oring
parson and architect, standing amid an island of shapely trees and
flower-beset cottages of thatched grey stone and cob, amidst the narrow
stretch of bright green water-meadows that wind between the sweeping
Wiltshire downs, so well beloved of William Cobbett. Or some new-seen
and yet familiar cluster of houses in a grey village of the upper
Thames overtopped by the delicate tracery of a fourteenth-century
church; or even sometimes the very buildings of the past untouched by
the degradation of the sordid utilitarianism that cares not and knows
not of beauty and history: as once, when I was journeying (in a dream
of the night) down the well-remembered reaches of the Thames betwixt
Streatley and Wallingford, where the foothills of the White Horse fall
back from the broad stream, I came upon a clear-seen mediaeval town
standing up with roof and tower and spire within its walls, grey and
ancient, but untouched from the days of its builders of old. All this I
have seen in the dreams of the night clearer than I can force myself to
see them in dreams of the day. So that it would have been nothing new
to me the other night to fall into an architectural dream if that were
all, and yet I have to tell of things strange and new that befell me
after I had fallen asleep. I had begun my sojourn in the Land of Nod by
a very confused attempt to conclude that it was all right for me to
have an engagement to lecture at Manchester and Mitcham Fair Green at
half-past eleven at night on one and the same Sunday, and that I could
manage pretty well. And then I had gone on to try to make the best of
addressing a large open-air audience in the costume I was really then
wearing--to wit, my night-shirt, reinforced for the dream occasion by a
pair of braceless trousers. The consciousness of this fact so bothered
me, that the earnest faces of my audience--who would NOT notice it, but
were clearly preparing terrible anti-Socialist posers for me--began to
fade away and my dream grew thin, and I awoke (as I thought) to find
myself lying on a strip of wayside waste by an oak copse just outside a
country village.

I got up and rubbed my eyes and looked about me, and the landscape
seemed unfamiliar to me, though it was, as to the lie of the land, an
ordinary English low-country, swelling into rising ground here and
there. The road was narrow, and I was convinced that it was a piece of
Roman road from its straightness. Copses were scattered over