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At the head of the Lake we got in a boat and rowed across Derwentwater to the tiny bay at the foot of Catbells. There we landed, shouldered our burdens, and set out over the mountains and the passes, and for a week we enjoyed the richest solitude this country can offer. We followed no cut-and-dried programme. I love to draw up programmes for a walking tour, but I love still better to break them.

The feast of colour brought a train of colour memories, one hard upon the heels of another, as we went down the hill; the Catbells, this golden with bracken, that purple with heather, and each doubled in the depths of Derwentwater; an October morning in the hardwood forests of the mountains of Tennessee, when for half an hour every gorgeous tint of red and yellow was lavishly flaunted and then the whole pride and splendour of it wiped out at once by a wind that sprang up; the encircling and towering reds and pinks of a gigantic amphitheatre of rock in the Dolomites; a patch of flowers right against the snow in the high Rockies, so intensely blue that it seemed the whole vault of heaven could be tinctured with the pigment that one petal would distil.

And then came the sunset, a sunset to be dreamed of. Skiddaw was a pyramid of rosy flame; great saffron seas of light lay over the Catbells, the immense shoulders of Borrowdale were purple, and the lake was truly a sea of glass and fire. Nor was this a singular and unmatched day. For a whole month the pageant of the snow lasted.