rent--it seemed incredible--was two shillings a week. The woman
yielded to what she thought my idle curiosity, and brought me the keys.
Each cottage contained four rooms, and the two could easily be thrown
into one. They were dry and water-tight, the walls whitewashed and
clean, the woodwork sound and well cared for. I sat down upon the
sun-warmed bank beside the gate and thought. Here was solitude indeed;
a dozen neighbours in all, simple labouring folk:


The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills.


Here, too, was beauty in excess; a glen untrodden by the feet of
tourists, moorland and pine-wood, a stream that lifted up a cheerful
voice, hills and mountains of delightful form and colour, and not far
away the silver gleam of lakes. In all external features it was my
dream come true, and the deep-bosomed woman at my side, with her face
of rosy, placid health, was herself the proof of how lightly the wings
of time passed over this haunt of ancient peace.

I suppose that no one ever approaches the realisation of his hopes
without a kind of fear. In those imaginary dramas which we invent and
rehearse perpetually in the silent theatre of our own minds, we always
take care that we get the best of the situation and the dialogue. The
dramas of real life are apt to end differently. The coveted occasion
finds us incapable; a baffling scepticism of our own powers leaves us
impotent; the part that ran so easily, with such unanimous applause,
when we were both the dramatist and the actor, suddenly bristles with a
hundred unsuspected difficulties. For the first time, as I sat on that