Innovations have seldom been improvements here. There are very many new things that are better than the old; but here one chiefly sees the new things that are cheaper than the old, and these are not always better. Many of them are not really cheaper. I have just given the roof of this house a new coat of thatch that ought to last for twenty years or more. The thatching here is done with wheat straw; so I grew a crop close by, and sold the grain and kept the straw. Slate or tile costs more; and with such roofing I should have to spend a great deal more on fuel, to keep the house as warm in winter time. In some ways a thatched roof is better than a cellar as a place for storing wine: the temperature just suits the wine, and there is not any damp. My grandfather tried keeping some above his bedroom ceiling; but it was an inconvenient place for fetching bottles down, and accidents may happen when thatchers are about. After looking at my vases here, a foreigner made me a little speech. “Oh, your country, how wonderful it is. Who should think to find choice works of ancient Greece with a roof of what you call the Thetch. In another house I find antiquities of Egypt, in another the Oriental porcelain and the lacquer, in another I find pictures most superb. Where originals do not exist, I find reproductions of the greatest works. Surely your England is the most artistic country in the world.”--I fear that England is Artistic in another sense. One day a shopman was showing me things all covered with clumsy ornament, and I asked if there was nothing of good design, without all these excrescences. He seemed puzzled at this, and then it dawned upon him, “Oh, I see, sir. You want something less Artistic.” This was a secluded place until the railway came. My grandfather writes on 23 September 1849, “I find most people like Wreyland, that is, those advancing in years: so quiet and so sheltered.” And then on 3 January 1864, “I cannot fancy that any railway improves scenery, but this will not so disturb it as one might imagine.... They fancy it is cutting up the country and letting in more people, which will destroy the scenery and the quiet of the neighbourhood; but they think more of its introducing new society than destroying the scenery.”