my letters to Peter began to be as full of it as Peter's own epistles. I
loved, also, the songs of the Elizabethans, for they reminded me of
the girl who had sung to me in the June night.

In the afternoons I took my exercise in long tramps along the
good dusty English roads. The country fell away from Biggleswick
into a plain of wood and pasture-land, with low hills on the horizon.
The Place was sown with villages, each with its green and pond and
ancient church. Most, too, had inns, and there I had many a draught
of cool nutty ale, for the inn at Biggleswick was a reformed place
which sold nothing but washy cider. Often, tramping home in the
dusk, I was so much in love with the land that I could have sung
with the pure joy of it. And in the evening, after a bath, there
would be supper, when a rather fagged jimson struggled between
sleep and hunger, and the lady, with an artistic mutch on her untidy
head, talked ruthlessly of culture.

Bit by bit I edged my way into local society. The Jimsons were a
great help, for they were popular and had a nodding acquaintance
with most of the inhabitants. They regarded me as a meritorious
aspirant towards a higher life, and I was paraded before their
friends with the suggestion of a vivid, if Philistine, past. If I had
any gift for writing, I would make a book about the inhabitants of
Biggleswick. About half were respectable citizens who came there
for country air and low rates, but even these had a touch of
queerness and had picked up the jargon of the place. The younger
men were mostly Government clerks or writers or artists. There
were a few widows with flocks of daughters, and on the outskirts
were several bigger houses - mostly houses which had been there
before the garden city was planted. One of them was brand-new, a