88 NATURE NEAR LONDON 



ceaselessly toiling know no such sweets ; their food is 

 as hard as their labour. How many foot-pounds, then, 

 of human energy do these grains in my hand represent ? 

 Do they not in their little compass contain the potenti- 

 alities, the past and the future, of human life itself? 



Another train booms across the iron bridge in the 

 hollow. In a few hours now the carriages will be 

 crowded with men hastening home from their toil in the 

 City. The narrow streak of sunshine which day by day 

 falls for a little while upon the office floor, yellowed by 

 the dingy pane, is all, perhaps, to remind them of the 

 sun and sky, of the forces of nature ; and that little is 

 unnoticed. The pressure of business is so severe in 

 these later days that in the hurry and excitement it is 

 not wonderful many should forget that the world is not 

 comprised in the court of a City thoroughfare. 



Rapt and absorbed in discount and dollars, in bills 

 and merchandise, the over-strung mind deems itself all 

 the body is forgotten, the physical body, which is 

 subject to growth and change, just as the plants and 

 the very grass of the field. But there is a subtle con- 

 nection between the physical man and the great nature 

 which comes pressing up so closely to the metropolis. 

 He still depends in the nineteenth century, as in the 

 dim ages before the Pyramids, upon this tiny yellow 

 grain here, rubbed out from the ear of wheat. The 

 clever mechanism of the locomotive which bears him to 

 and fro, week after week and month after month, from 

 home to office and from office home, has not rendered 

 him in the least degree independent of this. 



But it is no wonder that these things are forgotten 

 in the daily struggle of London. And if the merchant 

 spares an abstracted glance from the morning or evening 

 newspaper out upon the fields from the carriage window, 



