Personally I shall always be glad that I saw some rural aspects of England first, for they are the most characterful and, to me, significant. London is an amazing city and thoroughly English, but the rural districts are more suggestive. In what respects do the people of one country differ from those of another, since they eat, sleep, rise, dress, go to work, return, love, hate, and aspire alike? In little--dynamically, mechanically speaking. But temperamentally, emotionally, spiritually and even materially they differ in almost every way. England is a mood, I take it, a combination of dull colors and atmosphere. It expresses heaven only knows what feeling for order, stability, uniformity, homeliness, simplicity. It is highly individual--more so almost than Italy, France or Germany. It is vital--and yet vital in an intellectual way only. You would say off-hand, sensing the feel of the air, that England is all mind with convictions, prejudices, notions, poetic longings terribly emphasized. The most egotistic nation in the world because, perhaps, the most forcefully intellectual. How different is the very atmosphere of it from America. The great open common about this house smacked of English individuality, leisure, order, stratification--anything you will. The atmosphere was mistily damp, the sun at best a golden haze. All the bare trees were covered with a thin coating of almost spring-green moss. The ground was springy, dewy. Rooks were in the sky, the trees. Little red houses in the valleys, with combination flues done in quaint individual chimney pots send upward soft spirals of blue smoke. Laborers, their earth-colored trousers strapped just below the knees by a small leather strap, appeared ever and anon; housemaids, spick and span, with black dresses, white aprons, white laces in their hair, becoming streamers of linen made into large trig bows at their backs, appeared at some door or some window of almost every home. The sun glints into such orderly, well-dressed windows; the fields suspire such dewy fragrances. You can encounter hills of sheep, creaking wains, open common land of gorse and wild berries. My little master, smartly clad, dashes by on a pony; my young mistress looks becomingly gay and superior on a Shetland or a cob. A four-year-old has a long-eared white donkey to ride. That is England. How shall it be said--how described? It is so delicate, so remote, so refined, so smooth, a pleasant land of great verse and great thought. CHAPTER VII A GLIMPSE OF LONDON