The country becomes unpleasant-looking even before the trams end. At Redworth, where I drew up for a short time to make purchases, swarms of rough, dark, and grimy men surrounded us, but all were polite and most civil.
On the hilltop we again draw up in front of an inn. The panting horses want water, and we ourselves have till now had no breakfast.
“Good beds for travellers round the corner.” This was a ticket in a window. I go round the corner. Here is a little show of some kind and a caravan. But the show business cannot be much of a success in this Black Country, for these caravanites look poverty-stricken. From a rude picture on a ragged screen I learn that this caravan is devoted to a horse-taming or Rarey show. The dramatis personae consist of a long, lean, unwholesome-looking lad with straggling yellow hair, a still longer and still leaner lad without any visible hair, and a short man with grey moustache. But this latter comes to the gate bearing in his arms a boy-child of ten years, worn to a skeleton, sickly, and probably dying. The boy shivers, the short man speaks soothingly to him, and bears him back into a dingy tent. I do not relish my breakfast after this sad sight.
We are not sorry when we are away from the immediate vicinity of the mines, and unlimbered by the roadside near the old Red Gate Inn. We have been following the ancient Roman road for many miles, and a good one it is, and very obliging it was of the Romans to make us such a road.
The inn is altogether so quiet and cosy that I determine to stable here for the night, and pass the day writing or strolling about.
So we cross the road and draw the Wanderer up beneath a lordly oak. In crossing we pass from Warwick into Leicestershire.
Pea-blossom is coughing occasionally. It is not a pleasant sound to have to listen to. She may be better to-morrow, for it will be Saturday, and a long and toilsome day is before us.
It is evening now; a walk of a mile has brought me to a hilltop, if hill it can be called. The view from here is by no means spirit-stirring, but quiet and calming to the mind. What a delightful difference between lying here and in that awful bustling inn yard at Leamington!
It is a country of irregular green fields, hedge-bounded, and plentifully sprinkled with oak and ash-trees and tall silver-green aspens; a country of rolling hills and flats, but no fens, with here and there a pretty old-fashioned farm peeping through the foliage.
There is not a cloud in the sky, the sun is sinking in a yellow haze, the robin and the linnet are singing beside me among the hawthorns, and down in the copse yonder a blackbird is fluting.