But life in an English village derives its charm only in part from its intimacy with wild Nature and all her wonders and beauties, indispensable as these are to the daily lives of most thinking, working men. There is no error so disastrous, humanly speaking, as that which leads a man to seek happiness or sublimity out of the beaten track of his fellows. Neighbourhood, the daily interchange of thought and word and kindly deed, is a necessity for all healthy human life, and the natural medium of all true advancement. And nowhere will you find it of such sturdy growth, rooted in such nourishing, yet temperate soil, than in the villages of modern England. Yet here it is necessary to discriminate, to mark conditions. If one’s duty towards one’s neighbour assumes a real and prime world’s importance in village life, it is equally true that all men are not alike fit to be villagers, nor all villages to be accounted neighbourly. It is an essential part of the life I would describe in these pages that both the people and the place should depend for existence on the day’s work; work done, as far as may be, on the soil from which all sprang, and to which all some day must return. The show villages, the little lodging-letting communities that are to be found here and there, must be excluded from the argument. Nor can men of private means, however modest, find a natural place in the true villager ranks. Where to all men life is a series of laborious days, tired evenings, dreamless nights, you, lolling in the sunshine, or playing at work, or more fatal still, working at play, will be for ever a public anomaly. You will get civility, a patient, dignified tolerance from all. But you will not have a neighbour: though you live until your feet have graven their mark into every stone of the place, you will be a stranger in a strange land. For my part, such as my work is, I have done it, every stroke, in Windlecombe for half a lifetime back, and may claim to have fairly won my villagership. And what it is worth to me—how it is sweetened by daily touch of kind hearts and grip of clean hands; what the country sunshine means, filtering through the vine-leaves of my workroom window; and what the song of the robin that sits on the ivied gate-post without, or, in winter-time, comes fluttering and tapping at the old bull’s-eye panes for crumbs; how the daily walk, in wood or meadow or by riverside, brings ever its new marvel or revelation of unimagined beauty; and how, above all, the lives of the quaint, courageous, clever folk, in whose midst Destiny has thrown me, overbrim with all traits human, delectably mortal, divinely out-of-place—these, and many other aspects of villagership, I have here tried to set down in plain words and meaning, believing that what has proved of interest and profit to one very human, always erring, often doubting soul, may do the like for others, though journeying by widely sundered tracks.