Suppose a philosopher were to live in and about these old stones, for a year or two he might be quite undisturbed. Then he would be arrested on suspicion after some crime. A ploughman would reveal that he had seen the man about. It would reach a pressman with a camera. He would get somebody to pose either in Wayland’s Smithy or a similar place at Wimbledon or Balham. A column about “the simple life” would be printed in a newspaper illustrated by these photographs. By this time the real philosopher, a hairy and uncommunicative man, would have been released. A rival pressman would travel to Wantage Road with a third-class ticket, which he would call either second or first class in his list of expenses. He would assail the philosopher, and with as much grace as is compatible with haste and a preoccupied mind, would bid him describe his experiences in answer to well-chosen leading questions. The philosopher might possibly fail to understand the pressman’s object, or even his English; he might seem to refuse. Then the other would produce his card, claiming instant attention as the representative of both the _Hourly Deceiver_ and the _Evening Tinkle-Tinkle_. This would amuse, puzzle, or infuriate the hairy man. His laughter or his anger would be mistaken for rudeness. The pressman would return to Wantage Road and in the train invent far better things than ever were on sea or land, and he would have no difficulty in illustrating his article by photographs which the philosopher would never see. But the people of the neighbourhood would see. Then boys would go up on a Sunday afternoon and stare and perhaps trample down the wheat. A town councillor or a retired missionary or other man of culture would inspect the scene. In the philosopher’s absence it would be discovered that Wayland’s Smithy was undrained and improperly ventilated. A woman would be scared at a distant view of the philosopher. It would be time for something to be done. Then one of two things would happen. Either the man would disappear as quietly as mist or as last year’s books: or he would be told to go, roused to eloquence or violence, arrested and imprisoned, and his story told in twenty lines in the local papers. From time to time the police of neighbouring counties would torment him until at last he could be certified as a lunatic. Instead of giving him a large plate of ham and eggs, followed by apple dumplings and then prussic acid, they would shut him up for ever in a building with innumerable windows, from any of which he could look out and see lunatics. Nevertheless, he would have had that one year unmolested at Wayland’s Smithy.