Low rooms of my repose! Beams of comfort and great age; drowsy and inhabiting fires; ingle-nooks made for companionship. You also, beer much better, much more soft, than the beer of lesser towns; beans, bacon, and chicken cooked to the very limit of excellence; port drawn from barrels which the simple Portuguese had sent to Lynn over the cloud-shadowed sea, and honourable Lynn without admixture had sent upon a cart to you, port undefined, port homogeneous, entirely made of wine: you also beds! Wooden beds with curtains around them, feathers for sleeping on, and every decent thing which the accursed would attempt to destroy; candles (I trust)--and trust is more perfect than proof--bread made (if it be possible) out of English wheat; milk drawn most certainly from English cows, and butter worthy of the pastures of England all around. Oh, glory to the Fens, Griffin, it shall not be said that I have not enjoyed you! * * * * * There is a modern habit, I know, of gloom, and men without faith upon every side recount the things that they have not enjoyed. For my part I will yield to no such habit. I will consider that I have more perfectly tasted in the mind that which may have been denied to my mere body, and I will produce for myself and others a greater pleasure than any pleasure of the sense. I will do what the poets and the prophets have always done, and satisfy myself with vision, and (who knows?) perhaps by this the Griffin of the Idea has been made a better thing (if that were possible!) than the Griffin as it is--as it materially stands in this evil and uncertain world. So let the old horse go by and snatch me from this chance of joy: he has not taken everything in his flight, and there remains something in spite of time, which eats us all up. And yet ... what is that in me which makes me regret the Griffin, the real Griffin at which they would not let me stay? The Griffin painted green: the real rooms, the real fire ... the material beer? Alas for mortality! Something in me still clings to affections temporal and mundane. England, my desire, what have you not refused me! THE FIRST DAY'S MARCH I very well remember the spring breaking ten years ago in Lorraine. I remember it better far than I shall ever remember another spring, because one of those petty summits of emotion that seem in boyhood like the peaks of the world was before me. We were going off to camp.