation, on a burning first
of September.

It was a false point, and our labour was vain: yet, to do Rover
justice (for he's an excellent dog, though I have lost his
pedigree), the fault was none of his, the birds were gone: the
curate showed me the spot where they had lain basking, at the root
of an old hedge.

I stopped and cried Hem! The curate is fatter than I; he wiped the
sweat from his brow.

There is no state where one is apter to pause and look round one,
than after such a disappointment. It is even so in life. When we
have been hurrying on, impelled by some warm wish or other, looking
neither to the right hand nor to the left--we find of a sudden that
all our gay hopes are flown; and the only slender consolation that
some friend can give us, is to point where they were once to be
found. And lo! if we are not of that combustible race, who will
rather beat their heads in spite, than wipe their brows with the
curate, we look round and say, with the nauseated listlessness of
the king of Israel, "All is vanity and vexation of spirit."

I looked round with some such grave apophthegm in my mind when I
discovered, for the first time, a venerable pile, to which the
enclosure belonged. An air of melancholy hung about it. There was
a languid stillness in the day, and a single crow, that perched on