been before: and out of all those unreal, waste, and transitory realms
of illusion, evolve a real, stable, and habitable world, which all who
run may reach.

* * * * *

At last I left school for good, and paid a visit to my Uncle Ibbetson in
Hopshire, where he was building himself a lordly new pleasure-house on
his own land, as the old one he had inherited a year or two ago was no
longer good enough for him.

It was an uninteresting coast on the German Ocean, without a rock, or a
cliff, or a pier, or a tree; even without cold gray stones for the sea
to break on--nothing but sand!--a bourgeois kind of sea, charmless in
its best moods, and not very terrible in its wrath, except to a few
stray fishermen whom it employed, and did not seem to reward very
munificently.

Inland it was much the same. One always thought of the country as gray,
until one looked and found that it was green; and then, if one were old
and wise, one thought no more about it, and turned one's gaze inward.
Moreover, it seemed to rain incessantly.

But it was the country and the sea, after Bluefriars and the
cloisters--after Newgate, St. Bartholomew, and Smithfield.

And one could fish and bathe in the sea after all, and ride in the
country, and even follow the hounds, a little later; which would have
been a joy beyond compare if one had not been blessed with an uncle who
thought one rode like a French tailor, and told one so, and mimicked