er--the less stomach I felt for the contest. I
wrestled with it in my study, only to be driven to my books. I walked
out to meet it in the streets, only to seek shelter from it in music-hall
or theatre. Thereupon it waxed importunate and over-bearing, till the
shadow of it darkened all my doings. The thought of it sat beside me at
the table, and spoilt my appetite. The memory of it followed me abroad,
and stood between me and my friends, so that all talk died upon my lips,
and I moved among men as one ghost-ridden.

Then the throbbing town, with its thousand distracting voices, grew
maddening to me. I felt the need of converse with solitude, that master
and teacher of all the arts, and I bethought me of the Yorkshire Wolds,
where a man may walk all day, meeting no human creature, hearing no voice
but the curlew's cry; where, lying prone upon the sweet grass, he may
feel the pulsation of the earth, travelling at its eleven hundred miles a
minute through the ether. So one morning I bundled many things, some
needful, more needless, into a bag, hurrying lest somebody or something
should happen to stay me, and that night I lay in a small northern town
that stands upon the borders of smokedom at the gate of the great moors;
and at seven the next morning I took my seat beside a one-eyed carrier
behind an ancient piebald mare. The one-eyed carrier cracked his whip,
the piebald horse jogged forward. The nineteenth century, with its
turmoil, fell away behind us; the distant hills, creeping nearer,
swallowed us up, and we became but a moving speck upon the face of the
quiet earth.

Late in the afternoon we arrived at a village, the memory of which had
been growing in my mind. It lies in the triangle formed by the sloping
walls of three great fells, and not even the telegraph wire has reached
it yet, to murmur to it whispers of the restless world--or had not at the
time of which I write. Nought disturbs it save, once a day, the one-eyed
carrier--if he and his piebald mare have not yet laid their ancient bones
to rest--who, passing through, leaves a few letters and parcels to be
called for by the people of the scattered hill-farms round about. It is
the meeting-place of two noisy brooks. Through the sleepy days and the
hushed nights, one hears them ever chattering to themselves as children
playing alone some game of make-believe. Coming from their far-off homes
among the hills, they mingle their waters here, and journe