re for ages. Petulant Suburban, I am the
real rustic. I believe that the streets of London are paved with gold;
and I mean to see it before I die."

The evening breeze freshened among the little tossing trees of that
lane, and the purple evening clouds piled up and darkened behind my
Country Seat, the house that belonged to me, making, by contrast, its
yellow bricks gleam like gold. At last my friend said: "To cut it short,
then, you mean that you will live in the country because you won't like
it. What on earth will you do here; dig up the garden?"

"Dig!" I answered, in honourable scorn. "Dig! Do work at my Country
Seat; no, thank you. When I find a Country Seat, I sit in it. And for
your other objection, you are quite wrong. I do not dislike the country,
but I like the town more. Therefore the art of happiness certainly
suggests that I should live in the country and think about the town.
Modern nature-worship is all upside down. Trees and fields ought to be
the ordinary things; terraces and temples ought to be extraordinary. I
am on the side of the man who lives in the country and wants to go to
London. I abominate and abjure the man who lives in London and wants
to go to the country; I do it with all the more heartiness because I am
that sort of man myself. We must learn to love London again, as rustics
love it. Therefore (I quote again from the great Cockney version of The
Golden Treasury)--

"'Therefore, ye gas-pipes, ye asbestos? stoves,
Forbode not any severing of our loves.
I have relinquished but your earthly sight,
To hold you dear in a more distant way.
I'll love the 'buses lumbering through the wet,
Even more than when I lightly tripped as they.
The grimy colour of the London clay
Is lovely yet,'

"because I have found the house where I was really born; the tall and
quiet house from which I can see London afar off, as the miracle of man
that it is."

The Nightmare

A sunset of copper and gold had just broken down and gone to pieces in
the west, and grey colours were crawling over everything in earth and
heaven; also a wind was growing, a wind that laid a cold finger upon
flesh and spirit. The bushes at the back of my garden began to whisper
like conspirators; and then to wave like wild hands in signal. I was
trying to read by the last light that died on the lawn a long poem of
the decadent period, a poem about the old gods of Babylon and Egypt,
about their blazing and obscene