om Margate they were full of chatter about the people that
they had met, and they went about whistling the last song they had
heard upon the beach. I had met no one but a few simple labouring
folk, and the music I remembered was the whistling of blackbirds and
thrushes in the early dawn. I knew that I had purchased much finer
pleasure in a single day, and at a cheaper rate, than they in a month
of days; but I never told them so, for they would not have understood
me. The ear that hungers for the raucous strains of cockney Pierrots
on a beach cannot attune itself to the notes of the morning thrush.

There is one tiny farm that I love to think of, because its tenants
taught me better than a thousand books could have done how real was the
felicity of simple life. It had six rooms all told, and was little
better than a cottage. Before its door ran a clear river which
connected two lakes; a pinewood rose behind the house, and behind this
again the lower buttresses of the everlasting hills. The nearest town
was seven miles away; you reached it by a lovely road, in part through
pinewoods, in part over open moors, with the silver flashing of a lake
never far away, and the purple mountains always close at hand. The
farm-holding was insignificantly small, as was the case in those parts;
but my host uttered no word of its insufficiency. He grew enough oats
to provide good oatmeal for his family and fodder for his horse; his
potatoes also came from his own soil, and his bacon from his own stye;
his few sheep gave him fresh meat, or brought him a little money in the
market, and from their wool every blanket in the house was spun, and
even his own clothing woven. Two cows provided milk and butter for the
household; his fowls gave him eggs and occasionally a dinner; and thus
with the exception of the yearly grocer's bill he spent next to no
money. I dwelt beneath this humble roof for a month, and I profess
that in all that time I never saw the members of the household engaged
in any labour that was not also a pleasure. There was plenty of work,
of course: cows to be milked, vegetables to be dug and cleansed, meals
to be prepared, the little harvest to be gathered in; but it was work
that one could do with singing. No one hurried over it, for there was
ample time for every duty of the day. No one felt these simple duties
burdensome, because they were so natural and inevitable, It was a rare
day when some member of the house