same sweet air as the nibbling donkeys and the browsing sheep, whose
woolliness seemed to me, in those early days of acquaintance with
English objects, but part of the general texture of the small dense
landscape, which looked as if the harvest were gathered by the shears
and with all nature bleating and braying for the violence.
Everything was full of expression for Mark Ambient's visitor--from
the big bandy-legged geese whose whiteness was a "note" amid all the
tones of green as they wandered beside a neat little oval pool, the
foreground of a thatched and whitewashed inn, with a grassy approach
and a pictorial sign--from these humble wayside animals to the crests
of high woods which let a gable or a pinnacle peep here and there and
looked even at a distance like trees of good company, conscious of an
individual profile. I admired the hedge-rows, I plucked the faint-
hued heather, and I was for ever stopping to say how charming I
thought the thread-like footpaths across the fields, which wandered
in a diagonal of finer grain from one smooth stile to another. Mark
Ambient was abundantly good-natured and was as much struck, dear man,
with some of my observations as I was with the literary allusions of
the landscape. We sat and smoked on stiles, broaching paradoxes in
the decent English air; we took short cuts across a park or two where
the bracken was deep and my companion nodded to the old woman at the
gate; we skirted rank coverts which rustled here and there as we
passed, and we stretched ourselves at last on a heathery hillside
where if the sun wasn't too hot neither was the earth too cold, and
where the country lay beneath us in a rich blue mist. Of course I
had already told him what I thought of his new novel, having the
previous night read every word of the opening chapters before I went
to bed.

"I'm not without hope of being able to make it decent enough," he