But, apart from the money question, the desire to go into the country after a time wears off, even among those who have before lived in pure air and among country sights and scenes; people get used to their dull, sordid surroundings; the memory of fairer sights grows dim, and the imagination is not strong enough to conjure them up again. ‘Shure, I ain’t been in the country this fifteen year,’ an old woman once startled me by saying at a country party; ‘and if it hadn’t been for your note ’ere it would ha’ been another fifteen year afore I’d ha’ seen it.’ And she was not so poor, this old lady; 7_s._ a week, perhaps, and 2_s._ 6_d._ to pay for rent. It was not her poverty which prevented her seeing the fifteen fair springs which had passed since she came from the Green Isle. No! it was just the want of power to make the effort--a loss to her far more serious than the loss of the sight of the country. As the late James Hinton used to say, ‘The worst thing is to be in hell and not know it is hell’; perhaps the best thing one can do for another is to give him the glimpse of heaven, which, letting in the light, shows the blackness of hell. ‘Don’t you think green is God’s favourite colour?’ asked an old lady, the thought being suggested as we stood together in a forest of soft green. ‘Well, I can’t say,’ was the answer; ‘look at the sky; how blue that is.’ ‘Yes, but that isn’t always blue, and the earth is ’most always green.’ Does it not seem a pity that this old poet soul, so fit to teach God’s lessons, should live all through the summer days in one room, shared by four other people, seeing only the mud colours of London, which certainly are not God’s favourite colours. It was this same old lady who said on receiving her first invitation, ‘All the years I’ve lived in London I was never asked to go into the country before you asked me.’ But the want of pleasure and change is no newly discovered need of the poor. School-treats and excursions and bean-feasts have been organised and carried out almost since Sunday-schools have existed and congregations had a corporate life. Every summer sees the columns of the newspapers used to ask for money to give 900, 1,000, 2,000 children ‘one day in the country,’ and when the money is obtained and the day arrives, the children are packed into vans or a special train and turned into the woods or fields to enjoy themselves (and tease the frogs) until tea, buns, and hymns bring the ‘’appy day’ to an end. Good days these, full of pleasure and health-giving exercise, but perhaps mixed with too large an element of excitement to teach the children to enjoy the country for its own sake, to enable them to learn in Dame Nature’s lap ‘that we can feed this mind of ours in a wise passiveness.’