FullReads

The pretty landscape whirled by; we went through a hundred tunnels (more or less); the little engine gave a shrill little squeak now and then; at old, old railway stations, that remind one agreeably of jails, rough-looking men in black shirt sleeves and corduroy waistcoats ran out to the train to open the carriage doors, and I forgot the gentleman altogether. Till at length we came to his station.

When he had got out he turned to latch the door, and putting his head in at the window, he said to me in the pleasantest manner possible: “Good aufternoon, sir.” He wasn’t sore at me a bit! That was simply his fashion of travelling, in silence.

I was going into the countryside, to the country places where the old men have pleasant faces and the maidens quiet eyes. To fare forth upon the King’s highway, to hedgerows and blossoms and the old lanes of Merrie England, to mount again the old red hills, bird enchanted, and dip the valleys bright with sward, to the wind on the heath, brother, to hills and the sea, to lonely downs, to hold converse with simple shepherd men, and, when even fell, the million tinted, to seek some ancient inn for warmth in the inglenook, and bite and drop, and where, when the last star lamp in the valley had expired, I would rest my weary bones until the sweet choral of morning birds called me on my way.

There was an ancient character going along the road. He walked with a staff, a crooked stick. His coatless habit was the colour of clay; his legs were bound about just below the knee by a strap (wherein, at one side, he carried his pipe), so that his trowsers flared at the bottom like a sailor’s; over his shoulder he bore a flat straw basket. Under his chin were whiskers; his eyes were merry and bright and his cheeks just like fine rosy apples, with a great high light on each. I asked of him the way and we trudged along together. “You are from Mericy,” he said with delight.

He told me about himself. He was seventy-four and he had never had “a single schooling” in his life. Capel was his home, a village of about twenty houses which we were approaching, thirty miles or so from London. The last time he been to London was when he was fifteen. He had then seen some fireworks there. No fireworks in Capel, he said, had ever been able to touch him since. He had been pushing on, he said, pushing on, pushing on all the while.

“You were not born in Capel, then?” I said.

Born in Capel! Why, he had been born seven miles from Capel.

The difficulty was that I had overlooked the fact that everybody goes out of London town at Whitsuntide. Village and county town I tried and I could not find where to lay my head. Everything was, as they say in England, “full up.” It was coming on to rain and the night fell chill and black. Would I have to use my rucksack for a pillow and sleep in the fields?

At length I found a man–it was at quaint Godalming, I think, where the famous Charterhouse School is–who could not give me a room, but offered me a bed and breakfast at half a crown. “There’s another fellow up there,” he said. “But he’s a nice, quiet fellow; something like yourself,” he said. “I think you’ll like him.”

“You are an American,” remarked my landlord. I sat with him in his little parlour behind the bar. It had a gun over the mantelpiece, a great deal of painted china and a group of stuffed birds in a glass case. He asked me if I liked reading, because, if I did, he had an old dictionary to which I was welcome at any time.