visited St. Paul’s or Westminster Abbey; had never travelled so far as Kew or Greenwich; had never been inside a picture gallery; and had never attended a concert in his life.  The pendulum of his innocuous existence swung between the office and his home with a uniform monotony.  Yet not only was he contented with his life, but I believe that he regarded it as entirely successful.  He had counted it a great piece of luck when he had entered the office as a youth of sixteen, and the glow of his good fortune still lingered in his mind at forty.  He regarded his employers with a species of admiring awe not always accorded to kings.  The most violent social democrat could have made nothing of Arrowsmith; there was not the least crevice in his heart in which the seed of discontent could have found a lodgment.  As for making any question of whether he was getting the best or most out of life, Arrowsmith was as incapable as a kitten.

The virtues of Arrowsmith, which were in their way quietly heroic, impressed me a good deal; but his abject contentment with the limitations of his lot appalled me.  I felt a dread grow in me lest I should become subdued to the element in which I worked as he was.  I asked myself whether a life so destitute of real interests and pleasures was life at all?  I made fugitive attempts to allure the little man into some realms of wider interest, but with the most discouraging results.  I once insisted on taking him with me for a day in Epping Forest.  He came reluctantly, for he did not like leaving his wife at home, and it seemed that no persuasion could induce her to undertake so adventurous a jaunt.  He was no walker, and half a dozen miles along the Forest roads tired him out.  By the afternoon even his cheerfulness had vanished; he gazed with blank and gloomy eyes upon the wide spaces of the woodland scenery.  He did not regain his spirits till we drew near Stratford on the homeward journey.  At the first sight of gas-lit streets he brightened up, and I am persuaded that the rancid odours of the factories at Bow were sweeter in his nostrils than all the Forest fragrances.  I never asked him again to share a pleasure for which I now perceived he had no faculty; but I often asked myself how long it would take for a city life to extirpate in me the taste by which Nature is appreciated, as it had in Arrowsmith.

I have taken Arrowsmith as an example of the narrowness of interest created by a city life, and it would be easy to offer an apology for him, which I, for one, would most heartily endorse.  The poor fellow was very much the creature of his circumstances.  But this was scarcely the case with another man I knew, whose circumstances, had he known how to use them, might have afforded him the opportunity of many cultivated tastes.  He was the son of a small farmer, born in the same village as myself.  By some curious accident he was flung into the vortex of London life at seventeen, and became a clerk in