If the ideal conditions of life, of which most of us dream, could be realised, the result would be a padded and luxurious existence, well-housed, well-fed, well-dressed, with all the winds of heaven tempered to indolence and cowardice. We are saved from absolute shame by the consciousness that if such a life were possible we should speedily revolt against the comforts that flattered the body while they ignored the soul. In Arden there is no such compromise with our immoral desires to get results without work, to buy without paying for what we receive. Nature keeps no running accounts and suffers no man to get in her debt; she deals with us on the principles of immutable righteousness; she treats us as her equals, and demands from us an equivalent for every gift or grace of sight or sound she bestows. She rejects contemptuously the advances of the weaklings who aspire to become her beneficiaries without having made good their claim by some service or self-denial; she rewards those only who, like herself, find music in the tempest as well as in the summer wind; joy in arduous service as well as in careless ease. A world in which there were no labours to be accomplished, no burdens to be borne, no storms to be endured, would be a world without true joy, honest pleasure, or noble aspiration. It would be a fool's paradise. The Forest of Arden is not without its changes of weather and season. Rosalind and I had fancied that it was always summer there, and that sunlight reigned from year's end to year's end; if we had been told that storms sometimes over-shadowed it, and that the icy fang of winter is felt there, we should have doubted the report. We had a good deal to learn when we first went to Arden; in fact, we still have a great deal to learn about this wonderful country, in which so many of the ideals and standards with which we were once familiar are reversed. It is one of the blessed results of living in the Forest that one is more and more conscious that he does not know and more and more eager to learn. There are no shams of any sort in Arden, and all pride in concealing one's ignorance disappears; one's chief concern is to be known precisely as he is. We were a little sensitive at first, a little disposed to be cautious about asking questions that might reveal our ignorance; but we speedily lost the false shame we had brought with us from a world where men study to conceal, as a means of protecting, the things that are most precious to them. When we learned that in the Forest nobody vulgarises one's affairs by making them matter of common talk, that all the meannesses of slander and gossip and misinterpretation are unknown, and that charity, courtesy, and honour are the unfailing law of intercourse, we threw down our reserves and experienced the refreshing freedom and sympathy of full knowledge between man and man.