“Talking of mouths,” said Mike, as they pulled up to change horses, “we had to start without breakfast.  I wonder if one could get a biscuit and a glass of milk.”

“Glass of milk!” screamed Muchross, “no milk allowed on this coach.”

“Well, I don’t think I could drink a brandy-and-soda at this time in the morning.”

“At what time could you drink one then?  Why, it is nearly eleven o’clock!  What will you have, Kitty?  A brandy?”

“No, I think I’ll take a glass of beer.”

The beauty of the landscape passed unperceived.  But the road was full of pleasing reminiscences.  As they passed through Croydon dear old Laura pointed out an hotel where she used to go every Sunday with the dear Earl, and in the afternoons they played cribbage in the sitting-room overlooking the street.  And some miles further on the sweetness of the past burst unanimously from all when Dicky pointed out with his whip the house where Bessie had gone for her honeymoon, and where they all used to spend from Saturday till Monday.  The incident of Bill Longside’s death was pathetically alluded to.  He had died of D. T.  “Impossible,” said Laura, “to keep him from it.  Milly, poor little woman, had stuck to him almost to the last.  He had had his last drink there.  Muchross and Dicky had carried him out.”

The day was filled with fair remembrances of summer, and the earth was golden and red; and the sky was folded in lawny clouds, which the breeze was lifting, revealing beautiful spaces of blue.  All the abundant hedgerows were red with the leaf of the wild cherry, and the oak woods wore masses of sere and russet leafage.  Spreading beeches swept right down to the road, shining in beautiful death; once a pheasant rose and flew through the polished trunks towards the yellow underwood.  Sprays trembled on naked rods, ferns and grasses fell about the gurgling watercourses, a motley undergrowth; and in the fields long teams were ploughing, the man labouring at the plough, the boy with the horses; and their smock-frocks and galligaskins recalled an ancient England which time has not touched, and which lives in them.  And the farm-houses of gables and weary brick, sometimes well-dismantled and showing the heavy beam, accentuated these visions of past days.  Yes, indeed, the brick villages, the old gray farm-houses, and the windmill were very beautiful in the endless yellow draperies which this autumn country wore so romantically.  One spot lingered in Mike’s memory, so representative did it seem of that country.  The road swept round a beech wood that clothed a knoll, descending into the open country by a tall redding hedge to a sudden river, and cows were seen drinking and wading in the shallows, and this last impression of the earth’s loveliness smote the poet’s heart to joy which was near to grief.