These are the four chief ways of quarrelling, the four gates to this delightful city.  For it is delightful, once your ’prentice days are past.  In a way it is like a cold bath on a winter’s morning, and you glow all day.  In a way it is like football, as the nimble aggravation dances to and fro.  In a way it is like chess.  Indeed, all games of skill are watered quarrels, quarrel and soda, come to see them in a proper light.  And without quarrelling you have not fully appreciated your fellow-man.  For in the ultimate it is the train and complement of Love, the shadow that rounds off the delight we take in poor humanity.  It is the vinegar and pepper of existence, and long after our taste for sweets has vanished it will be the solace of our declining years.

THE AMATEUR NATURE-LOVER

It is possible that an education entirely urban is not the best conceivable preparation for descriptive articles upon the country.  On the other hand, your professional nature-lover is sometimes a little over-familiar with his subject.  He knows the names of all the things, and he does not spare you.  Besides, he is subtle.  The prominent features are too familiar to him, and he goes into details.  What respectable townsman, for instance, knows what “scabiosa” is?  It sounds very unpleasant.  Then the professional nature-lover assumes that you know trees.  No Englishman can tell any tree from any other tree, except a very palpable oak or poplar.  So that we may at least, as an experiment, allow a good Londoner to take his unsophisticated eyes out into the sweet country for once, and try his skill at nature-loving, though his botany has been learned over the counter of flower-shops, and his zoology on Saturday afternoons when they have the band in the Gardens.  He makes his way, then, over by Epsom Downs towards Sutton, trying to assimilate his mood to the proper flavour of appreciation as he goes, and with a little notebook in the palm of his hand to assist an ill-trained memory.  And the burthen of his song is of course the autumn tints.

The masses of trees towards Epsom and Ewell, with the red houses and Elizabethan facades peeping through their interstices, contain, it would seem, every conceivable colour, except perhaps sky-blue; there are brilliant yellow trees, and a kind of tree of the most amazing gamboge green, almost the green of spring come back, and tan-coloured trees, deep brown, red, and deep crimson trees.  Here and there the wind has left its mark, and the grey-brown branches and their purple tracery of twigs, with a suggestion of infinite depth behind, show through the rents in the leafy covering.  There are deep green trees—­the amateur nature-lover fancies they may be yews—­with their dense warm foliage arranged in horizontal masses, like the clouds low down in a sunset; and certain other evergreens, one particularly, with a bluish-green covering of upstanding needles, are intensely conspicuous among the flame tints around.  On a distant church tower, and nearer, disputing the possession of a gabled red house with a glowing creeper, is some ivy; and never is the perennial green of ivy so delightful as it is now, when all else is alight with the sombre fire of the sunset of the year....