And the dear old Scotch Preacher, when Harriet and I had wrapped him up, went out, saying: 

“This has been a day of pleasant bread.”

It has; it has.  I shall not soon forget it.  What a lot of kindness and common human nature—­childlike simplicity, if you will—­there is in people once you get them down together and persuade them that the things they think serious are not serious at all.

III

THE OPEN ROAD

“To make space for wandering is it that the world was made so wide.”

—­Goethe, Wilhelm Meister.

I love sometimes to have a day alone—­a riotous day.  Sometimes I do not care to see even my best friends:  but I give myself up to the full enjoyment of the world around me.  I go out of my door in the morning—­preferably a sunny morning, though any morning will do well enough—­and walk straight out into the world.  I take with me the burden of no duty or responsibility.  I draw in the fresh air, odour-laden from orchard and wood.  I look about me as if everything were new—­and behold everything is new.  My barn, my oaks, my fences—­I declare I never saw them before.  I have no preconceived impressions, or beliefs, or opinions.  My lane fence is the end of the known earth.  I am a discoverer of new fields among old ones.  I see, feel, hear, smell, taste all these wonderful things for the first time.  I have no idea what discoveries I shall make!

So I go down the lane, looking up and about me.  I cross the town road and climb the fence on the other side.  I brush one shoulder among the bushes as I pass:  I feel the solid yet easy pressure of the sod.  The long blades of the timothy-grass clasp at my legs and let go with reluctance.  I break off a twig here and there and taste the tart or bitter sap.  I take off my hat and let the warm sun shine on my head.  I am an adventurer upon a new earth.

Is it not marvellous how far afield some of us are willing to travel in pursuit of that beauty which we leave behind us at home?  We mistake unfamiliarity for beauty; we darken our perceptions with idle foreignness.  For want of that ardent inner curiosity which is the only true foundation for the appreciation of beauty—­for beauty is inward, not outward—­we find ourselves hastening from land to land, gathering mere curious resemblances which, like unassimilated property, possess no power of fecundation.  With what pathetic diligence we collect peaks and passes in Switzerland; how we come laden from England with vain cathedrals!

Beauty?  What is it but a new way of approach?  For wilderness, for foreignness, I have no need to go a mile:  I have only to come up through my thicket or cross my field from my own roadside—­and behold, a new heaven and a new earth!

Things grow old and stale, not because they are old, but because we cease to see them.  Whole vibrant significant worlds around us disappear within the sombre mists of familiarity.  Whichever way we look the roads are dull and barren.  There is a tree at our gate we have not seen in years:  a flower blooms in our door-yard more wonderful than the shining heights of the Alps!