horse gets to be six years old--they always do”? or that “you always find bay horses turn chestnut if they’re clipped badly”? These men would not try these fictions upon any one else; why should I suffer for being a country parson by being told a long story--with the most religious seriousness--of “that there horse as Mr. Abel had, that stopped growing in his fore-quarters when he was two and went on growing with his hind-quarters till he was seven--that hoss that they called Kangaroo, ’cause he’d jump anything--anything under a church tower, only you had to give him his head”? I used to get much more irritated by this kind of thing when I was less mellowed by age than I am: and I have learnt to be more tolerant even of a horse-dealer than I once was. In an outburst of indignation one day, I turned angrily upon one of the fraternity, and said to him, “Man! how can you go on lying in this way; why won’t you deal fairly, instead of always trying to take people in?” The man was not a bit offended--indeed he smiled quite kindly upon me. “Lor,’ sir, do you suppose _we_ never get took in?” I am fully persuaded that horse-dealer thought I was going to try the confidence trick with him. * * * * * I am often assured by my town friends that the _loneliness_ of my country life must be very trying. I reply with perfect truth that I have never known what it is to feel lonely except in London. Some years ago one Sunday afternoon I was compelled to consult an eminent oculist. When the cab drove up to the great man’s door in Cardross Square, his eminence was at the window in a brown study, with his elbows leaning on the wire blind, the tip of his nose flattened against the pane, his eyes vacantly staring at nothing. When we were shown into his presence, the forlorn and desolate expression on that forsaken man’s face was quite shocking to the nerves. A painter who could have reproduced the look of aimless and despairing woe might have made a name for ever. When people talk to me of loneliness I always instinctively recall the image of that famous oculist in the heart of London on a Sunday afternoon. Ever since that day I have never been able to get over a horror of wire blinds. Happily, they are articles of furniture which have almost gone out now, but they used to be fearfully common. Even now the Londoner thinks it _de rigueur_ to darken the windows of his sitting-room on the ground floor; and in furnished lodgings you must have wire blinds. Why is this? When I ask the question I am told that you _must_ have wire blinds: if you didn’t, people would look in. In the country we never have wire blinds, and yet nobody looks in; therefore you call our life lonely. But loneliness is not the simple product of external circumstances--it is the outcome of a morbid temperament, creating for itself a sense of vacuity, whatever may be a man’s surroundings.