88 THE SOUTH COUNTRY 



feeling is like that, space and quiet and my own littleness 

 stupendously exaggerated. I have wished I could lay 

 down my thoughts and desires and noises and stirrings 

 and cease to trouble that great peace. It was, perhaps, of 

 this loneliness that the Psalmist spoke : * My days are 

 consumed like smoke. ... I watch, and am as a sparrow 

 alone on the housetop.' The world is wrong, but the 

 night is fine; the dew light and the moist air is full of the 

 honeysuckle scent. I will smoke another pipe of your 

 tobacco and leave you for a while. I like to be alone 

 before I sleep." 



The next I saw of him was when he was frying bacon 

 and boiling beans for our meal. " Forget my night 

 thoughts," he said, "and be thankful for the white dry 

 road and the blue sky. We are not so young but that 

 we must be glad it is summer and fine. As for me, the 

 dry weather is so sweet that I like the smell of elder 

 flower and the haycart horses' dung and the dust that get 

 into the throat of an evening. Good-bye." 



He went away to wash at the pump, as the cattle spread 

 out from the milking-stalls into the field and filled it with 

 their sweet breath and the sound of their biting the thick 

 grass. 



I saw him again a few years later. 



London was hot and dry, and would have been 

 parched, cracked and shrivelled had it been alive instead 

 of dead. The masonry was so dry that the eye wearied 

 of it before the feet wearied of the pavement, and 

 both desired the rain that makes the city at one with 

 Nature. The plane-trees were like so many captives 

 along the streets, shackled to the flagstones, pelted with 



