180 BIG AND LITTLE. 



Take, once more, the utter impossibility of truly 

 realizing to our own minds even very minor big- 

 nesses of size in external nature. Look at England 

 itself! A single county, when we come to walk 

 or ride or drive through it from end to end, is 

 larger far than we can really picture to ourselves 

 in our mental imaginings. The bicyclist who has 

 gone through the length and breadth of Surrey 

 or Sussex — to mention the counties most familiar 

 as a rule to the London amateur — knows that 

 even those fractions of England are too big to 

 be adequately represented in a single inclusive act 

 of memory or imagination. How, then, can any 

 one of us pretend that we have really and truly 

 a genuine conception of the relative bigness of all 

 England? We know it in fact merely by rough 

 ideas derived from railway-travelling ; it took us 

 so many hours to go by train from London to 

 Penzance, and so many more to drive by coach 

 from the Penzance Hotel to the Land's End. We 

 were so long in going from Carlisle to Dover, and 

 so long in getting from Carnarvon to Yarmouth. 

 Li this way we fiame symbolically to ourselves 

 some rough idea of the size of our native country, 

 not, indeed, as visible at a single inclusive bird's- 

 eye vievtr, but as traversable by rail, or as measur- 

 able by means of the time recjuired for transit 

 across it. From this point of view, no doubt, 

 railways have really made the ideal England 



