Forgetting thousand leagues of sea."

Perhaps she was in the very town I was leaving behind. Perhaps we had
slept within a few houses of each other. Who could tell?

Looking back at the old town, with its one steep street climbing the
white face of the chalk hill, I remembered what wonderful exotic women
Thomas Hardy had found eating their hearts out behind the windows of
dull country high streets, through which hung waving no banners of
romance, outwardly as unpromising of adventure as the windows of the
town I had left. And then turning my steps across a wide common, which
ran with gorse and whortleberry bushes away on every side to distant
hilly horizons, swarthy with pines, and dotted here and there with
stone granges and white villages, I thought of all the women within
that circle, any one of whom might prove the woman I sought,--from
milkmaids crossing the meadows, their strong shoulders straining with
the weight of heavy pails, to fine ladies dying of ennui in their
country-houses; pretty farmers' daughters surreptitiously reading
novels, and longing for London and "life;" passionate young farmers'
wives already weary of their doltish lords; bright-eyed bar-maids
buried alive in country inns, and wondering "whatever possessed them"
to leave Manchester,--for bar-maids seem always to come from
Manchester,--all longing modestly, said I, to set eyes on a man like
me, a man of romance, a man of feeling, a man, if you like, to run away
with.

My heart flooded over with tender pity for these poor sweet
women--though perhaps chiefly for my own sad lot in not encountering
them,--and I conceived a great comprehensive love-poem to be entitled
"The Girls that never can be Mine." Perhaps before the end of our tramp
together, I shall have a few verses of it to submit to the elegant
taste of the reader, but at present I have not advanced beyond the
title.

CHAPTER XI

AN OLD MAN OF THE HILLS, AND THE SCHOOLMASTER'S STORY

While occupying myself with these no doubt wanton reflections on the
unfair division of opportunities in human life, I was leisurely
crossing the common, and presently I came up with a pedestrian who,
though I had little suspected it as I caught sight of him ahead, was
destined by a kind providence to make more entertaining talk for me in
half an hour than most people provide in a lifetime.

He was an oldish man, turned sixty, one would say, and belonging, to
judge from his dress and ge