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and yet it produced no shock of pleasure; never, in fact,
had I looked on a lovely scene for the first time so unemotionally. It
seemed to be no new scene, but an old familiar one; and that it had
certain degrading associations which took away all delight.
The reason of this was that a great railway company had long been
"booming" this romantic spot, and large photographs, plain and
coloured, of the town and its quaint buildings had for years been staring

at me in every station and every railway carriage which I had entered
on that line. Photography degrades most things, especially open-air
things; and in this case, not only had its poor presentments made the
scene too familiar, but something of the degradation in the advertising
pictures seemed to attach itself to the very scene. Yet even here, after
some pleasureless days spent in vain endeavours to shake off these
vulgar associations, I was to experience one of the sweetest surprises
and delights of my life.
The church of this village-like town is one of its chief attractions; it is a
very old and stately building, and its perpendicular tower, nearly a
hundred feet high, is one of the noblest in England. It has a magnificent
peal of bells, and on a Sunday afternoon they were ringing, filling and
flooding that hollow in the hills, seeming to make the houses and trees
and the very earth to tremble with the glorious storm of sound. Walking
past the church, I followed the streamlet that runs through the town and
out by a cleft between the hills to a narrow marshy valley, on the other
side of which are precipitous hills, clothed from base to summit in oak
woods. As I walked through the cleft the musical roar of the bells
followed, and was like a mighty current flowing through and over me;
but as I came out the sound from behind ceased suddenly and was now
in front, coming back from the hills before me. A sound, but not the
same--not a mere echo; and yet an echo it was, the most wonderful I
had ever heard. For now that great tempest of musical noise, composed
of a multitude of clanging notes with long vibrations, overlapping and
mingling and clashing together, seemed at the same time one and
many--that tempest from the tower which had mysteriously ceased to
be audible came back in strokes or notes distinct and separate and
multiplied many times. The sound, the echo, was distributed over the
whole face of the steep hill before me, and was changed in character,
and it was as if every one of those thousands of oak trees had a peal of
bells in it, and that they were raining that far-up bright spiritual tree
music down into the valley below. As I stood listening it seemed to me
that I had never heard anything so beautiful, nor had any man--not the
monk of Eynsham in that vision when he heard the Easter bells on the
holy Saturday evening, and described the sound as "a ringing of a
marvellous sweetness, as if all the bells in the world, or whatsoever is

of sounding, had been rung together at once."
Here, then, I had found and had become the possessor of something
priceless, since in that moment of surprise and delight the mysterious
beautiful sound, with the whole scene, had registered an impression
which would outlast all others received at that place, where I had
viewed all things with but languid interest. Had it not come as a
complete surprise, the emotion experienced and the resultant mental
image would not have been so vivid; as it is, I can mentally stand in
that valley when I will, seeing that green-wooded hill in front of me
and listen to that unearthly music.
Naturally, after quitting the spot, I looked at the first opportunity into a
guide-book of the district, only to find that it contained not one word
about those wonderful illusive sounds! The book-makers had not done
their work well, since it is a pleasure after having discovered something
delightful for ourselves to know how others have been affected by it
and how they describe it.
Of many other incidents of the kind I will, in this chapter, relate one
more, which has a historical or legendary interest. I was staying with
the companion of my walks at a village in Southern England in a
district new to us. We arrived on a Saturday, and next morning after
breakfast went out for a long walk. Turning into the first path across the
fields on leaving the village, we came eventually to an oak wood,
which was like an open forest, very wild and solitary. In half an hour's
walk among the old