This kind of earth-hunger is, I believe, not common among English people to-day; if it were, the tide of life would not set so steadily townward as it does.  The class in which it existed most strongly was the yeoman class, and this is a class which has practically disappeared.  In my youth I knew half a dozen persons of this class, to whom towns were genuinely abhorrent.  They would come to London once or twice in their lives, visit certain market towns in their district at intervals, and escape back into the country with the joy of wild birds liberated from a cage.  The mere grime and dirt of cities horrified them; they were suffocated in the close air, and they were driven half distracted by the clamour of the streets.  These men lived, upon the whole, lives of not immoderate labour:  or, as one might say, of sober ease, They possessed little money, it is true, but the want of it did not appear to trouble them.  Their houses were plain, their method of life simple, and clearly it had not entered their minds to covet any more sumptuous modes of life.  All this is changed now.  The daily press, which presents a thousand pictures of the bustling life of cities, goes everywhere, and has communicated a strange restlessness to the rural mind.  Increased means of locomotion have brought London to the very door of village communities.  If men to-day actually possessed the acres on which they toil they would be in no hurry to leave them; they would be effectually chained to the soil by the sense of independence and proprietorship, as is the case among the rural population of France, who do not rent but own the land.  The yeomen did own the land, and that was the secret of their content.  But when the day of large farms came, the small landowners were crushed out; and as for the mere peasant, he has no chance at all of ever owning land, and never has had; so that he has every inducement to crowd into towns where wages are nominally higher, and he soon outgrows that natural earth-hunger which modern civilisation affords him no means of gratifying.

By virtue of the peasant or gipsy blood in me I kept my earth-hunger through twenty years of London life, but I count my case unique.  I never found any one who shared my feelings; on the contrary, I found that whatever primitive instincts toward country life my friends may have had once, London had made an effectual end of them.  The country means for most Londoners, not the blessed solitude of open spaces, but Margate or Brighton.  When the annual summer exodus arrives he does but exchange one kind of town for another kind.  He carries with him all the aptitudes and artificial instincts of the town; he loves the bustle of a crowd; he wants boarding-houses full of company, and streets brilliant with electric light; and he returns to town, after a vivacious fortnight, without having once looked upon the real country, unless it be with the distracted eye of a rider on a char-a-banc.  If my earth-hunger did