Another pinching shoe is to be found in climate and locality. A man hungering for the busy life of the city has to vegetate in the rural districts, where the days drop one after the other like leaden bullets, and time is only marked by an accession of dulness. Another, thirsting for the repose of the country, has to jostle daily through Cheapside. To one who thinks Canadian salmon-fishing the supreme of earthly happiness, fate gives the chance of chasing butterflies in Brazil; to another who holds 'the common objects of the seashore' of more account than silver and gold, an adverse fortune assigns a station in the middle of a plain as arid as if the world had been made without water; and a third, who cares for nothing but the free breathing of the open moors or the rugged beauty of the barren fells, is dropped down into the heart of a narrow valley where he cannot see the sun for the trees. At first this matter of locality seems to be but a very small grip on the foot, not worth a second thought; but it is one of a certain cumulative power impossible to describe, though keen enough to him who suffers; and the pinching shoe of uncongenial place is quite as hard to bear as that of uncongenial work. Again, a man to whom intellectual companionship means more than it does to many is thrown into a neighbourhood where he cannot hope to meet with comprehension, still less with sympathy. He is a Freethinker, and the neighbourhood goes in for the strictest Methodism or the highest ultra-Ritualism; he is a Radical, and he is in the very focus of county Toryism, where the doctrine of equality and the rights of man is just so much seditious blasphemy, while the British Constitution is held as a direct emanation from divine wisdom second only to the Bible; or he is a Tory to the backbone--and his backbone is a pretty stiff one--and he is in the midst of that blatant kind of Radicalism which thinks gentlehood a remnant of the dark ages, and confounds good breeding with servility, and loyalty to the Crown with oppression of the people. Surrounded by his kind, he is as much alone as if in the middle of a desert. An Englishman among Englishmen, he has no more mental companionship than if he were in a foreign country where he and his neighbour spoke different tongues, and each had a set of signs with not two agreeing. And this kind of solitude makes a pinching shoe to many minds; though to some of the more self-centred or defying kind it is bearable enough--perhaps even giving a sense of roominess which closer communion would destroy.