A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. I/ 



hushes and hides before it ; and I believe that to any 

 observant man its unnatural features must always be 

 disquieting and depressing. 



On bright, frosty mornings, when I go up to the 

 top of the hilly common behind the house, I see all 

 along the northern horizon a broad, dun bank of 

 cloud, orange-coppery fading to ashy-brown, the 

 coast of that land of London Particular, where it is 

 freezing rawly, where the gas-jets are burning murky- 

 yellow in the olive-coloured air, and where three 

 million pair of lungs are drawing the biting carbonic 

 and sulphurous acids. Down here the rime is just 

 turned to dew and flashes crimson and green on the 

 points of the furze and the cobwebs ; and in the 

 dead calm the sun strikes warm in the face, and 

 draws out the intense sweetness of the fine heath- 

 grass. Even as one is commiserating the people 

 whose morning trains are stuck in a blank yellow 

 world at Battersea or Vauxhall, amid a cannonade 

 of fog-signals, the wind begins to veer and shift 

 northerly ; and before noon the light in Arnington is 

 as the light of the Embankment, with a smell as of 

 Brompton Road. 



This censing of the country by the town is pestilent 

 enough to all whose senses are practised in tolerably 

 clean and unsophisticated media ; but it probably 



c 



