peace, while I watched the
wonder grow upon his face. Why were the cars so short and stilted? Why
had every other freight-car a tarpaulin drawn over it? What wages would
an engineer get now? Where was the swarming population of England he
had read so much about? What was the rank of all those men on tricycles
along the roads? When were we due at Plymouth I told him all I knew,
and very much that I did not. He was going to Plymouth to assist in a
consultation upon a fellow-countryman who had retired to a place
called The Hoe--was that up-town or down-town--to recover from nervous
dyspepsia. Yes, he himself was a doctor by profession, and how any one
in England could retain any nervous disorder passed his comprehension.
Never had he dreamed of an atmosphere so soothing. Even the deep rumble
of London traffic was monastical by comparison with some cities he could
name; and the country--why, it was Paradise. A continuance of it, he
confessed, would drive him mad; but for a few months it was the most
sumptuous rest-cure in his knowledge.

"I'll come over every year after this," he said, in a burst of delight,
as we ran between two ten-foot hedges of pink and white may. "It's
seeing all the things I've ever read about. Of course it doesn't strike
you that way. I presume you belong here? What a finished land it is!
It's arrived. 'Must have been born this way. Now, where I used to
live--Hello I what's up?"

The train stopped in a blaze of sunshine at Framlynghame Admiral, which
is made up entirely of the name-board, two platforms, and an overhead
bridge, without even the usual siding. I had never known the slowest of
locals stop here before; but on Sunday all things are possible to the
London and Southwestern. One could hear the drone of conversation along
the carriages, and, scarcely less loud, the drone of the bumblebees in
the wallflowers up the bank. My companion thrust his head through the
window and sniffed luxuriously.

"Where are we now?" said he.

"In Wiltshire," said I.

"Ah! A man ought to be able to write novels with his left hand in a
country like this. Well, well! And so this is about Tess's country,
ain't it? I feel just as if I were in a book. Say, the conduc--the guard
has something on his mind. What's he getting at?"

The splendid badged and belted guard was striding up the platform at
the regulation official pace, and in the regulation official voice was
saying at each door:

"Has any gentleman here