It was such a wonderful afternoon: I was bound to go on wandering.
At last I came to the end of the lanes and found myself on an open hilltop. As the fresh bracing air met me full in the face, I began to feel hungry. I looked at my watch: it was five o’clock. I looked at the landscape, and realised that, though I didn’t know where I was, I was certainly miles away from any tea.
I paused and considered: Should I carefully retrace my steps? That always seems a poor-spirited way of getting home again, even though you are lost! On all sides stretched an expanse of hilly country, grey lichen-covered boulders, yellow-flowered gorse, wiry mauve and purple heather, and a wealth of green, and bronze, and golden tinted bracken, with occasional woods and larch plantations. There was a general hum of bees and insects in the air, and a pheasant rose from the ground close to me and flew with a whirr into a little coppice near by.
A sign-board was lying on the ground by the gate leading into the coppice. It was the worse for wind and weather, but one could still read the alarming warning, “Trespassers will be prosecuted!” Who would trespass, and who would prosecute, on that wild bit of moorland, I wonder? The only being in sight was a rabbit, sitting motionless close beside the prostrate notice and studying me silently with the air of a special constable! Yet even he went off and left me quite alone.
At that moment I caught sight of a chimney over the spur of the hill. I felt convinced it must be attached to a fireplace, and surely there would be a kettle on that fire. I made a bee-line for the place.
To the eye of the town-dweller, hill and moorland distances are apt to be deceptive; the house proved to be much farther off than I had at first imagined. But this gave added zest to expedition; I determined to reach it though I only arrived in time to put up there for the night. A nearer view showed the cottage to be the fag-end of a small hamlet lying snugly in the protecting hollow of the hills.
When I actually entered the village, there were so many pretty dwellings, and they all looked equally inviting, that I was undecided where to open an attack. However, I settled on one that had a couple of hollyhocks, some late pinks, and a black-currant bush growing out of the top of the garden wall, while a free-and-easy grape-vine, a tall monthly rose, and some clematis waved arms of welcome to me from the front of the cottage.
Just as I approached the gate, a pleasant-faced woman came out of the door and walked down the garden path between the French marigolds that edged the flower-beds. She was the only sign of life in the place (apart from a few belated hens, who, being averse to early rising, I suppose, had determined to take time by the forelock, and were catching the historic early worm overnight).