Simplification of life has in all ages had its advocates, but it was not till the time of Rousseau and the revolutionary epoch that it acquired its full significance, when the connection between simple living and a juster social state became obvious and unmistakable, and it was seen that luxury on the part of one man must involve drudgery on the part of another. Thoreau’s _Walden_, published in America in 1854, was beginning to be known in England some thirty years later; and Edward Carpenter’s essays, afterwards collected in his _England’s Ideal_ (1887), were pointing the way to a wiser and healthier mode of life. I read some of those essays while still at Eton; and amid such surroundings they had a peculiarly vivid interest, as revealing, what was there quite overlooked, that it was possible to dispense with the greater part of the trappings with which we were encumbered, and to live far more simply and cheaply than was dreamed of in polite society. The removal from a public school to a cottage among the Surrey hills was something more than a change of residence: it was an emigration, a romance, a strange new life in some remote antipodes, where the emblems of the old servitude, such as cap and gown, found new and better uses, like swords beaten into ploughshares. My gown was cut into strips for fastening creepers to walls: my top-hat, the last time I remember seeing it, was shading a young vegetable-marrow. Servants there were none; and with the loss of them we learnt two things: first that servants do a great deal more than their employers give them credit for; secondly, that much of what they do may be lessened or rendered needless by a little judicious forethought in the arrangement of a house. One ungrateful office that servants perform is that of protecting their employers from personal interviews with beggars and tramps; they act as plenipotentiaries in the business of saying No. In country districts this certainly saves a good deal of a householder’s time, but whether it is altogether a benefit to him may be doubted, for tramps are sometimes an amusing folk, and by no means devoid of humour in their mode of levying taxes upon the well-to-do. One old mendicant, I remember, who called at my back door to solicit a small sum for a very special purpose, and told his tale so skilfully that from admiration, not conviction, I relieved him, as he himself expressed it, of his immediate difficulty. Two minutes later there was a gentle knock at my _front_ door, and behold the same old rascal commencing the same old tale! He had made the mistake of supposing that a single cottage was two semi-detached ones, and when the door was opened by his late benefactor, I saw him shaken by a momentary spasm of laughter, so human as to disarm wrath.