thoughts and ambitions. Perhaps it is not so difficult for me as it
would be for most persons who are not natives to identify myself with
him and see it as he sees it. That greater place we have been in, that
mighty, monstrous London, is ever present to the mind and is like a mist
before the sight when we look at other places; but for me there is no
such mist, no image so immense and persistent as to cover and obscure
all others, and no such mental habit as that of regarding people as a
mere crowd, a mass, a monstrous organism, in and on which each
individual is but a cell, a scale. This feeling troubles and confuses my
mind when I am in London, where we live "too thick"; but quitting it I
am absolutely free; it has not entered my soul and coloured me with its
colour or shut me out from those who have never known it, even of the
simplest dwellers on the soil who, to our sophisticated minds, may seem
like beings of another species. This is my happiness--to feel, in all
places, that I am one with them. To say, for instance, that I am going
to Salisbury to-morrow, and catch the gleam in the children's eye and
watch them, furtively watching me, whisper to one another that there
will be something for them, too, on the morrow. To set out betimes and
overtake the early carriers' carts on the road, each with its little
cargo of packages and women with baskets and an old man or two, to
recognize acquaintances among those who sit in front, and as I go on
overtaking and passing carriers and the half-gipsy, little "general
dealer" in his dirty, ramshackle, little cart drawn by a rough,
fast-trotting pony, all of us intent on business and pleasure, bound for
Salisbury--the great market and emporium and place of all delights for
all the great Plain. I remember that on my very last expedition, when I
had come twelve miles in the rain and was standing at a street corner,
wet to the skin, waiting for my carrier, a man in a hurry said to me, "I
say, just keep an eye on my cart for a minute or two while I run round
to see somebody. I've got some fowls in it, and if you see anyone come