lie over its border. It does not desire to be a pancake like
Cheshire. It has everything that England has, including thirty
miles of Watling Street; and England can show nothing more
beautiful and nothing uglier than the works of nature and the
works of man to be seen within the limits of the county. It is
England in little, lost in the midst of England, unsung by
searchers after the extreme; perhaps occasionally somewhat sore at
this neglect, but how proud in the instinctive cognizance of its
representative features and traits!

Constance and Sophia, busy with the intense preoccupations of
youth, recked not of such matters. They were surrounded by the
county. On every side the fields and moors of Staffordshire,
intersected by roads and lanes, railways, watercourses and
telegraph-lines, patterned by hedges, ornamented and made
respectable by halls and genteel parks, enlivened by villages at
the intersections, and warmly surveyed by the sun, spread out
undulating. And trains were rushing round curves in deep cuttings,
and carts and waggons trotting and jingling on the yellow roads,
and long, narrow boats passing in a leisure majestic and infinite
over the surface of the stolid canals; the rivers had only
themselves to support, for Staffordshire rivers have remained
virgin of keels to this day. One could imagine the messages
concerning prices, sudden death, and horses, in their flight
through the wires under the feet of birds. In the inns Utopians
were shouting the universe into order over beer, and in the halls
and parks the dignity of England was being preserved in a fitting
manner. The villages were full of women who did nothing but fight
against dirt and hunger, and repair the effects of friction on
clothes. Thousands of labourers were in the fields, but the fields