Now in England we have many such approaches and surprises. I will not speak of that good change which comes upon a man as he travels south from Victoria Station and hears, almost at the same time that he first smells earth, the South Country tongue; nor will I speak of that other change which perhaps some of my readers know very well, the change from the active and grasping Cockney into the quiet tenacity of East Anglia. It is not my province--but if I am not wrong one strikes it within half an hour in the fast expresses--these people push with quants, they sail in wherries, they inhabit flat tidal banks, they are at peace. Nor will I here speak of the Marches and how, between a village and a village, one changes from the common English parish with the Squire’s house and the church and the cottages and all, into the hard slate roofs and the inner flame of Wales. Rather I would speak of something the boundary of which has never yet been laid down, but which people call (I think) “The West Country.” * * * * * One never knows, when one is tackling a thing like this, where one should first begin to tackle it, or by what end one should take it. Every man according to his own study, every man according to his own bent or accident of experience, takes it by his own handle, and the one man speaks of the language, the other of the hills, another of the architecture, another of the names. For my part I would desire to speak of all. When one gets over a certain boundary one is in a peculiar district of this world, a special countryside of Europe, a happy land with a conviction and a tradition of its own which may not have a name, but which is in general the West Country, and which by its hills and by its men and women convinces any true traveller at once of its personality. More than one man after a dreary wandering southwards through the Midlands has walked by night up one of its fresh streets to an inn and cried: “What! Have I come upon Paradise?” And this feeling comes also when one has climbed up the Cotswold through the little places of stone and suddenly sees the valley floor of the Severn so full of orchards, or has come over the flat deserts of the Upper Thames and had revealed to him the Golden Valley; or, after plodding through Wiltshire, has smelt an air which told him that not far off were the heavy tides of that haunted sea which runs between the Welsh hills and the peninsula of Cornwall and Devon. Men are lost in these seas and are saved in them perpetually as by miracles: I can appeal, in this print, to how many? They have been saved by the miracle of that water. Here Arthur was cast up by the waves: on to that flat salt, in its calm, full of mists, looked out those who gave us our legend of his Court.