sed.
But in all that the Romans did there was something of a monument. Where
they might have taken pipes down a valley and up the opposing side they
preferred the broad shoulders of an arcade, and where a seven-foot door
would have done well enough to enter their houses by they were content
with nothing less than an arch of fifty. In all their work they were
conscious of some business other than that immediately to hand, and
therefore it is possible that their ruins will survive the establishment
of our own time as they have survived that of the Middle Ages. In this
wild place, at least, nothing remained of all that was done between
their time and ours.

These things did the sight on either side of the summit suggest to me,
but chiefly there returned as I gazed the delicious thought that learned
men, laborious and heavily endowed, had denied the _existence_ of this
Roman road.

See with what manifold uses every accident of human life is crammed!
Here was a piece of pedantry and scepticism, which might make some men
weep and some men stamp with irritation, and some men, from sheer
boredom, fall asleep, but which fed in my own spirit a fountain of pure
joy, as I considered carefully what kind of man it is who denies these
things; the kind of way he walks; the kind of face he has; the kind of
book he writes; the kind of publisher who chisels him; and the kind of
way in which his works are bound. With every moment my elation grew
greater and more impetuous, until at last I could not bear to sit any
longer still, even upon so admirable a beast, nor to look down even at
so rich a plain (though that was seen through the air of Southern
England), but turning over the downs I galloped home, and came in
straight from the turf to my own ground--for what man would live upon a
high road who could go through a gate right off the turf to his own
steading and let the world go hang?

And so did I. But as they brought me beer and bacon at evening, and I
toasted the memory of things past, I said to myself: "Oxford,
Cambridge, Dublin, Durham--you four great universities--you terrors of
Europe--that road is older than you: and meanwhile I drink to your
continued healths, but let us have a little room ... air, there, give us
air, good people. I stifle when I think of you."

THE ONION-EATER

There is a hill not far from my home whence it is possible to see
northward and southward such a stretch of land as is not to be seen from