of some
Border robber; and over the front door was carved in large letters,
"1908." That last burst of sincerity, that superb scorn of antiquarian
sentiment, overwhelmed me finally. I closed my eyes in a kind of
ecstasy. My friend (who was helping me to lean on the gate) asked me
with some curiosity what I was doing.

"My dear fellow," I said, with emotion, "I am bidding farewell to
forty-three hansom cabmen."

"Well," he said, "I suppose they would think this county rather outside
the radius."

"Oh, my friend," I cried brokenly, "how beautiful London is! Why do they
only write poetry about the country? I could turn every lyric cry into
Cockney.

"'My heart leaps up when I behold
A sky-sign in the sky,'

"as I observed in a volume which is too little read, founded on the
older English poets. You never saw my 'Golden Treasury Regilded; or, The
Classics Made Cockney'--it contained some fine lines.

"'O Wild West End, thou breath of London's being,'

"or the reminiscence of Keats, beginning

"'City of smuts and mellow fogfulness.';

"I have written many such lines on the beauty of London; yet I never
realized that London was really beautiful till now. Do you ask me why?
It is because I have left it for ever."

"If you will take my advice," said my friend, "you will humbly endeavour
not to be a fool. What is the sense of this mad modern notion that every
literary man must live in the country, with the pigs and the donkeys and
the squires? Chaucer and Spenser and Milton and Dryden lived in London;
Shakespeare and Dr. Johnson came to London because they had had quite
enough of the country. And as for trumpery topical journalists like you,
why, they would cut their throats in the country. You have confessed
it yourself in your own last words. You hunger and thirst after the
streets; you think London the finest place on the planet. And if by some
miracle a Bayswater omnibus could come down this green country lane you
would utter a yell of joy."

Then a light burst upon my brain, and I turned upon him with terrible
sternness.

"Why, miserable aesthete," I said in a voice of thunder, "that is the
true country spirit! That is how the real rustic feels. The real rustic
does utter a yell of joy at the sight of a Bayswater omnibus. The real
rustic does think London the finest place on the planet. In the few
moments that I have stood by this stile, I have grown rooted here like
an ancient tree; I have been he