Whatever that answer may be, I walked over the old Gothic bridge with a heart strong enough to meet Mrs Oldcastle without flinching.  I might have to quarrel with her—­I could not tell:  she certainly was neither safe nor wholesome.  But this I was sure of, that I would not quarrel with her without being quite certain that I ought.  I wish it were never one’s duty to quarrel with anybody:  I do so hate it.  But not to do it sometimes is to smile in the devil’s face, and that no one ought to do.  However, I had not to quarrel this time.

The woods on the other side of the river from my house, towards which I was now walking, were of the most sombre rich colour—­sombre and rich, like a life that has laid up treasure in heaven, locked in a casket of sorrow.  I came nearer and nearer to them through the village, and approached the great iron gate with the antediluvian monsters on the top of its stone pillars.  And awful monsters they were—­are still!  I see the tail of one of them at this very moment.  But they let me through very quietly, notwithstanding their evil looks.  I thought they were saying to each other across the top of the gate, “Never mind; he’ll catch it soon enough.”  But, as I said, I did not catch it that day; and I could not have caught it that day; it was too lovely a day to catch any hurt even from that most hurtful of all beings under the sun, an unwomanly woman.

I wandered up the long winding road, through the woods which I had remarked flanking the meadow on my first walk up the river.  These woods smelt so sweetly—­their dead and dying leaves departing in sweet odours—­that they quite made up for the absence of the flowers.  And the wind—­no, there was no wind—­there was only a memory of wind that woke now and then in the bosom of the wood, shook down a few leaves, like the thoughts that flutter away in sighs, and then was still again.

I am getting old, as I told you, my friends. (See there, you seem my friends already.  Do not despise an old man because he cannot help loving people he never saw or even heard of.) I say I am getting old—­(is it but or therefore?  I do not know which)—­but, therefore, I shall never forget that one autumn day in those grandly fading woods.

Up the slope of the hillside they rose like one great rainbow-billow of foliage—­bright yellow, red-rusty and bright fading green, all kinds and shades of brown and purple.  Multitudes of leaves lay on the sides of the path, so many that I betook myself to my old childish amusement of walking in them without lifting my feet, driving whole armies of them with ocean-like rustling before me.  I did not do so as I came back.  I walked in the middle of the way then, and I remember stepping over many single leaves, in a kind of mechanico-merciful way, as if they had been living creatures—­as indeed who can tell but they are, only they must be pretty nearly dead when they are on the ground.