224 THE GARDEN OF A 



meet friends gathered from the four corners of the 

 earth, or find the place as desolate as Siberia. You 

 may laugh and you may also cry. Yes, that is one 

 of the reasons why I could not stay in a city. 

 There is so much misery one must see and cannot 

 help, that it makes one feel small and shrivelled, 

 while hereabout there is no one so wretched but 

 what it is possible to aid him. You may, in short, 

 do everything in the city but live. I mean live your 

 own life, and not that of some particular clique, the 

 society of which, if you ignore, your loneliness will 

 be such that not the remotest dweller on the moun- 

 tain side could compass or imagine it the desola- 

 tion of a crowd ! 



Then to be ill in the city ! I was ill, very ill there, the 

 winter that I was eighteen. It was in a good house, 

 and the people were kind. I lay there day after day, 

 and all that I could see of the sky was a little ragged 

 scrap between the tall house-tops. The sun never 

 crossed this gap, but sometimes at night I saw the 

 dogstar, and from the diffused light I knew that the 

 moon was up. I lay watching and pining more and 

 more until one night, when the moon at last crossed 

 my vista, it was a strange thing rent and divided 

 by overhanging wires, and Sirius himself seemed 

 only a lamp in the tallest building. As I looked, life 



