22 MAY 1953, Page 22

COUNTRY LIFE

I BELIEVE that there are two kinds of air, the air of the valley and the air of the mountain. My wind is sound because I do not smoke. but I like to go slowly through the trees, up into the bosom of the hills where I can look about me and See the outcrops of quartz, the sun on a trickle of water that is a magnificent fall in miniature, the nursery of a new forest standing in rows of young trees two or three feet high. Up in such a place the air has the scent of moss and heather fibre in it, The breeze that disturbs my thinning hair comes from the mountain's shoulder that dominates a valley and villages I canard see. While I plod forward, my appetite grows, and when I return to the ordinary world, down among the chimney-pots, the backyard chicken-runs, and man's coming and going in the sound of tolling bells, I am ravenous and exhausted—drunk with the things I have see° and the wonderful air I have been breathing.