wife at home, and it seemed that no persuasion could induce her to
undertake so adventurous a jaunt. He was no walker, and half a dozen
miles along the Forest roads tired him out. By the afternoon even his
cheerfulness had vanished; he gazed with blank and gloomy eyes upon the
wide spaces of the woodland scenery. He did not regain his spirits
till we drew near Stratford on the homeward journey. At the first
sight of gas-lit streets he brightened up, and I am persuaded that the
rancid odours of the factories at Bow were sweeter in his nostrils than
all the Forest fragrances. I never asked him again to share a pleasure
for which I now perceived he had no faculty; but I often asked myself
how long it would take for a city life to extirpate in me the taste by
which Nature is appreciated, as it had in Arrowsmith.

I have taken Arrowsmith as an example of the narrowness of interest
created by a city life, and it would be easy to offer an apology for
him, which I, for one, would most heartily endorse. The poor fellow
was very much the creature of his circumstances. But this was scarcely
the case with another man I knew, whose circumstances, had he known how
to use them, might have afforded him the opportunity of many cultivated
tastes. He was the son of a small farmer, born in the same village as
myself. By some curious accident he was flung into the vortex of
London life at seventeen, and became a clerk in a reputable firm of
stockbrokers in Throgmorton Street. He rose rapidly, speculated
largely and successfully for himself, became a partner, and was rich at
thirty. I used to meet him occasionally, for he never forgot that we
had sat upon the same bench at school. I can see him still;
well-fleshed and immaculately dressed; his waistcoat pockets full of
gold; a prop of music-halls, a patron of expensive restaurants;
flashing from one to the other in the evening hours in swift hansoms; a
man envied and admired by a host of clerks in Throgmorton Street to