A COTTESWOLD SUMMER BREEZE 187 



smiled and they rustled a welcome. It has 

 played with the quaking grasses, and whispered 

 through the ripening corn. It has made the close- 

 set rival wild-flowers kiss each other. And all the 

 while it has been gathering to itself a burden of 

 sweet odours, which not even the smoke and smell 

 of half a dozen seaport towns have tainted. So 

 vast it is, these ills are lost in it, like the muddy 

 splashing of a child at the edge of a great river. 

 The Cotteswolds lie in the full current of this life- 

 giving sweet air, which flows almost without 

 ceasing from remote distances across the breast 

 of the Atlantic. 



But the hills, receiving so much of this humic 

 richness, give something in return. Even in the 

 dead season, when fields are bare, the long green 

 slopes exhale a faint yet exhilarating breath a 

 something which human perceptions are not able 

 fully to appreciate, which evades deliberate investi- 

 gation, yet again and again makes itself known. 

 It is the very ghost of an aroma, yet one which 

 inspires with ideas of a wealth of life and sweet- 

 ness hidden somewhere within the combes, some- 

 where within the wide brown arms of the hills. 



