irected me to travel to the town of Lewes in Sussex.
Arrived there, I was to ask for the pony-chaise of my young lady's
father--described on his card as Reverend Tertius Finch. The chaise was
to take me to the rectory-house in the village of Dimchurch. And the
village of Dimchurch was situated among the South Down Hills, three or
four miles from the coast.

When I stepped into the railway carriage, this was all I knew. After my
adventurous life--after the volcanic agitations of my republican career
in the Doctor's time--was I about to bury myself in a remote English
village, and live a life as monotonous as the life of a sheep on a hill?
Ah, with all my experience, I had yet to learn that the narrowest human
limits are wide enough to contain the grandest human emotions. I had seen
the Drama of Life amid the turmoil of tropical revolutions. I was to see
it again, with all its palpitating interest, in the breezy solitudes of
the South Down Hills.

CHAPTER THE SECOND

Madame Pratolungo makes a Voyage on Land

A WELL-FED boy, with yellow Saxon hair; a little shabby green chaise; and
a rough brown pony--these objects confronted me at the Lewes Station. I
said to the boy, "Are you Reverend Finch's servant?" And the boy
answered, "I be he."

We drove through the town--a hilly town of desolate clean houses. No
living creatures visible behind the jealously-shut windows. No living
creatures entering or departing through the sad-colored closed doors. No
theater; no place of amusement except an empty town-hall, with a sad
policeman meditating on its spruce white steps. No customers in the
shops, and nobody to serve them behind the counter, even if they had
turned up. Here and there on the pavements, an inhabitant with a capacity
for staring, and (apparently) a capacity for nothing else. I said to
Reverend Finch's boy, "Is this a rich place?" Reverend Finch's boy
brightened and answered, "That it be!" Good. At any rate, they don't
enjoy themselves here--the infamous rich!

Leaving this town of unamused citizens immured in domestic tombs, we got
on a fine high road--still ascending--with a spacious open country on
either side of it.

A spacious open country is a country soon exhausted by a sight-seer's
eye. I have learnt from my poor Pratolungo the habit of searching for the
political convictions of my fellow-creatures, when I find myself in
contact with them in strange places. Having nothing else to do, I
searched Finch