she can treat me like that and barely give me a pleasant word in a
month! Let her come to Salisbury and see how many there be!

And so with every one in that vast assemblage--vast to the dweller in
the Plain. Each one is present as it were in two places, since each has
in his or her heart the constant image of home--the little, peaceful
village in the remote valley; of father and mother and neighbours and
children, in school just now, or at play, or home to dinner--home cares
and concerns and the business in Salisbury. The selling and buying;
friends and relations to visit or to meet in the market-place, and--how
often!--the sick one to be seen at the Infirmary. This home of the
injured and ailing, which is in the mind of so many of the people
gathered together, is indeed the cord that draws and binds the city and
the village closest together and makes the two like one.

That great, comely building of warm, red brick in Fisherton Street, set
well back so that you can see it as a whole, behind its cedar and
beech-trees--how familiar it is to the villagers! In numberless humble
homes, in hundreds of villages of the Plain, and all over the
surrounding country, the "Infirmary" is a name of the deepest meaning,
and a place of many gad and tender and beautiful associations. I heard
it spoken of in a manner which surprised me at first, for I know some of
the London poor and am accustomed to their attitude towards the
metropolitan hospitals. The Londoner uses them very freely; they have
come to be as necessary to him as the grocer's shop and the
public-house, but for all the benefits he receives from them he has no
faintest sense of gratitude, and it is my experience that if you speak
to him of this he is roused to anger and demands, "What are they for?"
So far is he from having any thankful thoughts for all that has been
given him for nothing and done for him and for his, if he has anything