ns, the street, or on the green. The spot may have beauty,
grandeur, salubrity, convenience; but if it lack memories it will
ultimately pall upon him who settles there without opportunity of
intercourse with his kind._

No, that was not discreet reading for a dyspeptic man of letters,
alone in a two-roomed gunyah in the midst of virgin bush, in a land
where the respectably old dates back a score of years, the historic,
say, fifty years, and 'the mists of antiquity' a bare century. One
recollection inevitably aroused by such a passage brought to mind
words comparatively recent, spoken by Mrs. Oldcastle:

'In the Old World, even for a man who lives alone on a mountain-top,
there is more of intellectuality--in the very atmosphere, in the
buildings and roads, the hedges and the ditches--than the best cities
of the New World have to offer.'

Quite apart from its grimly ironic philosophy, the topography, the
earthy quality--'take of English earth as much as either hand may
rightly clutch'--of the Wessex master's work makes it indigestible
reading for an exile of more than thirty or forty; unless, of course,
he is of the fine and robust type, whose minds and constitutions
function with the steadiness of a good chronometer, warranted for all
climes and circumstances.

But this mention of Hardy reminds me of a curious literary coincidence
which I stumbled upon a few months ago. For me, at all events, it was
a discovery. I was reading, quite idly, the story which should long
since have been dramatised for the stage, _The Trumpet Major_,
written, if I mistake not, in the early 'nineties. I came to chapter
xxiii., which opens in this wise:

_Christmas had passed. Dreary winter with dark evenings had given
place to more dreary winter with light evenings. Rapid thaws had ended
in rain, rain in wind, wind in dust. Showery days had come--the season
of pink dawns and white sunsets...._

This reading was part of my Hardy debauch. A week or two earlier I had
been reading what I think was his first book, written a quarter of a
century before _The Trumpet Major_. I refer to _Desperate Remedies_;
with all its faults, an extraordinarily full and finished production
for a first book. Now, with curiosity in my very finger-tips, I turned
over the pages of this volume, reread no more than a week previously.
I came presently upon chapter xii., and, following upon its first
sentence, read these words:

_Christmas had passed; dreary winter