Two or three times on his walk Aldous heard from far within the trees the sounds of hatchet and turner's wheel, which told him he was passing one of the wood-cutter's huts that in the hilly parts of this district supply the first simple steps of the chairmaking industry, carried on in the little factory towns of the more populous valleys.

And two or three times also he passed a string of the great timber carts which haunt the Chiltern lanes; the patient team of brown horses straining at the weight behind them, the vast prostrate trunks rattling in their chains, and the smoke from the carters' pipes rising slowly into the damp sunset air.

But for the most part the road along which he walked was utterly forsaken of human kind.

Nor were there any signs of habitation--no cottages, no farms.

He was scarcely more than thirty miles from London; yet in this solemn evening glow it would have been hardly possible to find a remoter, lonelier nature than that through which he was passing.
And presently the solitude took a grander note.