“Now that we are in Somerset we should drink the wine of the country.”
They pushed their bicycles on to the platform before the inn door, and Mr. Ingleby called for cider, a pale, dry liquid with a faint acridity very different from the sugary stuff that comes to the cities in bottles from Devonshire.
“Yes, it’s good cider,” said Mr. Ingleby, tasting. “Where does it come from?” he asked the landlord, who brought it.
“It do be a tidy drop o’ zidur,” said the man. “It do come from Mr. Atwell’s varm into Burrowdown.”
“In” with the accusative, thought Edwin.
“Is old Aaron Atwell still living?” asked his father.
The landlord laughed. The gentleman must have been away a long time from these parts. Mr. Atwell had been dead these fifteen years.
“The cider’s the same,” said Mr. Ingleby.
“’Tis a marvellous archard, sure ’nuff,” said the landlord. “And last year was a wunnerful year for apples. ’Tis all accardin’ . . .”
They left him, and coasted gently down the hill. Descending, it seemed to Edwin that the dome of Axdown lost some of its mountainous quality; and by the time that they had reached the level of the plain in which Wringford lay, he was hardly conscious of its imminence more than as a reminder that this soft, green country was not wholly devoted to quietude and sleep, but that a cool and lively air must always be rolling from the hidden slopes. They came to a green, bordered by elms in heavy leaf, on which a solitary donkey and a flock of geese were grazing. Now the road was dead level and the hedges rich with fragile dog-rose petals and thickets of hemp-agrimony that were not yet in flower. Superficially, the road might have been part of Warwickshire; but there was nothing of the Midlands in the air that moved above it.