see by ranging Europe. I
went to-day along a well-known road; just where the descent begins to
fall into a quiet valley, there stands a windmill--not one of the ugly
black circular towers that one sometimes sees, but one of the old crazy
boarded sort, standing on a kind of stalk; out of the little
loopholes of the mill the flour had dusted itself prettily over the
weather-boarding. From a mysterious hatch half-way up leaned the miller,
drawing up a sack of grain with a little pulley. There is nothing so
enchanting as to see a man leaning out of a dark doorway high up in
the air. He drew the sack in, he closed the panel. The sails whirled,
flapping and creaking; and I loved to think of him in the dusty gloom,
with the gear grumbling among the rafters, tipping the golden grain into
its funnel, while the rattling hopper below poured out its soft stream
of flour. Beyond the mill, the ground sank to a valley; the roofs
clustered round a great church tower, the belfry windows blinking
solemnly. Hard by the ancient Hall peeped out from its avenue of elms.
That was a picture as sweet as anything I have ever seen abroad,
as perfect a piece of art as could be framed, and more perfect than
anything that could be painted, because it was a piece out of the old
kindly, quiet life of the world. One ought to learn, as the years flow
on, to love such scenes as that, and not to need to have the blood and
the brain stirred by romantic prospects, peaked hills, well-furnished
galleries, magnificent buildings: mutare animum, that is the secret, to
grow more hopeful, more alive to delicate beauties, more tender, less
exacting. Nothing, it is true, can give us peace; but we get nearer it
by loving the familiar scene, the old homestead, the tiny valley,
the wayside copse, than we do by racing over Europe on the track
of Giorgione, or over Asia in pursuit of local colour. After all,
everything has its appointed time. It is good to range in youth, to rub
elbows with humanity, and then, as the days go on, to take stock, to
remember, to wonder, "To be content with little, to serve beauty well."

VI. SPECIALISM

It is a very curious thing to reflect how often an old platitude or
axiom retains its vitality, long after the conditions which gave it
birth have altered, and it no longer represents a truth. It would
not matter if such platitudes only lived on dustily in vapid and
ill-furnished minds, like the vases of milky-green opaque glass
de