THE SOUTH COUNTRY 7 



looking at the methods of great poets, of beautiful women, 

 of athletes, of politicians, but still gradually as fitted to 

 the mind as an old walking-stick to the hand that has 

 worn and been worn by it, full of our weakness as of our 

 strength, of our blindness as of our vision — the man him- 

 self, the poor man it may be. And I live by writing, 

 since it is impossible to live by not writing in an age not 

 of gold but of brass. 



Unlearned, incurious, but finding deepest ease and joy 

 out of doors, I have gone about the South Country these 

 twenty years and more on foot, especially in Kent 

 between Maidstone and Ash ford and round Penshurst, 

 in Surrey between London, Guildford and Horley, in 

 Hampshire round Petersfield, in Wiltshire between 

 Wootton Bassett, Swindon and Savernake. The people 

 are almost foreign to me, the more so because country 

 people have not yet been thrown into quite the same 

 confusion as townspeople, and therefore look awk- 

 wardly upon those who are not in trade — writing is an 

 unskilled labour and not a trade — not on the land, 

 and not idle. But I have known something of two or 

 three men and women, and have met a few dozen more. 

 Yet is this country, though I am mainly Welsh, a kind 

 of home, as I think it is more than any other to those 

 modern people who belong nowhere. Here they prefer 

 to retire, here they take their holidays in multitudes. For 

 it is a good foster-mother, ample-bosomed, mild and 

 homely. The lands of wild coast, of mountains, of 

 myriad chimneys, offer no such welcome. They have 

 their race, their speech and ways, and are jealous. You 

 must be a man of the sea or of the hills to dwell there at 



