In reconsidering what I have written I perceive that unconsciously I have chronicled only the pleasant episodes of my existence.  There is another picture that might be painted of mountains clothed in cloud, roads deep in mire, work done under drenching rains, early darkness, lack of neighbourship, isolation and monotony, a life separated by continents of silence from all the eager movement of the world.  There are two pictures of the country, equally true; the country of Corot, idyllic, lovely, full of soft light and graceful form; the country of Millet, austere, harsh, bleak, impressive only by a certain gravity and grand severity.  We all imagine that we could live in, and we all desire, the country of Corot.  But could we live in the country of Millet?  I confess that I could not have done so without resources in myself.  It required a genuine pleasure in hard physical exercise to get through the duties of the day, and a genuine interest in literature to supply the place of those artificial forms of pleasure which relieve the tedium of towns.  I do not know what I should have done without books in the long winter evenings.  Nowhere is a ‘city of the mind,’ into which one can retire, so necessary as in the country.  There is also needed an enduring and genuine delight in Nature and outdoor occupations, which creates its own sunshine under dreary skies.  The mere sentiment of rusticity, created in the townsman’s mind by pictures and novels, soon dissolves before the realities of a genuine country life.  It is Millet, not Corot, who is the most frequent comrade of the man who looks for months together on the same expanse of fields, and moves upon the same unchanging round of labour.  Therefore it is necessary to insist that no error could be greater than for a man with no real aptitude for a solitary life, and no resources of intellectual pleasure in himself, to attempt such an experiment as mine.  He would weary of it in a month, and would flee, like a child afraid of the darkness, back to gaslit streets again, with reviling on his lips and bitter anger in his heart.

It must also be remembered that I did not go into the country with the intention of deriving my livelihood from the soil.  My sources of income were separate from my mode of life; and although my income was at the best very small, yet it was sufficient to secure me ease of mind.  I did indeed discover that the expenses of a simple life were slight, and that these expenses might be kept low by a moderate degree of industry in rural pursuits, but I never imagined that I could live altogether by the soil.  I may frankly confess that while I believe it to be perfectly possible for a strong and handy man, accustomed to agricultural pursuits, to earn a living from the soil, my example has little to teach in this direction.  The cry of ‘Back to the Land’ will be meaningless until general ownership in the land is made possible.  It is the burden of rent, often