represent the typical scene that springs to the mind's eye with the
phrase "the English countryside": a village green, with some geese
stringing out across it. A straggle of quaint thatched cottages, roses
climbing about the windows, and in front little, carefully kept gardens,
with hollyhocks standing in rows, stocks and sweet-williams and such
old-fashioned flowers. At one end of the village, rising out of a clump
of yews, the mouldering church-tower, with mossy gravestones on one side
and a trim rectory on the other. At the other end of the village a
gabled inn, with a great stable-yard, busy with horses and waggons.
Above the village, the slopes of gently rising pastures, intersected
with footpaths and shadowed with woodlands. A little way out of the
village, an old mill with a lilied mill-pond, a great, dripping
water-wheel, and the murmur of the escaping stream. And winding on
into the green, sun-steeped distance, the blossom-hung English lanes.




XVII

LONDON--CHANGING AND UNCHANGING


I find it an unexpectedly strange experience to be in London again
after ten years in New York. I had no idea it could be so strange. Of
course, there are men to whom one great city is as another--commercial
travellers, impresarios, globe-trotting millionaires. Being none of
these, I am not as much at home in St. Petersburg as in Buda-Pesth, in
Berlin as in Paris, and, while once I might have envied such plastic
cosmopolitanism, I am realizing, this last day or two in London, that,