eaven's merciful will) overcome, the pauses, the
faintings, the weakness, the lost way, perhaps, the bitter weather, the
dreadful partings, the lonely night, the passionate grief--towards these
I turn my thoughts as I sit and think in my hobby-coach under Time, the
silver-wigged charioteer. The young folks in the same carriage meanwhile
are looking forwards. Nothing escapes their keen eyes--not a flower at
the side of a cottage garden, nor a bunch of rosy-faced children at the
gate: the landscape is all bright, the air brisk and jolly, the town
yonder looks beautiful, and do you think they have learned to be
difficult about the dishes at the inn?

Now, suppose Paterfamilias on his journey with his wife and children in
the sociable, and he passes an ordinary brick house on the road with an
ordinary little garden in the front, we will say, and quite an ordinary
knocker to the door, and as many sashed windows as you please, quite
common and square, and tiles, windows, chimney-pots, quite like others;
or suppose, in driving over such and such a common, he sees an ordinary
tree, and an ordinary donkey browsing under it, if you like--wife
and daughter look at these objects without the slightest particle of
curiosity or interest. What is a brass knocker to them but a lion's
head, or what not? and a thorn-tree with pool beside it, but a pool in
which a thorn and a jackass are reflected?

But you remember how once upon a time your heart used to beat, as you
beat on that brass knocker, and whose eyes looked from the window above.
You remember how by that thorn-tree and pool, where the geese were
performing a prodigious evening concert, there might be seen, at a
certain hour, somebody in a certain cloak and bonnet, who happened to
be coming from a village yonder, and whose image has flickered in that
pool. In that pool, near the thorn? Yes, in that goose-pool, never mind
how long ago, when there were reflected the images of the geese--and
two geese more. Here, at least, an oldster may have the advantage of
his young fellow-travellers, and so Putney Heath or the New Road may be
invested with a halo of brightness invisible to them, because it only
beams out of his own soul.

I have been reading the "Memorials of Hood" by his children,* and wonder
whether the book will have the same interest for others and for younger
people, as for persons of my own age and calling. Books of travel to any
country become interesting to us who have