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The old wood to-day is just like what it was when I wandered in it as a boy.  The doctor’s son is a man now, and is keeping a bar in Sydney; so he is gone.  The townspeople don’t come any more than before.  I am the only person who goes near the place.  The trees are a trifle grander.  I happen now and then, when I visit this Berkshire parish, upon a stump of a post or an old spike in the grass of this wood, but otherwise it is as though all this had not been.

A solemn thought:  How enduring are the works of Nature—­how perishable those of Man!

THE CHANNEL

Friends of mine, friends all, and you also, publishers, colonials and critics, do you know that particular experience for which I am trying to find words?  Do you know that glamour in the mind which arises and transforms our thought when we see the things that the men who made us saw—­the things of a long time ago, the origins?  I think everybody knows that glamour, but very few people know where to find it.

Every man knows that he has in him the power for such revelations, and every man wonders in what strange place he may come upon them.  There are men also (very rich) who have considered all the world and wandered over it, seeking those first experiences and trying to feel as felt the earlier men in a happier time—­yet these few rich men have not felt and have not so found the things which they desire.  I have known men who have thought to find them in the mountains, but would not climb them simply enough and refused to leave their luxuries behind, and so lost everything, and might as well have been walking in a dirty town at home for all the little good that the mountains did to them.  And I know men who have thought to find this memory and desire in foreign countries, in Africa, hunting great beasts such as our fathers hunted; yet even these have not relit those old embers, which if they lie dead and dark in a man make his whole soul dusty and useless, but which if they be once rekindled can make him part of all the centuries.

Yet there is a simple and an easy way to find what the men who made us found, and to see the world as they saw it, and to take a bath, as it were, in the freshness of beginnings; and that is to go to work as cheaply and as hardly as you can, and only as much away from men as they were away from men, and not to read or to write or to think, but to eat and drink and use the body in many immediate ways, which are at the feet of every man.  Every man who will walk for some days carelessly, sleeping, rough when he must, or in poor inns, and making for some one place direct because he desires to see it, will know the thing I mean.  And there is a better way still of which I shall now speak:  I mean, to try the seas in a little boat not more than twenty-five feet long, preferably decked, of shallow draught, such as can enter into all creeks and havens, and so simply rigged that by oneself, or with a friend at most, one can wander all over the world.