You all patter French more or
less, and perhaps German; you have seen men and cities, no doubt, and
have your opinions, such as they are, about schools of painting, high
art, and all that; have seen the pictures of Dresden and the Louvre,
and know the taste of sour krout. All I say is, you don't know your own
lanes and woods and fields. Though you may be choke-full of science, not
one in twenty of you knows where to find the wood-sorrel, or bee-orchis,
which grow in the next wood, or on the down three miles off, or what the
bog-bean and wood-sage are good for. And as for the country legends,
the stories of the old gable-ended farmhouses, the place where the last
skirmish was fought in the civil wars, where the parish butts stood,
where the last highwayman turned to bay, where the last ghost was laid
by the parson, they're gone out of date altogether.
Now, in my time, when we got home by the old coach, which put us down at
the cross-roads with our boxes, the first day of the holidays, and had
been driven off by the family coachman, singing "Dulce Domum" at the top
of our voices, there we were, fixtures, till black Monday came round. We
had to cut out our own amusements within a walk or a ride of home. And
so we got to know all the country folk and their ways and songs and
stories by heart, and went over the fields and woods and hills, again
and again, till we made friends of them all.
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