sibly Birket Foster. I used to think he
idealized; but then, I'd never seen anything of England but London, and
didn't know how all English trees, cottages, and even clouds, are
trained to group themselves to suit artists of different schools.

I kept wishing that you'd made me study architecture and botany, instead
of languages and music. In justice to oneself, one ought, when
travelling in England, to have at least a bowing acquaintance with every
sort of architecture, and all families of flowers, to say nothing of
trees, so that one might exclaim, as snobs do of royalties and
celebrities: "Oh, _she_ was the great granddaughter of So-and-So." "He
married Lady This-and-That." Also, I find I need much more knowledge of
literature than I have. This country is divided off into a kind of
glorious chessboard, each square being sacred to some immortal author,
playwright, or poet. The artists press them close, without overcrowding;
and history lies underneath--history for every square inch.

"Twelve coffin deep," I quoted Kipling to myself, as my mind panted
along Roman roads, and the Pilgrim's Way.

"Why, was there a cemetery there?" asked Mrs. Norton, looking mildly
interested.

She, by the way, doesn't much care for ruins. She says they're so
untidy.

You and I travelled till our money threatened to give out in the noble
cause of sight-seeing, but I never realized history quite so potently
even in Italy as I do in England. Yet that's not strange, when you think
how tiny England is, compared with other countries, and how things have
gone on happening there every minute since the Phoenicians found it a
snug little island. Its chapters of history have to be packed like
sardines, beginning down, down, far deeper than Kipling's "twelve
coffins."

One Surrey village telleth another, just to slip through in a motor-car,
though none could ever be tiresome in the telling; but if one stopped to
hear the real story of each one, how different they would all be! There
would be grand chapters of fighting, and mysterious chapters of
smuggling--oh, but long ones about smuggling, since most of the manors
and half the old cottages have "smugglers' rooms," where the lace and
spirits used to be hidden, in their secret journey from Portsmouth to
London. It's difficult to believe in these thrilling chapters now, in
the rich, placid county, where the only mystery floats in the veil of
blue mist that twists like a gauze scarf around the tr