There are times and moods in which it is revealed to us, or to a few amongst us, that we are a survival of the past, a dying remnant of a vanished people, and are like strangers and captives among those who do not understand us, and have no wish to do so; whose language and customs and thoughts are not ours. That "world-strangeness," which William Watson and his fellow-poets prattle in rhyme about, those, at all events, who have what they call the "note of modernity" in their pipings, is not in me as in them. The blue sky, the brown soil beneath, the grass, the trees, the animals, the wind, and rain, and sun, and stars are never strange to me; for I am in and of and am one with them; and my flesh and the soil are one, and the heat in my blood and in the sunshine are one, and the winds and tempests and my passions are one. I feel the "strangeness" {48} only with regard to my fellow-men, especially in towns, where they exist in conditions unnatural to me, but congenial to them; where they are seen in numbers and in crowds, in streets and houses, and in all places where they gather together; when I look at them, their pale civilised faces, their clothes, and hear them eagerly talking about things that do not concern me. They are out of my world--the real world. All that they value, and seek and strain after all their lives long, their works and sports and pleasures, are the merest baubles and childish things; and their ideals are all false, and nothing but by-products, or growths, of the artificial life--little funguses cultivated in heated cellars. [Sidenote: The barrow on the heath] In such moments we sometimes feel a kinship with, and are strangely drawn to, the dead, who were not as these; the long, long dead, the men who knew not life in towns, and felt no strangeness in sun and wind and rain. In such a mood on that evening I went to one of those lonely barrows; one that rises to a height of nine or ten feet above the level heath, and is about fifty yards round. It is a garden in the brown desert, covered over with a dense growth of furze bushes, still in flower, mixed with bramble and elder and thorn, and heather in great clumps, blooming, too, a month before its time, the fiery purple-red of its massed blossoms, and of a few tall, tapering spikes of foxglove, shining against the vivid green of the young bracken. All this rich wild vegetation on that lonely mound on the brown heath! {49} Here, sheltered by the bushes, I sat and saw the sun go down, and the long twilight deepen till the oak woods of Beaulieu in the west looked black on the horizon, and the stars came out: in spite of the cold wind that made me shiver in my thin clothes, I sat there for hours, held by the silence and solitariness of that mound of the ancient dead.