I was lighting my pipe as I stepped out of the inn
at Cockermouth, and did not raise my head until I
was fairly in the street. When I did so, it
flashed upon me that I was in England; the evening
sunlight lit up English houses, English faces, an English
conformation of street,—as it were, an English
atmosphere blew against my face. There is nothing
perhaps more puzzling (if one thing in sociology can
ever really be more unaccountable than another) than
the great gulf that is set between England and Scotland—a
gulf so easy in appearance, in reality so difficult
to traverse. Here are two people almost identical
in blood; pent up together on one small island, so
that their intercourse (one would have thought) must
be as close as that of prisoners who shared one cell
of the Bastille; the same in language and religion;
and yet a few years of quarrelsome isolation—a
mere forenoon’s tiff, as one may call it, in
comparison with the great historical cycles—has
so separated their thoughts and ways that not unions,
not mutual dangers, nor steamers, nor railways, nor
all the king’s horses and all the king’s
men, seem able to obliterate the broad distinction.
In the trituration of another century or so the corners
may disappear; but in the meantime, in the year of
grace 1871, I was as much in a new country as if I
had been walking out of the Hotel St. Antoine at Antwerp.
I felt a little thrill of pleasure at my heart as
I realised the change, and strolled away up the street
with my hands behind my back, noting in a dull, sensual
way how foreign, and yet how friendly, were the slopes
of the gables and the colour of the tiles, and even
the demeanour and voices of the gossips round about
me.
Wandering in this aimless humour, I turned up a lane
and found myself following the course of the bright
little river. I passed first one and then another,
then a third, several couples out love-making in
the spring evening; and a consequent feeling of loneliness
was beginning to grow upon me, when I came to a dam
across the river, and a mill—a great, gaunt
promontory of building,—half on dry ground
and half arched over the stream. The road here
drew in its shoulders and crept through between the
landward extremity of the mill and a little garden
enclosure, with a small house and a large signboard
within its privet hedge. I was pleased to fancy
this an inn, and drew little etchings in fancy of
a sanded parlour, and three-cornered spittoons, and
a society of parochial gossips seated within over
their churchwardens; but as I drew near, the board
displayed its superscription, and I could read the
name of Smethurst, and the designation of ’Canadian
Felt Hat Manufacturers.’ There was no
more hope of evening fellowship, and I could only
stroll on by the river-side, under the trees.
The water was dappled with slanting sunshine, and
dusted all over with a little mist of flying insects.
There were some amorous ducks, also, whose lovemaking
reminded me of what I had seen a little farther down.
But the road grew sad, and I grew weary; and as I
was perpetually haunted with the terror of a return
of the tie that had been playing such ruin in my head
a week ago, I turned and went back to the inn, and
supper, and my bed.
