Page:Waylaid by Wireless - Balmer - 1909.djvu/60

Rh with the gleaming fens and willow banks of the little stream beyond. And above, touching the clear blue sky, climbed the Norman and old English towers of Ely, carved clear and crested by the sun; while below, the white-fleeced sheep grazed in the grass at their base, almost within their cool shadow.

The calm, settled, and irrevocable manner and mind of this whole peaceful countryside and its people came to the young American with unexpressible understanding as he drew in with his breath the deep satisfaction and firm establishment of their very air. Many times before, and for many, many weeks when he was a boy he had come over to this England with his mother and sisters and their friends. But for three weeks this time he had been alone—solitary and untended of his own countrymen in England. And he felt he was just beginning to sound the hitherto all unsuspected depths of the fundamental differences—the delightful and discreet, oh, eminently discreet, differences which distinguish 42