The Interloper by Violet Jacob

INLAND from the river's mouth the dark plough-fields stretched sombre, / restful, wide, uncut by detail. The smaller roads intersecting the / country were treeless in the main, and did not draw the eye from the / majesty of the defined woods. There was everything to suggest breadth / and full air; and the sky, as Gilbert rode up towards a farm cresting / the swell of the high horizon, was as suggestive of it as the earth. / The clear gray meeting the sweep of the world was an immensity on which / cloud-masses, too high for rain, but full of it, looked as though cut / adrift by some Titanic hand and left to sail derelict on the cold / heavens.

The road he was travelling was enlivened by a stream of people, all / going in the same direction as himself, and mostly on foot, though a / couple of gigs, whose occupants looked as much too large for them as / the occupants of country gigs generally do, were ascending to the farm / at that jog which none but agriculturally-interested persons can / suffer.