for the backs of our knees to get stiff, reading the railway legislation and watching little drifts of new snow on the platform, scurrying down against the old, rusty tracks and settling on the old snow like starch on a dirty blanket. Then we got back onto the road and were silent for a while as we got back into our stride.

We went through a huge drift of snow in a ditch as we tried to collect larch-cones, and into a deeper one burying our faces again, and hurling one another waist-deep into the yielding strength of a positively Siberian corner, where the snow was four feet deep against the corner of a stone-walled field. The wind was heartily slapping us in the face at each corner and across the exposed backbone of the Cotswolds; but the sun was bright and quite warm on our backs, and even when the clouds covered it for us it would pick out a field three miles away, and make it glister like Jack Frost in a Christmas window, between the toy trees on the next slope.

Hanbury was dull and cold when we finally reached it, though there was a strange and fatalistic Jolly Farmer on the way who talked pleasantly to us about “the bloody snow”. A red-faced dairymaid, who looked as though she had come out of a comic opera chorus, directed us nervously to Roel Gate, and we got there somehow. It was snowing again, lightly and pleasantly. But I think Hawling to Roel Gate was mainly spent in incoherent song.

We took a sort of cart-track up to Sudely hill – eighteen inches in snow but fouled and fretted with footprints and ruts. Then we walked along a great flat ridge for miles, with tremendous blue hills on the left which were much more like those mystic and lumpy hills in a Sunday painter’s watercolour of the Highlands than the real thing in the Cotswolds.
Diana was tramping behind me through the deep snow and I found myself singing with some bombast:

“ – Mark my footsteps, good my page;
Tread thou in them boldly – ”

We found a disused pig-stye. The roof stays had broken and the great timber roof sloped awkwardly to the ground. We sheltered to smoke again. Pig-smells a year or so old must be one of the most sensory experiences on earth.

Then we came to a snow drift a good three feet deep, though in places it had been cut away from the centre of the track in chunks like farmyard butter and thrown in pleasant heaps on the white undulations at the road edge. We went in up to our knees enjoying ourselves