88 SHOOTING THE GROUSE 



has come over your whole being. No longer do the 

 cares or dilemmas of yesterday assail your peace ; 

 the House of Commons and the City how small 

 and far off they appear, as a little gleam of pale 

 sunlight illumines the details around you, and a 

 smothered rumbling tells that you are crossing a 

 bridge over a river. You must look out ; up goes 

 the blind ; and there, there are the everlasting hills. 

 Great grey-green slopes of Cumberland fells, patched 

 and scored with heaps and rifts of slaty stone, black 

 in the shadow and white and wet in the light ; veils 

 and wreaths of misty shower, like puffs from a colossal 

 steam-engine, travelling across the face of rock or 

 grass ; far up, a little slender white thread of a water- 

 fall you can almost hear the trickle and splash of 

 the water on the stones, or trace the sound of its 

 gurgling rush down through the beds of granite, 

 fringed with greener bracken, to the valley. 



Black cattle grazing unconcerned along the lower, 

 white sheep on the higher slopes ; straggling stone walls 

 of any age dividing the huge pastures ; deep dens 

 down which the foaming becks are pouring, where the 

 mist clings longer and blacker until the early flight of 

 chattering rooks and jackdaws crossing to their feed 

 is relieved in deeper notes of black against it. 



Now comes the sun, slanting along the hill, gilding 



