“Have you found a house, and a nest where you may lay your young?

(and from within): 

Even Thy altars, O Lord of Hosts! my King and my God!”

D. and I wandered (how one wanders here) a long time there yesterday evening.  Then we went up to the cemetery on the hill, with that beautiful lych-gate you were so fond of.  I picked you a forget-me-not from the old Rector’s grave, for he has gone home, after fifty-nine years’ pastorship of Amesbury.  His wife died the year before.  Their graves are beautifully kept with flowers.

Whit-Monday, 9.30 p.m.  We are in the upper sitting-room to-day, the lower one having been reserved for “trippers.”  It is a glorious night—­beyond the open window one of several Union Jacks waves in the evening breeze, and one of several brass bands has just played its way up the street.  How these admirable musicians have found the lungs to keep it up as they have done since an early hour this morning they best know!  Oh, how we have laughed!  How you would have laughed!!  It has been the most good-humoured, civil crowd you can imagine!  Such banners! such a “gitting of them” up and down the street by ardent “Foresters” and other clubs in huge green sashes and flowers everywhere!  Before we were up this morning they were hanging flags across the street, and seriously threatening the stability of that fine old window!

When I was dressed enough to pull up the blind and open the window some green leaves fluttered in in the delicious breeze.  I went off into raptures, thinking it was a big Vine I had not noticed before, creeping outside!!

It was a maypole of sycamore branches, placed there by the Foresters!!!

Frances Peard laughed at me much for something like to this I said at Torquay!  She said, “You are just like my old mother.  Whenever we pass a man who has used a fusee, she always becomes knowing about tobacco, and says, There, Frances, my dear—­there IS a fine cigar.’”

* * * * *

...  We came here last Thursday.  When I got to Porton D. had sent an air-cushion in the fly, and though I had a five miles drive it was through this exquisite air on a calm, lovely evening, and by the time we got to a spot on the Downs where a little Pinewood breaks the expanse of the plains, the good-humoured driver and I were both on our knees on the grass digging up plots of the exquisite Shepherd’s Thyme, which carpets the place with blue!

Yesterday we drove by Stonehenge to Winterbourne Stoke.  It was glaring, and I could not do much sketching, but the drive over the downs was like drinking in life at some primeval spring. (And this though the wind did give me acute neuralgia in my right eye, but yet the air was so exquisitely refreshing that I could cover my eye with a handkerchief and still enjoy!) The charm of these unhedged, unbounded, un-"cabined, cribbed, confined” prairies is all their