I have some magnificent carrots this year—­straight, clean, tapering, the colour a joy to look upon.

XXV.

For two things do my thoughts turn now and then to London.  I should like to hear the long note of a master’s violin, or the faultless cadence of an exquisite voice, and I should like to see pictures.  Music and painting have always meant much to me; here I can enjoy them only in memory.

Of course there is the discomfort of concert-hall and exhibition-rooms.  My pleasure in the finest music would be greatly spoilt by having to sit amid a crowd, with some idiot audible on right hand or left, and the show of pictures would give me a headache in the first quarter of an hour. Non sum qualis eram when I waited several hours at the gallery door to hear Patti, and knew not a moment’s fatigue to the end of the concert; or when, at the Academy, I was astonished to find that it was four o’clock, and I had forgotten food since breakfast.  The truth is, I do not much enjoy anything nowadays which I cannot enjoy alone.  It sounds morose; I imagine the comment of good people if they overheard such a confession.  Ought I, in truth, to be ashamed of it?

I always read the newspaper articles on exhibitions of pictures, and with most pleasure when the pictures are landscapes.  The mere names of paintings often gladden me for a whole day—­those names which bring before the mind a bit of seashore, a riverside, a glimpse of moorland or of woods.  However feeble his criticism, the journalist generally writes with appreciation of these subjects; his descriptions carry me away to all sorts of places which I shall never see again with the bodily eye, and I thank him for his unconscious magic.  Much better this, after all, than really going to London and seeing the pictures themselves.  They would not disappoint me; I love and honour even the least of English landscape painters; but I should try to see too many at once, and fall back into my old mood of tired grumbling at the conditions of modern life.  For a year or two I have grumbled little—­all the better for me.

XXVI.

Of late, I have been wishing for music.  An odd chance gratified my desire.

I had to go into Exeter yesterday.  I got there about sunset, transacted my business, and turned to walk home again through the warm twilight.  In Southernhay, as I was passing a house of which the ground-floor windows stood open, there sounded the notes of a piano—­chords touched by a skilful hand.  I checked my step, hoping, and in a minute or two the musician began to play that nocturne of Chopin which I love best—­I don’t know how to name it.  My heart leapt.  There I stood in the thickening dusk, the glorious sounds floating about me; and I trembled with very ecstasy of enjoyment.  When silence came, I waited in the hope of another piece, but nothing followed, and so I went my way.