cares not and knows not of beauty and history: as once, when I was
journeying (in a dream of the night) down the well-remembered reaches
of the Thames betwixt Streatley and Wallingford, where the foothills
of the White Horse fall back from the broad stream, I came upon a
clear-seen mediaeval town standing up with roof and tower and spire
within its walls, grey and ancient, but untouched from the days of its
builders of old. All this I have seen in the dreams of the night
clearer than I can force myself to see them in dreams of the day. So
that it would have been nothing new to me the other night to fall into
an architectural dream if that were all, and yet I have to tell of
things strange and new that befell me after I had fallen asleep. I had
begun my sojourn in the Land of Nod by a very confused attempt to
conclude that it was all right for me to have an engagement to lecture
at Manchester and Mitcham Fair Green at half-past eleven at night on
one and the same Sunday, and that I could manage pretty well. And
then I had gone on to try to make the best of addressing a large
open-air audience in the costume I was really then wearing--to wit, my
night-shirt, reinforced for the dream occasion by a pair of braceless
trousers. The consciousness of this fact so bothered me, that the
earnest faces of my audience--who would NOT notice it, but were
clearly preparing terrible anti-Socialist posers for me--began to fade
away and my dream grew thin, and I awoke (as I thought) to find myself
lying on a strip of wayside waste by an oak copse just outside a
country village.

I got up and rubbed my eyes and looked about me, and the landscape
seemed unfamiliar to me, though it was, as to the lie of the land, an
ordinary English low-country, swelling into rising ground here and
there. The road was narrow, and I was convinced that it was a piece
of Roman road from its straightness. Copses were scattered over the