In a city the daily grinding of millions of wheels over thousands of miles of roads fills the air with an acrid, almost impalpable powder, which finds its way even through closed windows and settles upon everything.  In my London house I could not take up a book without soiled fingers.  Even books which were protected by glass doors, and papers shut up in drawers, did not escape this filthy powder, composed of the fine-ground dust and excrement of the London streets.  If I wiped a picture with a white silk handkerchief, a black stain showed itself upon the handkerchief, and this in spite of the most careful efforts to keep the house clean.  I suppose Londoners get used to dirt, as eels are said to get used to skinning.  They spend their time in washing their hands, but with the most transient gain of cleanliness.  No one knows how filthy London is till he begins to notice how much longer window-curtains, household draperies, and personal linen keep clean in the country.  I should not like to be called an old maid, but I confess to an old-maidish care for cleanliness.  Untidiness in books or papers would not distress me, but dirt is a real distress; and if it be old-maidish to fight a continual battle with dirt, to scour and polish and dust, content with nothing less than immaculate purities of polished surface, then I suppose I am an old maid, and I count it to myself for righteousness.

Amid the many miseries of cities, this no doubt is but a minor misery, but the relief which I experienced in deliverance from it was disproportionately great.  The purity and freshness of the atmosphere, the corresponding cleanliness of all I touched in the house, were delightful to me, and added to my self-respect.  The clean, aromatic air passed like a ceaseless lustration through every room of the house.  The very bed-linen, bleached in the open air, had acquired the fragrance of mountain thyme and lavender.  I did not need to climb the hill to find the pine-woods; they grew round the very table where I ate.  Four walls and a roof gave me shelter, yet I lived in the open air all the time.

Then there was also the silence, at first so strange as to be almost oppressive, but later on sweeter than music.  It was at early morning and nightfall that this silence was most intense.  On a still night one could almost hear the earth move, and fancy that the stars diffused a gentle crackling noise as of rushing flame.  The fall of an acorn in a pine wood startled the ear like an explosion.  The river also was discerned as having a definite rhythm of its own.  It ran up and down a perpetual scale, like a bird singing.  What had seemed a heavy confused sound of falling water resolved itself into regular harmonies, which could have been written down in musical notation.  At times there was also in the air the sense of breathing.  On a dark night, standing at my door, I had the sense of a great heart that beat in the obscurity, of a bosom that rose and fell, of a pulse as regular as a clock.  I think that the ear must have recovered a fine sensitiveness, normal to it under normal conditions, but lost or dulled amid the deafening roar of towns.  It is scarcely an exaggeration when poets speak of hearing the grass grow; we could hear it, no doubt, if the ear were not stunned by more violent sounds.