s of locomotion have brought London to
the very door of village communities. If men to-day actually possessed
the acres on which they toil they would be in no hurry to leave them;
they would be effectually chained to the soil by the sense of
independence and proprietorship, as is the case among the rural
population of France, who do not rent but own the land. The yeomen did
own the land, and that was the secret of their content. But when the
day of large farms came, the small landowners were crushed out; and as
for the mere peasant, he has no chance at all of ever owning land, and
never has had; so that he has every inducement to crowd into towns
where wages are nominally higher, and he soon outgrows that natural
earth-hunger which modern civilisation affords him no means of
gratifying.

By virtue of the peasant or gipsy blood in me I kept my earth-hunger
through twenty years of London life, but I count my case unique. I
never found any one who shared my feelings; on the contrary, I found
that whatever primitive instincts toward country life my friends may
have had once, London had made an effectual end of them. The country
means for most Londoners, not the blessed solitude of open spaces, but
Margate or Brighton. When the annual summer exodus arrives he does
but exchange one kind of town for another kind. He carries with him
all the aptitudes and artificial instincts of the town; he loves the
bustle of a crowd; he wants boarding-houses full of company, and
streets brilliant with electric light; and he returns to town, after a
vivacious fortnight, without having once looked upon the real country,
unless it be with the distracted eye of a rider on a _char-a-banc_. If
my earth-hunger did not die in London, it was mainly because my
holidays were of a very different description. I never visited but one
watering-place, and that was enough. I never stayed in a
boarding-house in my life, nor would the promise of all my expenses
paid and a handsome bonus into the bargain tempt me to the experiment.
I sought the country absolute; a cottage or a little farm remote from
towns and out of sound of railways; villages so tiny that maps refuse
to name them. I can count half a dozen of these places which haunt my
memory with all the sanctity of some religious dream. They were my
temporary cloisters, where I received the sacrament of silence; the
woodland sanctuaries where my spirit was renewed. When my friends
returned fr