Kate saw with the eyes and heard with the ears of her youth, and the past
became as clear as the landscape before her. She remembered the days when
she came to read on this hillside. The titles of the books rose up in her
mind, and she could recall the sorrow she felt for the heroes and heroines.
It seemed to her strange that that time was so long past and she wondered
why she had forgotten it. Now it all seemed so near to her that she felt
like one only just awakened from a dream. And these memories made her
happy. She took pleasure in recalling every little event--an excursion she
made when she was quite a little girl to the ruined colliery, and later on,
a conversation with a chance acquaintance, a young man who had stopped to
speak to her.

At the bottom of the valley, right before her eyes, the white gables of
Bucknell Rectory, hidden amid masses of trees, glittered now and then in an
entangled beam that flickered between chimneys, across brick-banked squares
of water darkened by brick walls.

Behind Bucknell were more desolate plains full of pits, brick, and smoke;
and beyond Bucknell an endless tide of hills rolled upwards and onwards.

The American tariff had not yet come into operation, and every wheel was
turning, every oven baking; and through a drifting veil of smoke the
sloping sides of the hills with all their fields could be seen sleeping
under great shadows, or basking in the light. A deluge of rays fell upon
them, defining every angle of Watley Rocks and floating over the grasslands
of Standon, all shape becoming lost in a huge embrasure filled with the
almost imperceptible outlines of the Wever Hills.

And these vast slopes which formed the background of every street were the
theatre of all Kate's travels before life's struggles began. It amused her