“How long did it take us to do that?” said my friend, questioning his watch.

“Oh, about fifteen minutes,” I replied.

He said he thought he would go across the way and “do” the Abbey next while he was in the neighbourhood.

I suppose I could have helped him in the matter of despatch, but I didn’t think of it at the time.  Later I heard of two Americans who drove up to the abbey in a taxi.  Leaping out, one said to the other:  “You do the outside and I’ll do the inside, and that way we’ll save a lot of time.”

The thing a man does in America, of course, when he gets into a railroad train is to light a cigar and begin talking to the fellow next to him.  There were two of us in the railway carriage compartment on my way down into Surrey.  I made a number of amiable observations; I asked a number of pleasant questions.  My object was to while away the time in human companionship.  “Quite so,” was his reply to observations.

In replying to questions he would commit himself to nothing; he wouldn’t even say that he didn’t know.  “I shouldn’t undertake to say, sir,” was his answer.  And then, certainly, there was no possibility of pursuing the subject further.

He wasn’t reading a paper; he wasn’t doing anything but gaze straight in front of him.  I concluded that he was “sore” at me; I concluded that he was a surly bear, anyway.  And so an hour or so passed in utter silence.

The pretty landscape whirled by; we went through a hundred tunnels (more or less); the little engine gave a shrill little squeak now and then; at old, old railway stations, that remind one agreeably of jails, rough-looking men in black shirt sleeves and corduroy waistcoats ran out to the train to open the carriage doors, and I forgot the gentleman altogether.  Till at length we came to his station.

When he had got out he turned to latch the door, and putting his head in at the window, he said to me in the pleasantest manner possible:  “Good aufternoon, sir.”  He wasn’t sore at me a bit!  That was simply his fashion of travelling, in silence.

I was going into the countryside, to the country places where the old men have pleasant faces and the maidens quiet eyes.  To fare forth upon the King’s highway, to hedgerows and blossoms and the old lanes of Merrie England, to mount again the old red hills, bird enchanted, and dip the valleys bright with sward, to the wind on the heath, brother, to hills and the sea, to lonely downs, to hold converse with simple shepherd men, and, when even fell, the million tinted, to seek some ancient inn for warmth in the inglenook, and bite and drop, and where, when the last star lamp in the valley had expired, I would rest my weary bones until the sweet choral of morning birds called me on my way.