It was in the year 1888 (“O noctes coenasque deum!”--a tag) that, upon one of the southern hills of England, I came quite unexpectedly across a little old man who sat upon a bench that was there and looked out to sea. Now you will ask me why a bench was there, since benches are not commonly found upon the high slopes of our southern hills, of which the poet has well said, the writer has well written, and the singer has well sung:-- The Southern Hills and the South Sea They blow such gladness into me That when I get to Burton Sands And smell the smell of the home lands, My heart is all renewed, and fills With the Southern Sea and the South Hills. True, benches are not common there. I know of but one, all the way from the meeting place of England, which is upon Salisbury Plain, to that detestable suburb of Eastbourne by Beachy Head. Nay, even that one of which I speak has disappeared. For an honest man being weary of labour and yet desiring firewood one day took it away, and the stumps only now remain at the edge of a wood, a little to the south of No Man’s Land. Well, at any rate, upon this bench there sat in the year 1888 a little old man, and he was looking out to sea; for from this place the English Channel spreads out in a vast band 600 ft. below one, and the shore perhaps five miles away; it looks broader than any sea in the world, broader than the Mediterranean from the hills of Alba Longa, and broader than the Irish Sea from the summit of the Welsh Mountains: though why this is so I cannot tell. The little old man treated my coming as though it was an expected thing, and before I had spoken to him long assured me that this view gave him complete content. “I could sit here,” he said, “and look at the Channel and consider the nature of this land for ever and for ever.” Now though words like this meant nothing in so early a year as the year 1888, yet I was willing to pursue them because there was, in the eyes of the little old man, a look of such wisdom, kindness, and cunning as seemed to me a marriage between those things native to the earth and those things which are divine. I mean, that he seemed to me to have all that the good animals have, which wander about in the brushwood and are happy all their lives, and also all that we have, of whom it has been well said that of every thing which runs or creeps upon earth, man is the fullest of sorrow. For this little old man seemed to have (at least such was my fantastic thought in that early year) a complete acquiescence in the soil and the air that had bred him, and yet something common to mankind and a full foreknowledge of death.