The Inheritance 9 
is not the only thing that lures westward each 
winter. There is a spirit of the West, a 
something in the Western country capable of 
satisfying that in us which the East for- 
ever leaves unsatisfied. Broadly speaking the 
charm of the East is pastoral, of the West, 
heroic. We need the distance, the great 
silent spaces, sometime in the year; we need 
its colour—its savage reds and yellows, its 
opal desert tints. The aboriginal self in us 
comes to the fore, that primitive untram- 
melled man who must have room and broad 
vistas and silence; who is not content with 
hills and brooks but demands mountain chains, 
the forest, and the desert for his portion; 
who is at home in the splendid, untamed, 
savage West. 
Equally, I think, we need our green little 
world of the East, its meadows and pastures, 
its old orchards and bees and wrens. We do 
not always wish to sit in vast baronial halls 
but take comfort in snug little rooms, and 
perhaps, as we grow older, find them more 
to our liking. These little mountains, these 
quiet fields, these village elms and pastoral 
scenes appeal to some cultivated and finished 
part of us and inspire gentle and cultured 
thoughts. Nature has here so many moods. 
