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To our eyes, after the dull sward of the plain, it was a glad sight to see the green spread of the branches and the pleasant gardens which girt the hamlet round. All morning we had seen no sight of a human being, save the old hag upon the moor and a few peat-cutters in the distance. Our belts, too, were beginning to be loose upon us, and the remembrance of our breakfast more faint.
And were not these peat-cutters, with the big baskets on their backs, walking in silhouette along the ridges, the people that Sheila loved and tried to help; and were not these crofters' cottages with thatched roofs, like beehives, blending almost imperceptibly with the landscape, the dwellings into which she planned to introduce the luxury of windows; and were not these Standing Stones of Callernish, huge tombstones of a vanished religion, the roofless temple from which the Druids paid their westernmost adoration to the setting sun as he sank into the Atlantic was not this the place where Sheila picked the bunch of wild flowers and gave it to her lover?
Nothing escaped them, neither the detail of that strange and beautiful fen from which Amiens rises a country of peat and peat-cutters where the green plain is diapered with innumerable tiny lakes edged with black heaps of turf and daintily set with scattered trees nor the delicate charm of the forest lands about Chautilly. So much thinner and gracefuller these woods were than English woods!
The great bell of Beaulieu was ringing. Far away through the forest might be heard its musical clangor and swell. Peat-cutters on Blackdown and fishers upon the Exe heard the distant throbbing rising and falling upon the sultry summer air. It was a common sound in those parts as common as the chatter of the jays and the booming of the bittern.
They often drove up to Baraque Michel, that lonely inn on the borders between Belgium and Prussia, in which the douaniers drank their drams of gin when on the look-out for smugglers, and where the peat-cutters dry their smocks that the mist has wetted and their saturated boots at the fire that is always burning on the hearth.
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