crowded that day. "How's that?" said his friend. "Why, there's a trip
train gone up to-day with fourteen people from Pwllheli!"

Bredon Hill, in the Vale of Evesham, is the direction in which many
people look for hints of coming changes of weather.

"When Bredon Hill puts on his cap
Ye men of the vale beware of that"

is a well-known proverb referring to the dark curtain of rain clouds
obscuring the top, which is generally followed by heavy rain and
floods in the Avon meadows and those of all the little streams which
join that river. The same purple curtain can be seen on the Cotswolds
above Broadway, and is likewise the forerunner of floods in the Vale:

"When you see the rain on the hills
You'll shortly find it down by the mills."

There is, too, the beautiful blue hazy distance one sees in very fine
weather, which gives a feeling of mystery and remoteness and
unexplored possibilities. I lately read somewhere of a man who had
passed his life without leaving his native village, though he had
often looked far away into the blue distance, and longed to start upon
a journey of discovery; for its invitation seemed an assurance that in
such beauty there must be something better than he had ever
experienced in his own home. There came a day when the appeal was so
insistent that he braced himself to the effort, and after many weary
miles reached the place of his dreams, only to find that the blue
distance had disappeared. Meeting a passer-by he told him of his
journey and its object, and of his disappointment, "Look behind you,"