Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 21, 1896 - Miscellanies, Volume IV

ESSAYS OF THE ROAD, ETC.
High Wycombe ; for the day was a bad day for
walking at best, and now began to draw towards
afternoon, dull, heavy, and lifeless. A pall of grey
cloud covered the sky, and its colour reacted on the
colour of the landscape. Near at hand, indeed, the
hedgerow trees were still fairly green, shot through
with bright autumnal yellows, bright as sunshine.
But a little way off, the solid bricks of woodland
that lay squarely on slope and hill- top were not green,
but russet and grey, and ever less russet and more
grey as they drew off into the distance. As they
drew off into the distance, also, the woods seemed to
mass themselves together, and lay thin and straight,
like clouds, upon the limit of one's view. Not that
this massing was complete, or gave the idea of any
extent of forest, for every here and there the trees
would break up and go down into a valley in open
order, or stand in long Indian file along the horizon,
tree after tree relieved, foolishly enough, against the
sky. I say foolishly enough, although I have seen
the effect employed cleverly in art, and such long
line of single trees thrown out against the customary
sunset of a Japanese picture with a certain fantastic
effect that was not to be despised ; but this was
over water and level land, where it did not jar, as
here, with the soft contour of hills and valleys.
The whole scene had an indefinable look of being
painted, the colour was so abstract and correct, and
there was something so sketchy and merely im-
pressional about these distant single trees on the
horizon that one was forced to think of it all as
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