build an imaginary cottage on it, and
the views I had from the windows of my dream-cottages were more real to
me than the actual prospects on which I looked every day. I have even
gone so far as to seek the offices of land-agents, and haggle over the
price of land which I never meant to buy, for the mere pleasure of
fancying it was mine; and this kind of game was long pursued, for
land-agents are a numerous tribe, and when one discovered my imposture,
there was always another ready to accept me as a capitalist in search
of the picturesque. In short, to possess one small fragment of the
world's surface; to have a hut, a cabin, or a cottage that was verily
my own, to eat the fruits of my own labour on the soil--this seemed to
me the crown and goal of all human felicity. Conscript of the city as
I was, drilled and driven daily in the grim barrack-yard of despotic
civilisation, yet I was a deserter at heart; an earth-hunger as
rapacious and intense as that of any French or Irish peasant burned in
my bones, and, like the peasant conscript that I truly was, my dreams
were all of green pastures and running streams, and the happy
loneliness of open spaces under open skies.

This kind of earth-hunger is, I believe, not common among English
people to-day; if it were, the tide of life would not set so steadily
townward as it does. The class in which it existed most strongly was
the yeoman class, and this is a class which has practically
disappeared. In my youth I knew half a dozen persons of this class, to
whom towns were genuinely abhorrent. They would come to London once or
twice in their lives, visit certain market towns in their district at
intervals, and escape back into the country with the joy of wild birds
liberated from a cage. The mere grime and dirt of cities horrified
them; they were suffocated in the close air, and they were driven half
distracted by the clamour of the streets. These men lived, upon the
whole, lives of not immoderate labour: or, as one might say, of sober
ease, They possessed little money, it is true, but the want of it did
not appear to trouble them. Their houses were plain, their method of
life simple, and clearly it had not entered their minds to covet any
more sumptuous modes of life. All this is changed now. The daily
press, which presents a thousand pictures of the bustling life of
cities, goes everywhere, and has communicated a strange restlessness to
the rural mind. Increased mean