A MANOR HOUSE IN DEER LAND. 173 



at work? No meat is so good and richly 

 flavoured as that cooked before a wood fire. 

 Coming out at the arched porch under 

 the carved helmet and the inscription (not 

 only written in a dead language, but the very 

 letters ground away by Time), a May-fly 

 lias wandered into the hollow as far as the 

 sunshine slants. His wings — something the 

 colour of thin old glass, weather-beaten to a 

 faint yellow-green — are blurred with darker 

 colour like egg marks. Eising up and down 

 in the sunshine, he has wandered hither from 

 the trout-stream. The old tower casts a 

 longer shadow now, as the heat of the June 

 day declines. Many an old engraving is 

 up there, it is said, inaccessible because the 

 place is full of fleeces. The wealth of the 

 land here is in wool, and wool has been so 

 low in price of recent years that fleeces are 

 stored and kept season after season in hope 

 of a rise. 



The way up to the woods is beside the 

 trout-stream ; it is indeed but a streamlet, 



