LAST ESSAYS 311 



unexpected oasis, and came away with pearls and rubies, 

 only to find they had been away, not a month or two, but 

 twenty years, and as they grew old one by one they set 

 out to find the city of the oasis, but left their bones among 

 the palms and water of the mirage. 



The ash-copses are cut, where he used to go with the 

 little copy of Shakespeare's poems and sonnets, never 

 reading it out of doors, yet carrying it about until it was 

 worn. 



' Was everyone, then, so pleasant to me in those days ?' 

 So he suddenly interrupts his memories. There was not 

 one friendly ; they were indifferent to him, he to them. 

 He will not remember the noisy scapegrace, nor his cousin 

 Jimmy Cox, nor his brother Harry, not Alere, nor Amadis, 

 nor Molly, the milkmaid. 



' I planted myself everywhere under the trees in the 

 fields and footpaths by day and by night, and that is why 

 I have never put myself into the charge of the many- 

 wheeled creatures that move on the rails and gone back 

 thither, lest I might find the trees look small, and the 

 elms mere switches, and the fields shrunken, and the 

 brooks dry, and no voice anywhere. Nothing but my 

 own ghost to meet me by every hedge. I fear lest I 

 should find myself more dead than all the rest, and verily 

 I wish, could it be without injury to others, that the sand 

 of the desert would rise and roll over and obliterate the 

 place for ever and ever.'* 



But, he says, he need not wish this ; and then with 

 unlucky mock gravity, which could only have succeeded 

 had it been irony, he goes on to point out with firstly, 

 secondly, and seventhly, that beyond his own there is no 

 evidence to support what he has said about the sparkle 

 of the brook and the old man with the silver buckles and 

 the footpaths . . . ' so that perhaps, after all, I was mis- 

 taken, and there never was any such place or any such 

 meadows, and I was never there. And perhaps, in 

 course of time, I shall find out also, when I pass away 



* ' My Old Village,' Field and Hedgerow 



