It was a glorious morning at the end of May; and when. I escaped from
the pall of smoke which hung over the city, I found the sky a sheet of
cloudless blue. How I watched for the ending of the rows of houses, which
lined the road for miles--the great roots of London, running far out
into the country, up which poured past me an endless stream of food and
merchandise and human beings--the sap of the huge metropolitan life-tree!
How each turn of the road opened a fresh line of terraces or villas, till
hope deferred made the heart sick, and the country seemed--like the place
where the rainbow touches the ground, or the El Dorado of Raleigh's Guiana
settler--always a little farther off! How between gaps in the houses, right
and left, I caught tantalizing glimpses of green fields, shut from me by
dull lines of high-spiked palings! How I peeped through gates and over
fences at trim lawns and gardens, and longed to stay, and admire, and
speculate on the name of the strange plants and gaudy flowers; and then
hurried on, always expecting to find something still finer ahead--something
really worth stopping to look at--till the houses thickened again into a
street, and I found myself, to my disappointment, in the midst of a town!
And then more villas and palings; and then a village;--when would they
stop, those endless houses?

At last they did stop. Gradually the people whom I passed began to look
more and more rural, and more toil-worn and ill-fed. The houses ended,
cattle-yards and farm-buildings appeared; and right and left, far away,
spread the low rolling sheet of green meadows and cornfields. Oh, the joy!
The lawns with their high elms and firs, the green hedgerows, the delicate
hue and scent of the fresh clover-fields, the steep clay banks where I
stopped to pick nosegays of wild flowers, and became again a child,--and
then recollected my mother, and a walk with her on the river bank towards
the Red House--and hurried on again, but could not be unhappy, while my