ornings reading in the garden, and I discovered for the
first time what a pleasure was to be got from old books. They recalled
and amplified that vision I had seen from the Cotswold ridge, the
revelation of the priceless heritage which is England. I imbibed a
mighty quantity of history, but especially I liked the writers, like
Walton, who got at the very heart of the English countryside. Soon,
too, I found the _Pilgrim's Progress_ not a duty but a delight. I
discovered new jewels daily in the honest old story, and my letters to
Peter began to be as full of it as Peter's own epistles. I loved, also,
the songs of the Elizabethans, for they reminded me of the girl who had
sung to me in the June night.

In the afternoons I took my exercise in long tramps along the good
dusty English roads. The country fell away from Biggleswick into a
plain of wood and pasture-land, with low hills on the horizon. The
Place was sown with villages, each with its green and pond and ancient
church. Most, too, had inns, and there I had many a draught of cool
nutty ale, for the inn at Biggleswick was a reformed place which sold
nothing but washy cider. Often, tramping home in the dusk, I was so
much in love with the land that I could have sung with the pure joy of
it. And in the evening, after a bath, there would be supper, when a
rather fagged Jimson struggled between sleep and hunger, and the lady,
with an artistic mutch on her untidy head, talked ruthlessly of culture.

Bit by bit I edged my way into local society. The Jimsons were a great
help, for they were popular and had a nodding acquaintance with most of
the inhabitants. They regarded me as a meritorious aspirant towards a
higher life, and I was paraded before their friends with the suggestion
of a vivid, if Philistine, past. If I had any gift for writing, I would
make a book about the inhabitants of Biggleswick. About half were
respectable citizens who came there for country air and low rates, but
even these had a touch of queerness and had picked up the jargon of the
place. The younger men were mostly Government clerks or writers or
artists. There were a few widows with flocks of daughters, and on the
outskirts were several bigger houses--mostly houses which had been
there before the garden city was planted. One of them was brand-new, a
staring villa with sham-antique timbering, stuck on the top of a hill
among raw gardens. It belonged to a man called Moxon Ivery, who was a
kind of ac