“Thou, too, must share our fate; for human life is short. 
      Soon will thy tomb be hid, and the grass grow rank on thy grave.”

      MACPHERSON’S Ossian.

And sometimes when I have been up on the hills by night, and, looking away over the broad vale stretched out below, have seen in the distance the gliding lights of some Great Western express—­a trusty weight-carrier bearing through the darkness its precious burden of humanity—­I thought of the time when the old seas ran here.  And then there seemed to come from the direction of the old White Horse and Wayland Smith’s cave the faint murmuring sound of the “Blowing-stone” ("King Alfred’s bugle-horn")—­that summoner of men to arms a thousand years ago, like the beacons of later days that “shone on Beachy Head”; and I felt like a man standing at the prow of a mighty liner, “homeward bound,” on some fine though dark and starless evening, when no sound breaks upon his ear but the monotonous beating of the screw and the ceaseless flow of unfathomed waters, save that ever and anon in the far distance the moaning foghorn sounds its note of warning; whilst as he stands “forward” and inhales the pure health-giving salt distilled from balmy vapours that rise everlastingly from the surface of the deep, nothing is visible to the eye—­straining westward for a glimpse of white chalk cliffs, or eastward, perhaps, for the first peep of dawn—­save the intermittent flash from the lighthouse tower, and the signals glowing weird and fiery that reveal in the misty darkness those softly gliding phantasies, the ships that pass in the night.

II.

In nine years out of ten autumn lingers on until the death of the old year; then, with the advent of the new, our English winter begins in earnest.

It is Christmas Day, and so lovely is the weather that I am sitting on the terrace watching the warm, grateful sun gradually disappearing through the grey ash trunks in the hanging wood beyond the river.  The birds are singing with all the promise of an early spring.  There is scarcely a breath of wind stirring, and one might almost imagine it to be April.  Tom Peregrine, clad in his best Sunday homespun, passes along his well-worn track through the rough grass beyond the water, intent on visiting his vermin traps, or bent on some form of destruction,—­for he is never happy unless he is killing.  My old friend, the one-legged cock pheasant, who for the third year in succession has contrived to escape our annual battue, comes up to my feet to take the bread I offer.  When he was flushed by the beaten there was no need to call “Spare him,” for with all the cunning of a veteran he towered straight into the skies and passed over the guns out of shot.  Two fantail pigeons of purest white, sitting in a dark yew tree that overhangs the stream a hundred yards away, make the prettiest picture in the world against the dusky foliage.