in the practical understanding of the proverb, "The longest way
around is the shortest way there." At 2 p.m. I reached Thaxted,
and rectified my first notion of the town, formed when I mistook it
for Bardfield. Having made six miles extra between the two points,
I resumed my walk after a short delay at the latter.

The weather was glorious. A cloudless sun shone upon a little sky-
crystalled world of beauty, smaller in every dimension than you ever
see in America. And this is a feature of English scenery that will
strike the American traveller most impressively at the first glance,
whether he looks at it by night or day. It is not that Nature, in
adjusting the symmetries of her scenic structures, nicely apportions
the skyscape to the landscape of a country merely for artistic
effect. It is not because the island of Great Britain is so small
in circumference that the sky is proportioned to it, as the crystal
is to the dial of a watch; that it is so apparently low; that the
stars it holds to its moist, blue bosom are so near at midnight, and
the sun so large at noon. It comes, doubtless, from that constant
humidity of the atmosphere which distinguishes the climate of
England, and gives to both land and sky an aspect which is quite
unknown to our great western continent. An American, after having
habituated himself to this aspect, on returning to his own country,
will be almost surprised at a feature of its scenery which he never
noticed before. He will be struck at the loftiness of the sky; at
the vividness of its blue and gold, the sharp, unsoftened light of
the stars, and, as it were, the contracted pupil of the sun's eye at
mid-day. The sunset glories of our western heavens play upon a
ground of rigid blue. "The Northern Lights," which, at their winter
evening illuminations, seem to have shredded into wavy filaments all
the rainbows that have spanned the chambers of the East since the