An afternoon in the late November of 1903.

Frost, gales, and abundant rains have more than half stripped the oaks of their yellow leaves.

But the rain is over now, the sky once more a pure lucid blue above me--all around me, in fact, since I am standing high on the top of the ancient stupendous earthwork, grown over with oak wood and underwood of holly and thorn and hazel with tangle of ivy and bramble and briar.

It is marvellously still; no sound from the village reaches me; I only hear the faint rustle of the dead leaves as they fall, and the robin, for one spied me here and has come to keep me company.

At intervals he spurts out his brilliant little fountain of sound; and that sudden bright melody and the bright colour of the sunlit translucent leaves seem like one thing.