Jenny Lind sleeps in Malvern Priory Church; but Wynd's Point where she died is four miles away up on the hills, in the middle of that noble range of the Malverns that marches north and south from Worcester beacon to Gloucester beacon.

It lies just where the white ribbon of road that has wound its way up from Malvern reaches the slopes of Hereford beacon, and begins its descent into the fat pastures and deep woodlands of the Herefordshire country.

Across the dip in the road Hereford beacon, the central point of the range, rises in gracious treeless curves, its summit ringed with the deep trenches from whence, perhaps on some such cloudless day as this, the Britons scanned the wide plain for the approach of the Roman legions. Caractacus himself is credited with fortifying these natural ramparts; but the point is doubtful. There are those who attribute the work to——. But let the cabman who brought me up to Wynd's Point tell his own story.

He was a delightful fellow, full of geniality and information which he conveyed in that rich accent of Worcestershire that has the strength of the north without its harshness and the melody of the south without its slackness. He had also that delicious haziness about the history of the district which is characteristic of the native. As we walked up the steep road side by side by the horse's head he pointed out the Cotswolds, Gloucester Cathedral, Worcester Cathedral, the Severn and the other features of the ever widening landscape. Turning a bend in the road, Hereford beacon came in view.

“That's where Cromwell wur killed, sir.”

He spoke with the calm matter-of-factness of a guide-book.

“Killed?” said I, a little stunned.

“Yes, sir, he wur killed hereabouts. He fought th' battle o' Worcester from about here you know, sir.”

“But he came from the north to Worcester, and this is south. And he wasn't killed at all. He died in his bed.”

The cabman yielded the point without resentment.

“Well, sir, happen he wur only captured. I've heard folks say he wur captured in a cave on Hereford beacon. The cave's there now. I've never sin it, but it's there. I used to live o'er in Radnorshire and heard tell as he wur captured in a cave on Hereford beacon.”

He was resolute on the point of capture. The killing was a detail; but the capture was vital. To surrender that would be to surrender the whole Cromwellian legend. There is a point at which the Higher Criticism must be fought unflinchingly if faith is not to crumble utterly away.

“He wur a desperate mischieful man wur Cromwell,” he went on. “He blowed away Little Malvern Church down yonder.”

He pointed down into the woody hollow below where an ancient tower was visible amid the rich foliage. Little Malvern Priory! Here was historic ground indeed, and I thought of John Inglesant and of the vision of Piers Plowman as he lay by the little rivulet in the Malverns.

“Left the tower standing he did, sir,” pursued the historian. “Now, why should th' old varmint a' left th' tower standing, sir?”

And the consideration of this problem of Cromwellian psychology brought us to Wynd's Point.

The day before our arrival there had been a visitor to the house, an old gentleman who had wandered in the grounds and sat and mused in the little arbour that Jenny Lind built, and whence she used to look out on the beacon and across the plain to the Cots-wolds. He had gently declined to go inside the house. There are some memories too sacred to disturb. It was the long widowed husband of the Swedish saint and singer.

It is all as she made it and left it. There hangs about it the sense of a vanished hand, of a gracious spirit. The porch, with its deep, sloping roof, and its pillars of untrimmed silver birch, suggesting a mountain chalet, “the golden cage,” of the singer fronting the drawing-room bowered in ivy, the many gables, the quaint furniture, and the quainter pictures of saints, that hang upon the walls—all speak with mute eloquence of the peasant girl whose voice thrilled two hemispheres, whose life was an anthem, and whose magic still lingers in the sweet simplicity of her name.

“Why did you leave the stage?” asked a friend of Jenny Lind, wondering, like all the world, why the incomparable actress and singer should surrender, almost in her youth, the intoxicating triumphs of opera for the sober rÔle of a concert singer, singing not for herself, but for charity.

Jenny Lind sat with her Lutheran Bible on her knee.

“Because,” she said, touching the Bible, “it left me so little time for this, and” (looking at the sunset) “none for that.”

There is the secret of Jenny Lind's love for Wynd's Point, where the cuckoo—his voice failing slightly in these hot June days—wakes you in the rosy dawn and continues with unwearied iteration until the shadows lengthen across the lawn, and the Black Mountains stand out darkly against the sunset, and the lights of Gloucester shine dimly in the deepening gloom of the vast plain.

Jenny Lind was a child of Nature to the end, and Wynd's Point is Nature unadorned. It stands on a woody rock that drops almost sheer to the road, with mossy ways that wind through the larches the furze and the broom to the top, where the wind blows fresh from the sea, and you come out on the path of spongy turf that invites you on and on over the green summits that march in stately Indian file to the shapely peak of Worcester beacon.

Whether you go north to Worcester beacon or south over Hereford beacon to Gloucester beacon, there is no finer walk in England than along these ten miles of breezy highlands, with fifteen English counties unrolled at your feet, the swifts wheeling around your path and that sense of exhilaration that comes from the spacious solitude of high places. It is a cheerful solitude, too, for if you tire of your own thoughts and of the twin shout of the cuckoo you may fling yourself down on the turf and look out over half of busy England from where, beyond 'the Lickey Hills, Birmingham stains the horizon with its fuliginous activities to where southward the shining pathway of the Bristol Channel carries the imagination away with Sebastian Cabot to the Spanish main. Here you may see our rough island story traced in characters of city, hill, and plain. These grass-grown trenches, where to-day the young lambs are grazing, take us back to the dawn of things and the beginnings of that ancient tragedy of the Celtic race. Yonder, enveloped in a thin veil of smoke, is Tewkesbury, and to see Tewkesbury is to think of the Wars of the Roses, of “false, fleeting, perjured Clarence that stabbed me on the field at Tewkesbury,” and of Ancient Pistol, whose “wits were thick as Tewkesbury mustard.” There is the battlefield of Mortimer's Cross, and far away Edgehill carries the mind forward to the beginning of that great struggle for a free England which finished yonder at Worcester, where the clash of arms was heard for the last time in our land and where Cromwell sheathed his terrible sword for ever.

The sun has left the eastern slopes and night is already beginning to cast its shadows over Little Malvern and the golf links beyond, and the wide plain where trails of white smoke show the pathway of trains racing here through the tunnel to Hereford, there to Gloucester, and yonder to Oxford and London. The labourer is leaving the fields and the cattle are coming up from the pastures. The landscape fades into mystery and gloom. Now is the moment to turn westward, where

Vanquished eve, as night prevails,

Bleeds upon the road to Wales.

All the landscape is bathed with the splendour of the setting sun, and in the mellow radiance the Welsh mountains stand out like the far battlements of fairyland. Eastnor Castle gleams like a palace of alabaster, and in the woods of the castle that clothe these western slopes a pheasant rends the golden silence with the startled noise and flurry of its flight.

The magic passes. The cloud palaces of the west turn from gold to grey; the fairy battlements are captured by the invading night, the wind turns suddenly chill, the moon is up over the Cotswolds. It is time to go....

Down in the garden at Wynd's Point a rabbit scurries across the lawn and a late cuckoo returning from the hills sends a last shout through the twilight. The songs of the day are done. I stand under the great sycamore by the porch where through the hot hours the chorus of myriads of insects has sounded like the ceaseless note of a cello drawn by an unfaltering bow. The chorus has ceased. The birds have vanished, all save a pied wagtail, loveliest of a lovely tribe, that flirts its graceful tail by the rowan tree. From the midst of the foliage come those intimate murmurs of the birds, half chatter, half song, that close the day. Even these grow few and faint until the silence is unbroken.

And the birds and the beasts and the insects are drowned,

In an ocean of dreams without a sound.

Overhead the sky is strewn with stars. Night and silence have triumphed.

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