lue sky sweetly diversified by snowy piles of cloud--these
and a thousand other natural delights combined to enlarge one's heart,
ease one's mind, and arouse one's dormant instinct to live, to laugh,
and to enjoy. Worries rolled back from me. I responded jovially to
Heron's grim quips, and felt more heartily alive than I had felt for
years.

Having walked swingingly for four or five hours we sat down in a
pleasant inn to a nondescript meal, at something like the
eighteenth-century dining hour; consuming large quantities of cold boiled
beef, salad, cheese, home-baked bread, and brown ale. (I had learned now
to drink beer, on such occasions as this, at all events; and did it with
a childish sense of holiday 'swagger.' Its associations with rural
life pleased me. But in the town I was annoyed to find that even half
a glass of it was apt to make my head ache villainously.) We sat and
smoked, talking lazily in the twilight; missed one train, and walked
leisurely to the next station to catch a later one.

The approach to London rather chilled and saddened me by the sharp
demand it seemed to make for the laying aside of calm reflection or
cheerful conversation, and the taking up of stern realities, practical
considerations--the hard, concrete facts of daily life. The outlines
of the huddled houses, the moving lights of thronged streets, the
Town-- It seemed to grip me by the shoulder.

'Come! Wake up from your fancies. Been laughing, joking, chatting,
drawing deep breaths, have you? Ah, well, here am I. You know me. Hear
the ring of the hurrying horses' feet on my hard ways? See the anxious
ferret faces of my workers? I am Reality. I am your master, and the
world's master. You may escape me for a day, and dream you are a free
man in the open. Grrrr!--' The train jars to a standstill. 'That may
be well enough for a dream; but I am Reality. Come! There's no time
here for reflection. Pick up your load. Get on; get on; or I'll smash
you down in my gutters, where my human wastage lies!'

That is how cities have always spoken to me as I have entered them
from the country. And yet--and yet, most of my life has been spent
within their confines. Long imprisonment makes men fear liberty, they
say. But how could a man fear the kindly country and its liberty for
reflection? And, attaining to it, how could he possibly desire return
to the noisy, crowded cells of the city? Impossible, surely, unless of
course the city offered him a livi