Half-a-crown return to Oxshott and a train at 12.35.  You know the ride better than I, probably, and what Surrey is at the beginning of June.  The first gush of green on our getting clear of Clapham was like the big drink after an afternoon’s haymaking.  There was but one cloud on the little journey.  She got into the next carriage.

I dreamed all the way.  On arriving at Oxshott I immediately became systematic.  Having a very practical belief in the material basis of all exquisite experience, I simply nodded to the great pinewoods half a mile off, on the brow of long heathy downs to the left of the railway bridge—­as who should say, ’I shall enjoy you all the better presently for some sandwiches and a pint of ale’—­and promptly, not to say scientifically, turned down the Oxshott road in search of an inn.

Oxshott is a quaint little hamlet, one of the hundred villages where we are going to live when we have written great novels; but I didn’t care for the village inn, so walked a quarter of a mile nearer Leatherhead, till the Old Bear came in sight.

There I sat in the drowsy parlour, the humming afternoon coming in at the door, ‘the blue fly’ singing on the hot pane, dreaming all kinds of gauzy-winged dreams, while my body absorbed ham sandwiches and some excellent ale.  Of course I did not leave the place without the inevitable reflection on Lamb and the inns he had immortalised.  Outside again my thoughts were oddly turned to the nature of my expedition by two figures in the road—­an unhappy-looking couple, evidently ’belonging to each other,’ the young woman with babe at breast, trudging together side by side—­

    ’One was a girl with a babe that throve,
      Her ruin and her bliss;
    One was a youth with a lawless love,
      Who claspt it the more for this.’

The quotation was surely inevitable for any one who knows Mr. Meredith’s tragic little picture of ‘The Meeting.’

Thus I was brought to think of Sandra again, and of the night when the Brookfield ladies had heard her singing like a spirit in the heart of the moon-dappled pinewood, and impresario Pericles had first prophesied the future prima donna.

Do you remember his inimitable outburst?—­’I am made my mind!  I send her abroad to ze Academie for one, two, tree year.  She shall be instructed as was not before.  Zen a noise at La Scala.  No—­Paris!  No—­London!  She shall astonish London fairst.  Yez! if I take a theatre!  Yez! if I buy a newspaper!  Yez! if I pay feefty-sossand pound!’

Of course, as one does, I had gone expecting to distinguish the actual sandy mound among the firs where she sat with her harp, the young countryman waiting close by for escort, and the final ’Giles Scroggins, native British, beer-begotten air’ with which she rewarded him for his patience in suffering so much classical music.  Mr. Meredith certainly gives a description of the spot close enough for identification, with time and perseverance.  But, reader, I had gone out this afternoon in the interest rather of fresh air than of sentimental topography; and it was quite enough for me to feel that somewhere in that great belt of pinewood it had all been true, and that it was through those fir-branches and none other in the world that that ‘sleepy fire of early moonlight’ had so wonderfully hung.