For the discipline of sympathy, for the quickened sense of comradeship in work, for the very presence of that unloveliness which compels sympathy, I dwell more months in the town than in the country-side. But remembering what Nature did to save me, and owing her an endless debt of filial duty, I return to her in the summer days, and to make up for the long months of separation cling nearer to her than most of her truant sons. For communion with Nature, the ideal joy of country life, is not attained by the sportsman or the mere player of games, who think of their bodies chiefly, and use as a means to rude physical vigour the end ordained for the fine contentience of body, mind, and spirit. Again I will pass by the obvious and familiar resources of outdoor life, and speak only of such as men are unaccountably prone to neglect. There is a way of learning nature which in this wet land is mostly followed by tramps and vagrants; the way of sleeping beneath the stars. So far is this joy from the thoughts of most men, that even George Borrow felt a strange uneasiness when for the first time the darkness descended upon him in the open country. I think we carry with us all our lives that fear of night with which nursery tales inspired our childhood; it reinforces the later more reasoned fear of boisterous weather, or of the men who walk in darkness because their works are evil. We shrink from night as a chill privation of daylight, as a gloom which we must traverse, but not inhabit; the distrust becomes with years instinctive and universal, and the nearest approach to friendly relation with night attained by most of us is a timid liking for the twilight hours. Yet as the sun rises alike upon the just and upon the unjust even so does he descend, and we put a slight upon Providence if we abandon to rogues and rakes that wonderful kingdom of the darkness of which by natural prerogative we are enfranchised. By never using our proper freedom, we give them prescriptive licence of usurpation, so that the hours in which the heavens are nearest to us are become the peculiar inheritance of thieves.