Chapter 3 The Country Flavour 
OHN SMITH was so much a man of the 
countryside it is worth while to try imagining 
what that country was like which was the 
scene of his life and gave a flavouring to his 
talk. In his boyhood and young manhood, in 
the days before railways, were the lanes muddier, 
the roadside trees less tall, than in my own 
memory? Was the winter more wintry then 
than now, colder, wetter, gloomier? Certainly 
winter preponderates in my fancies of old Farn- 
borough. 
This is, no doubt, partly due to picture books 
of that period—pidtures full of snow and lowering 
clouds, of men in heavy overcoats and of stage- 
coaches stuck in snow-drifts, of leafless trees, and 
shivering animals, and so on. It is a rugged 
England, with rugged people; a country which, 
maybe, George Morland composed for me— 
Morland interpreted later, perhaps, by the author 
of Lavengro. But I suspeé& that John Smith 
himself was partly responsible. A weather- 
beaten man he was. You could see he had lived 
a strenuous outdoor life. And as his hair grew 
frostier and he liked the fireside better—pulling 
off stiff and ponderous farm-boots to dry in the 
fender—it added to his comfort to recall the 
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