I have sometimes wondered whether in the process of time these little intimate differences of ours will survive. I wish they would! I wish they would, by the Lord! The Greeks were a little people, yet their provinces have survived, and the contempt that Aspasia felt for the Peloponnesus is (or should be) yet recorded. The hill tribes behind the Phoenician coast were a little people, but the fame of their religion, of their civil wars, has survived that of the merchants of Tyre. Rome, Veii, and the others were little places like Arundel and Pulborough, quite close together; but they were talked of, and men know much of them to-day. I could wish the differences of this island were so known and that people coming from a long way off would be humble and learn those differences. Surely a nation grows great in this way, by many provinces reacting one upon the other, recognised by the general will, sometimes in conflict with it. At any rate the West Country is a province of Europe; no one can get into it without touching his youth again and putting his fingers to earth, and getting sustenance from it, as a man does when he turns at the turning point of a race and touches earth with his fingers and is strong again to spring forward. The Weald Among the changes that have come upon England with the practice and facility for rapid travel many would put first the conquest (some would call it the spoiling) of little-known and isolated stretches of English landscape; and men still point out with a sort of jealous pride those districts, such as the upper Cotswolds, which modern travel has not disturbed. It seems to me that there is another feature attaching to the facility for travel, and that is this, that men can now tell other men what their countrysides are like; men can now compare one part of England with another in a way that once they could not do, and this facility in communication which so many deplore has so much good about it at least, in that it permits right judgments. There have been men in the past who have travelled widely for the mere pleasure of seeing many parts of their own country--Cobbett was one--but they were rare. As the towns grew, commercial travelling led men only to the towns, but now the thing is settling down. Men travel everywhere, all kinds of men, and no part of England remains of which a man can say that he loves it without knowing why he loves it, or that its character is indefinable. So it is with the Weald.