on a neighbouring embankment.  But these things remind one of the flowers on a grave.  And the people who walk up and down the platform, their noses cold in the wind, are hardly more cheerful than undertakers’ men.  Even the porters in their green trousers, who roll the milk-cans along the platform to the luggage-van with an energy and a clatter that would satisfy the ambition of any healthy child, do not look merry.  There was one cheerful porter who used to welcome you like a host, and make a jest as he clipped your railway ticket—­“Just to lighten your load, sir!”—­but the Government had him removed and put to mind gates at a crossing where he would not be able to speak to the passengers.  As a rule, however, nobody looks as if he liked being in a railway station or would stop there if he could go anywhere else.  I trust the Ministry of Reconstruction will see to it that the railway stations of the country are rebuilt and vivified.  One does not really wish to stop at any station at all except one’s own station.  But if one has to do so, let the stations be made more amusing.

Unfortunately, it is not only the frequent stops that have made railway travelling almost ideally uncomfortable.  The Government seems also to have hired a staff of workers to impregnate the seats of the carriages with dust and to scatter all the dust that can be spared in these exiguous days on the floors.  They have also a gang of old and wheezy gentlemen who travel up and down the line all day shutting the windows.  This work is sometimes deputed to women.  They are forbidden to say “May I?” or “Do you mind?” or to make use of any civil expression that might mollify the traveller sitting by the window.  It is part of their instructions to reach past him with an air of independence and to have the window shut and the book that he is reading knocked out of his hand before he has time to see what has happened.  Some day someone will write a book about the alteration of English manners that took place during the Great War.  I believe the alteration is largely due to these Government hirelings whose duty it is to make railway travel a burden and never to say “Please” or “Thank you.”

Even now, however, there are compensations.  In the morning the shadows are long, and, as one rattles north among the water-meadows, the flying plumes of the engine leave a procession of melting silhouettes on the fields to the west.  Rooks oar their way towards their homes with long twigs in their beaks.  Horses go through the last days of their kingship dragging ploughs and harrows over the fields with slow and monotonous tread.  Here a hill has been ploughed into a sea of little brown waves.  Further on a meadow is already bright with the green of winter-sown corn.  The country has never been so laboured before.  Chalk and sand and brown earth and red are all being turned up and broken and bathed in the sun and wind.  Adam has begun to delve again.  There is the urgency of life in fields long idle.  It is not that the fields have become populous.  One sees many laboured fields, but little labour.  The occasional plough-horse, however, brings strength into the stillness.  How noble a figure of energy he makes!