--tore myself away, I may say, for, besides meeting with
people I didn't know who treated a stranger with sweet
friendliness, it is a town which quickly wins one's
affections. It is built of bricks of a good deep rich red
--not the painfully bright red so much in use now--and no
person has had the bad taste to spoil the harmony by
introducing stone and stucco. Moreover, Newbury has, in Shaw
House, an Elizabethan mansion of the rarest beauty. Let him
that is weary of the ugliness and discords in our town
buildings go and stand by the ancient cedar at the gate and
look across the wide green lawn at this restful house, subdued
by time to a tender rosy-red colour on its walls and a deep
dark red on its roof, clouded with grey of lichen.

From Newbury and the green meadows of the Kennet the Hampshire
hills may be seen, looking like the South Down range at its
highest point viewed from the Sussex Weald. I made for Coombe
Hill, the highest hill in Hampshire, and found it a
considerable labour to push my machine up from the pretty
tree-hidden village of East Woodhay at its foot. The top is a
league-long tableland, with stretches of green elastic turf,
thickets of furze and bramble, and clumps of ancient noble
beeches--a beautiful lonely wilderness with rabbits and birds
for only inhabitants. From the highest point where a famous
gibbet stands for ever a thousand feet above the sea and where
there is a dew-pond, the highest in England, which has never
dried up although a large flock of sheep drink in it every
summer day, one looks down into an immense hollow, a Devil's
Punch Bowl very many times magnified,--and spies, far away and
far below, a few lonely houses half hidden by trees at the