though none of the hills are high, all of them are interesting—­interesting as such things are interesting in an old, small country, by a kind of exquisite modulation, something suggesting that outline and coloring have been retouched and refined, as it were, by the hand of Time.  Independently of its castles and abbeys, the definite relics of the ages, such a landscape seems historic.  It has human relations, and it is intimately conscious of them.  That little speech about the loveliness of his county, or of his own part of his county, was made to me by my companion as we walked up the grassy slope of a hill, or “edge,” as it is called there, from the crests of which we seemed in an instant to look away over half of England.  Certainly I should have grown fond of such a view as that.  The “edge” plunged down suddenly, as if the corresponding slope on the other side had been excavated, and one might follow the long ridge for the space of an afternoon’s walk with this vast, charming prospect before one’s eyes.  Looking across an English county into the next but one is a very pretty entertainment, the county seeming by no means so small as might be supposed.  How can a county seem small in which, from such a vantage-point as the one I speak of, you see, as a darker patch across the lighter green, the twelve thousand acres of Lord So-and-So’s woods?  Beyond these are blue undulations of varying tone, and then another bosky-looking spot, which you learn to be about the same amount of manorial umbrage belonging to Lord Some-One-Else.  And to right and left of these, in shaded stretches, lie other estates of equal consequence.  It was therefore not the smallness but the vastness of the country that struck me, and I was not at all in the mood of a certain American who once, in my hearing, burst out laughing at an English answer to my inquiry as to whether my interlocutor often saw Mr. B——.  “Oh no,” the answer had been, “we never see him:  he lives away off in the West.”  It was the western part of his county our friend meant, and my American humorist found matter for infinite jest in his meaning.  “I should as soon think,” he declared, “of saying my western hand and my eastern.”

I do not think, even, that my disposition to form a sentimental attachment for this delightful region—­for its hillside prospect of old red farmhouses lighting up the dark-green bottoms, of gables and chimney-tops of great houses peeping above miles of woodland, and, in the vague places of the horizon, of far-away towns and sites that one had always heard of—­was conditioned upon having “property” in the neighborhood, so that the little girls in the town should suddenly drop courtesies to me in the street; though that too would certainly have been pleasant.  At the same time, having a little property would without doubt have made the sentiment stronger.  People who wander about the world without money have their dreams—­dreams of what they would buy if their pockets were lined.  These dreams are very