But whatever dreams of permanent and dedicated vagrancy I might entertain, manifestly my first duty was to find a cottage if I could.  At last, and almost by accident, I came on what I wanted.  I had gone to the Lake District in the month of August, and one day I struck into a lonely road to the north-west of Buttermere.  Half an hour’s walk brought me to a tiny hamlet beside a rushing stream, and here, for the first time in all my wanderings, I found a genuine deserted cottage.  To speak by the book there were two cottages exactly similar, covered by a single roof.  They stood upon a gentle slope; a group of pines formed a shelter from the north, the moorland rose behind them, and the river sang through a contiguous glen.  My first glance told me that they had not long been out of occupation.  They showed no marks of dilapidation, and the little gardens, though weed-grown, gave signs of recent care.  A woman whom I met told me their history.  They had long been inhabited by two families, father and son.  A few months previously these families had sailed for Canada.  No one had applied for the cottages, for in that part work was scarce, and the foundries and shipyards on the coast drew away the younger population.  The rent—­it seemed incredible—­was two shillings a week.  The woman yielded to what she thought my idle curiosity, and brought me the keys.  Each cottage contained four rooms, and the two could easily be thrown into one.  They were dry and water-tight, the walls whitewashed and clean, the woodwork sound and well cared for.  I sat down upon the sun-warmed bank beside the gate and thought.  Here was solitude indeed; a dozen neighbours in all, simple labouring folk: 

  The silence that is in the starry sky,
  The sleep that is among the lonely hills.

Here, too, was beauty in excess; a glen untrodden by the feet of tourists, moorland and pine-wood, a stream that lifted up a cheerful voice, hills and mountains of delightful form and colour, and not far away the silver gleam of lakes.  In all external features it was my dream come true, and the deep-bosomed woman at my side, with her face of rosy, placid health, was herself the proof of how lightly the wings of time passed over this haunt of ancient peace.

I suppose that no one ever approaches the realisation of his hopes without a kind of fear.  In those imaginary dramas which we invent and rehearse perpetually in the silent theatre of our own minds, we always take care that we get the best of the situation and the dialogue.  The dramas of real life are apt to end differently.  The coveted occasion finds us incapable; a baffling scepticism of our own powers leaves us impotent; the part that ran so easily, with such unanimous applause, when we were both the dramatist and the actor, suddenly bristles with a hundred unsuspected difficulties.  For the first time, as I sat on that sunny bank, I began to ask myself whether I could really play the part I had so long desired to play.