have had once, London had made an effectual end of them. The country
means for most Londoners, not the blessed solitude of open spaces, but
Margate or Brighton. When the annual summer exodus arrives he does
but exchange one kind of town for another kind. He carries with him
all the aptitudes and artificial instincts of the town; he loves the
bustle of a crowd; he wants boarding-houses full of company, and
streets brilliant with electric light; and he returns to town, after a
vivacious fortnight, without having once looked upon the real country,
unless it be with the distracted eye of a rider on a _char-à-banc_. If
my earth-hunger did not die in London, it was mainly because my
holidays were of a very different description. I never visited but one
watering-place, and that was enough. I never stayed in a
boarding-house in my life, nor would the promise of all my expenses
paid and a handsome bonus into the bargain tempt me to the experiment.
I sought the country absolute; a cottage or a little farm remote from
towns and out of sound of railways; villages so tiny that maps refuse
to name them. I can count half a dozen of these places which haunt my
memory with all the sanctity of some religious dream. They were my
temporary cloisters, where I received the sacrament of silence; the
woodland sanctuaries where my spirit was renewed. When my friends
returned from Margate they were full of chatter about the people that
they had met, and they went about whistling the last song they had
heard upon the beach. I had met no one but a few simple labouring
folk, and the music I remembered was the whistling of blackbirds and
thrushes in the early dawn. I knew that I had purchased much finer
pleasure in a single day, and at a cheaper rate, than they in a month
of days; but I never told them so, for they would not have understood
me. The ear that hungers for the raucous strains of cockney Pierrots
on a beach cannot attune itself to the notes of the morning thrush.