BENEDICITE 163 



individualities, and agree mutually to tolerate one 

 another. In some future state we may meet again 

 and merge; but in this present state of man, each 

 can serve the other only as a foil. 



I essay at times to give this worthy personage the 

 slip, a difficult task for one who shares with him the 

 same pair of feet. 



Thus, on that aforementioned Sabbath morning in 

 April, I got clear away from our village on to the 

 high-road, upon which is strung a succession of 

 villages and country towns from Stretford on the 

 Mersey as far as Chester on the Dee. I like country 

 roads in the early day. It is with a spacious sense 

 of freedom and proprietorship that one stalks along 

 the empty highway, and no part of it affects me more 

 pleasantly than that where I step from one county 

 into another. Two counties and a man there is a 

 fine roominess in the picture. I had got clear away, 

 as I stated, without any untoward demonstration on 

 the part of the respectable Ruminant who for my 

 sins is set to shadow me. He, with his predilection 

 for beaten tracks of all sorts, gave no sign of his 

 presence so long as we tramped ahead on the King's 

 high-road. He is, indeed, a comfortable soul 

 where he has a right of way and the law on his 

 side ; and when, later in the day, the hooting, 

 grunting motors, manned by goggle-eyed fiends, 

 began to sweep past, whirling aloft clouds of man- 

 choking, tree-stifling dust on the petrol-laden air, he 

 notified his presence by remarking that, as pedes- 

 trians, we had full legal right to the use of the foot- 

 way whenever visible, were the cars, indeed, fifty 

 times as numerous, and the dust sixty times as thick. 



