And then at last this rest, which has been so sweet, becomes monotony, and palls on him. One trout is very like another trout, barring a few ounces of weight. When he has expatiated on his first find of moon-fern, and dug it up carefully by the roots for his own fernery at Bayswater, he is slightly disgusted to come upon many tufts of moon-fern, and to know that it is not so very rare hereabouts after all, and that he cannot take away half he sees. Then too, he begins to understand the true meaning of the pictures, Gainsborough and others, which were so quaintly beautiful to him in the early days. The idyllic youths dancing in the beerhouse barn are clumsy louts who are kept from the commission of great offences mainly because they have no opportunity for dramatic sins; but they indemnify themselves by petty agricultural pilferings, and they get boozy on small beer. The pretty market-girls cantering by, are much like other daughters of Eve elsewhere, save that they have more familiarity with certain facts of natural life than good girls in town possess, and are a trifle more easy to dupe. On the whole, he finds human nature much the same in essentials here as in London--Arcadia being the poorer of the two, inasmuch as it wants the sharpness, the deftness, the refinement of bearing given by much intercourse and the more intimate contact of classes. By the time his holidays are over, our London man goes back to his work invigorated in body, but quite sufficiently sated in mind to return with pleasure to his old pursuits. He walks into the office decidedly stouter than when he left, much sunburnt, and unfeignedly glad to see them all again. It pleases him to feel like MacGregor on his native heath once more; though his native heath is only a dingy office in the E.C. district, with a view of his rival's chimney-pots. Still it is pleasant; and to know that he is recognized as Mr. So-and-So of the City, a safe man and with a character to lose, is more gratifying to his pride than to have his quality and standing discussed in village back-parlours and tap-rooms, and the question whether he is a man whom Arcadia may trust, gravely debated by boors whose pence are not as his pounds. He speaks with rapture of his delightful holiday, and extols the virtues of Arcadia and the Arcadians as warmly as if he believed in them. Perhaps he grumbles ostentatiously at his return to harness; but in his heart he knows it to be the better life; for, delicious as it is to sit in the sun eating lotuses, it is nobler to weed out tares and to plant corn.