one or two wild strawberries.  There came up to me from fields below me the beautiful smell of hay, and there was a break in the voice of the cuckoo.  There was a feeling of summer and of evening and of lateness and of Sabbath in the air; the sky was calm and full of a strange colour, and the sun was low; the bells in the church in the village were all a-ring, and the chimes went wandering with echoes up the valley towards the sun, and whenever the echoes died a new chime was born.  And all the people of the village walked up a stone-paved path under a black oak porch and went into the church, and the chimes stopped and the people of the village began to sing, and the level sunlight shone on the white tombstones that stood all round the church.  Then there was a stillness in the village, and shouts and laughter came up from the valley no more, only the occasional sound of the organ and of song.  And the blue butterflies, those that love the chalk, came and perched themselves on the tall grasses, five or six sometimes on a single piece of grass, and they closed their wings and slept, and the grass bent a little beneath them.  And from the woods along the tops of the hills the rabbits came hopping out and nibbled the grass, and hopped a little further and nibbled again, and the large daisies closed their petals up and the birds began to sing.

Then the hills spoke, all the great chalk hills that I loved, and with a deep and solemn voice they said, ’We have come to you to say Goodbye.’

Then they all went away, and there was nothing again all round about me upon every side.  I looked everywhere for something on which to rest the eye.  Nothing.  Suddenly a low grey sky swept over me and a moist air met my face; a great plain rushed up to me from the edge of the clouds; on two sides it touched the sky, and on two sides between it and the clouds a line of low hills lay.  One line of hills brooded grey in the distance, the other stood a patchwork of little square green fields, with a few white cottages about it.  The plain was an archipelago of a million islands each about a yard square or less, and everyone of them was red with heather.  I was back on the Bog of Allen again after many years, and it was just the same as ever, though I had heard that they were draining it.  I was with an old friend whom I was glad to see again, for they had told me that he died some years ago.  He seemed strangely young, but what surprised me most was that he stood upon a piece of bright green moss which I had always learned to think would never bear.  I was glad, too, to see the old bog again, and all the lovely things that grew there—­the scarlet mosses and the green mosses and the firm and friendly heather, and the deep silent water.  I saw a little stream that wandered vaguely through the bog, and little white shells down in the clear depths of it; I saw, a little way off, one of the great pools where no islands are, with rushes round