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half submerged in green. They showed their white disks through a green transparency of grass, as they seemed to swim with the tide, or turned over, ruffled by a sudden catspaw that changed the whole colour of the valley from brown to violet. There was something very sweet and restful in the little valley; but Alice trotted on towards the rising ground above, for she had thought of a certain quiet place over there—a place where solitude and peace seemed the only inhabitants, and where she might bury the regrets and disappointments of the past without anyone else taking part in the funeral. It was a wide open stretch of moorland, lightly strewed with grey boulders of rock, over head and ears in furze and bracken, and occasionally showing the red-and-white motley of the cattle which wandered over it. On one side a line of cliffs enclosed the purple vintage of the sea in a small estuary; on the other the great dividing range, muffled in azure haze, stretched from north to south without a break. There was a small forlorn wooden church with a tin steeple, perched just at the edge of the plain, where the moorland broke down into the valley. It seemed to accentuate the stillness and solitude of the great purple plain, for one could not imagine any congregation, even on a Sunday, coming