It was a forest which at
some time, no doubt, had extended without a break till it
merged into that of Epping--leagues away to the south.
The modern clearance and tillage, however, which separated
it now from Epping had served as a curiously effective
barrier--more baffling than the Romans and Angles
in their turn had found the original wildwood.
No stranger seemed ever to find his way into that broad,
minutely-cultivated fertile plain which High Thorpe looked
down upon. No railway had pushed its cheapening course
across it. Silent, embowered old country roads and lanes
netted its expanse with hedgerows; red points of tiled roofs,
distinguishable here and there in clusters among the darker
greens of orchards, identified the scattered hamlets--all
named in Domesday Book, all seemingly unchanged since.
A grey square church-tower emerging from the rooks'
nests; an ordered mass of foliage sheltering the distant
gables and chimneys of some isolated house; the dim
perception on occasion that a rustic waggon was in motion
on some highway, crawling patiently like an insect--of
this placid, inductive nature were all the added proofs
of human occupation that the landscape offered.
Mr. Stormont Thorpe, on an afternoon of early October,
yawned in the face of this landscape--and then idly wondered
a little at the mood which had impelled him to do so.
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