fe of the fields
and gorsy hills and young plantations would be either better or worse if
there were no such thing as gossamer. But I am no longer contented with
my ignorance. I mean to find out all that is known about gossamer, and
satisfy myself of the truth of the tradition that the threads are spun
by tiny spiders, though surely with very little hope of snaring flies.

I spent six months making the tour which Ascher planned for me. I
returned to London in the spring of 1914, full of interest in what I had
seen and learned. I intend some day to write a book of travels, to give
an account of my experiences. I shall describe the long strip of the
world over which I wandered as a landscape on a quiet autumn morning,
netted over with gossamer. That is the way it strikes me now, looking
back on it all. Ascher and men like him have spun fine threads, covering
every civilised land with a web of credit, infinitely complex, so
delicate that a child's hand could tear it.

A storm, even a strong breeze comes, and the threads are dragged from
their holdings and waved in wild confusion through the air. A man,
brutal as war, goes striding through the land, and, without knowing what
he does, bursts the filaments and destroys the shimmering beauty which
was before he came. That, I suppose, is what happens. But the passing of
a man, however violent he is, is the passing of a man and no more. Even
if a troop of men marches across the land their marching is over and
done with soon. They have their day, but afterwards there are other
days. Nature is infinitely persistent and gossamer is spun again.

I remember meeting, quite by chance, on a coasting steamer on which
I travelled, a bishop. He was not, judged by strict ecclesiastical
standards, quite entitled to that rank. He belonged to some American
religious organisation of which I had no knowledge, but he called
himself, on the passenger list, Bishop Zacchary Brown. He was apostolic
in his devotion to the Gospel as he understood it. His particular field
of work lay in the northern part of South America. He ranged, so I
understood, through Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela. He was full of hope
for the future of these lands, their spiritual future. I had long talks
with him and discovered that he regarded education, the American form
of it, and commerce, the fruit of American enterprise, as the enemies of
superstition and consequently the handmaids of the Gospel.

He wanted to see scho