I sit writing in my study, the house above me strangely silent.  The evening sun lies golden on the lawn and among the apple-trees of my little orchard; but the thought of the sweet time ended lies rather heavy on my heart—­the wonder what it all means, why we should have these great hopes and desires, these deep attachments in the short days that God gives us.  “What a world it is for sorrow,” wrote a wise and tender-hearted old schoolmaster on a day like this; “and how dull it would be if there were no sorrow.”  I suppose that this is true; but to be near things and yet not to grasp them, to desire and not to attain, and to go down to darkness in the end, like the shadow of a dream—­what can heal and sustain one in the grip of such a mood?—­Ever yours,

T. B.

Upton,
Aug. 4, 1904.

My dear Herbert,—­I have just been over to Woodcote; I have had a few days here alone at the end of the half, and was feeling so stupid and lazy this morning that I put a few sandwiches in my pocket and went off on a bicycle for the day.  It is only fifteen miles from here, so that I had two or three hours to spend there.  You know I was born at Woodcote and lived there till I was ten years old.  I don’t know the present owner of the Lodge, where we lived; but if I had written and asked to go and see the house, they would have invited me to luncheon, and all my sense of freedom would have gone.

It is thirty years since we left, and I have not been there, near as it is, for twenty years.  I did not know how deeply rooted the whole scene was in my heart and memory, but the first sight of the familiar places gave me a very curious thrill, a sort of delicious pain, a yearning for the old days—­I can’t describe it or analyse it.  It seemed somehow as if the old life must be going on there behind the pine-woods if I could only find it; as if I could have peeped over the palings and seen myself going gravely about some childish business in the shrubberies.  I find that my memory is curiously accurate in some respects, and curiously at fault in others.  The scale is all wrong.  What appears to me in memory to be an immense distance, from Woodcote to Dewhurst, for instance, is now reduced to almost nothing; and places which I can see quite accurately in my mind’s eye are now so different that I can hardly believe that they were ever like what I recollect of them.  Of course the trees have grown immensely; young plantations have become woods, and woods have disappeared.  I spent my time in wandering about, retracing the childish walks we used to take, looking at the church, the old houses, the village green, and the mill-pool.  One thing came home to me very much.  When I was born my father had only been settled at Woodcote for two years; but, as I grew up, it seemed to me we must have lived there for all eternity; now I see that he was only one in a long procession of human visitants who have inhabited and loved the place.  Another