WYLDER'S HAND,
CHAPTER I.
BELATING HOW I DROVE THROUGH THE VILLAGE OF
GYLINGDEN WITH MARK WYLDER'S LETTER IN MY VA-
LISE.'
It was late in autumn, and I was skimming along,
through a rich English country, in a postchaise, among
tall hedge-rows gilded, like all the landscape, with the
slanting beams of sunset. The road makes a long and
easy descent into the little town of Gylingden, and down
this we were going at an exhilarating pace, and the jingle
of the vehicle sounded like sledge-bells in my ears, and
its swaying and jerking were pleasant and life-like.
An undulating landscape, with a homely farmstead here
and there, and plenty of old English timber scattered over
it, extended mistily to my right; on the left the road
is overtopped by a noble forest. The old park of Brandon
lies there, more than four miles from end to end. These
masses of solemn and discolored verdure, the faint but
splendid lights, and long filmy shadows, the slopes and
hollows — my eyes wandered over them all with that
strange sense of unreality, and that mingling of sweet
and bitter fancy, with which we revisit a scene familiar in
early childhood, and which has haunted a long inter-
val of maturity and absence, like a romantic reverie.