kingdom is found in London; is it not with the exorbitant growth of
London that many an ill has spread over the land? London is the

antithesis of the domestic ideal; a social reformer would not even
glance in that direction, but would turn all his zeal upon small

towns and country districts, where blight may perhaps be arrested,
and whence, some day, a reconstituted national life may act upon the

great centre of corruption. I had far rather see England covered
with schools of cookery than with schools of the ordinary kind; the

issue would be infinitely more hopeful. Little girls should be
taught cooking and baking more assiduously than they are taught to

read. But with ever in view the great English principle--that food
is only cooked aright when it yields the utmost of its native and

characteristic savour. Let sauces be utterly forbidden--save the
natural sauce made of gravy. In the same way with sweets; keep in

view the insurpassable English ideals of baked tarts (or pies, if so
you call them), and boiled puddings; as they are the wholesomest, so

are they the most delicious of sweet cakes yet invented; it is
merely a question of having them well made and cooked. Bread,

again; we are getting used to bread of poor quality, and ill-made,
but the English loaf at its best--such as you were once sure of

getting in every village--is the faultless form of the staff of
life. Think of the glorious revolution that could be wrought in our

troubled England if it could be ordained that no maid, of whatever
rank, might become a wife unless she had proved her ability to make

and bake a perfect loaf of bread.
XII

The good S- writes me a kindly letter. He is troubled by the
thought of my loneliness. That I should choose to live in such a

place as this through the summer, he can understand; but surely I
should do better to come to town for the winter? How on earth do I

spend the dark days and the long evenings?
I chuckle over the good S-'s sympathy. Dark days are few in happy

Devon, and such as befall have never brought me a moment's tedium.
The long, wild winter of the north would try my spirits; but here,

the season that follows autumn is merely one of rest, Nature's
annual slumber. And I share in the restful influence. Often enough

I pass an hour in mere drowsing by the fireside; frequently I let my
book drop, satisfied to muse. But more often than not the winter

day is blest with sunshine--the soft beam which is Nature's smile in
dreaming. I go forth, and wander far. It pleases me to note

changes of landscape when the leaves have fallen; I see streams and
ponds which during summer were hidden; my favourite lanes have an

unfamiliar aspect, and I become better acquainted with them. Then,
there is a rare beauty in the structure of trees ungarmented; and if

perchance snow or frost have silvered their tracery against the
sober sky, it becomes a marvel which never tires.

Day by day I look at the coral buds on the lime-tree. Something of
regret will mingle with my joy when they begin to break.

In the middle years of my life--those years that were the worst of
all--I used to dread the sound of a winter storm which woke me in

the night. Wind and rain lashing the house filled me with miserable
memories and apprehensions; I lay thinking of the savage struggle of

man with man, and often saw before me no better fate than to be
trampled down into the mud of life. The wind's wail seemed to me

the voice of a world in anguish; rain was the weeping of the feeble
and the oppressed. But nowadays I can lie and listen to a night-

storm with no intolerable thoughts; at worst, I fall into a
compassionate sadness as I remember those I loved and whom I shall

see no more. For myself, there is even comfort in the roaring dark;
for I feel the strength of the good walls about me, and my safety

from squalid peril such as pursued me through all my labouring life.
"Blow, blow, thou winter wind!" Thou canst not blow away the modest

wealth which makes my security. Nor can any "rain upon the roof"
put my soul to question; for life has given me all I ever asked--

infinitely more than I ever hoped--and in no corner of my mind does
there lurk a coward fear of death.

XIII
If some stranger from abroad asked me to point out to him the most

noteworthy things in England, I should first of all consider his
intellect. Were he a man of everyday level, I might indicate for

his wonder and admiration Greater London, the Black Country, South
Lancashire, and other features of our civilization which, despite

eager rivalry, still maintain our modern pre-eminence in the
creation of ugliness. If, on the other hand, he seemed a man of

brains, it would be my pleasure to take him to one of those old
villages, in the midlands or the west, which lie at some distance

from a railway station, and in aspect are still untouched by the
baser tendencies of the time. Here, I would tell my traveller, he

saw something which England alone can show. The simple beauty of
the architecture, its perfect adaptation to the natural

surroundings, the neatness of everything though without formality,
the general cleanness and good repair, the grace of cottage gardens,

that tranquillity and security which make a music in the mind of him
who gazes--these are what a man must see and feel if he would

appreciate the worth and the power of England. The people which has
made for itself such homes as these is distinguished, above all

things, by its love of order; it has understood, as no other people,
the truth that "order is heaven's first law." With order it is

natural to find stability, and the combination of these qualities,
as seen in domestic life, results in that peculiarly English

product, our name for which--though but a pale shadow of the thing
itself--has been borrowed by other countries: comfort.

Then Englishman's need of "comfort" is one of his best
characteristics; the possibility that he may change in this respect,

and become indifferent to his old ideal of physical and mental ease,
is the gravest danger manifest in our day. For "comfort," mind you,

does not concern the body alone; the beauty and orderliness of an
Englishman's home derive their value, nay, their very existence,

from the spirit which directs his whole life. Walk from the village
to the noble's mansion. It, too, is perfect of its kind; it has the

dignity of age, its walls are beautiful, the gardens, the park about
it are such as can be found only in England, lovely beyond compare;

and all this represents the same moral characteristics as the
English cottage, but with greater activities and responsibilities.

If the noble grow tired of his mansion, and, letting it to some
crude owner of millions, go to live in hotels and hired villas; if

the cottager sicken of his village roof, and transport himself to
the sixth floor of a "block" in Shoreditch; one sees but too well

that the one and the other have lost the old English sense of
comfort, and, in losing it, have suffered degradation alike as men

and as citizens. It is not a question of exchanging one form of
comfort for another; the instinct which made an Englishman has in

these cases perished. Perhaps it is perishing from among us
altogether, killed by new social and political conditions; one who

looks at villages of the new type, at the working-class quarters of
towns, at the rising of "flats" among the dwellings of the wealthy,

has little choice but to think so. There may soon come a day when,
though the word "comfort" continues to be used in many languages,

the thing it signifies will be discoverable nowhere at all.
XIV

If the ingeniousforeigner found himself in some village of
manufacturing Lancashire, he would be otherwise impressed. Here

something of the power of England might be revealed to him, but of
England's worth, little enough. Hard ugliness would everywhere

assail his eyes; the visages and voices of the people would seem to
him thoroughly akin to their surroundings. Scarcely could one find,

in any civilized nation, a more notablecontrast than that between
these two English villages and their inhabitants.

Yet Lancashire is English, and there among the mill chimneys, in the
hideous little street, folk are living whose domestic thoughts claim

undeniable kindred with those of the villagers of the kinder south.
But to understand how "comfort," and the virtues it implies, can

exist amid such conditions, one must penetrate to the hearthside;
the door must be shut, the curtain drawn; here "home" does not

extend beyond the threshold. After all, this grimy row of houses,
ugliest that man ever conceived, is more representative of England

to-day than the lovely village among the trees and meadows. More