The truth is, if we live in fairly natural healthy condition, we are just as happy as the lower animals.  Some philosopher has said that the chief pleasure in a man’s life, as in that of a cow, consists in the processes of mastication, deglutition, and digestion, and I am very much inclined to agree with him.  The thought of death troubles us very little —­we do not believe in it.  A familiar instance is that of the consumptive, whose doctor and friends have given him up and wait but to see the end, while he, deluded man, still sees life, an illimitable, green, sunlit prospect, stretching away to an infinite distance before him.

Death is a reality only when it is very near, so close on us that we can actually hear its swift stoaty feet rustling over the dead leaves, and for a brief bitter space we actually know that his sharp teeth will presently be in our throat.

Out in the blessed sunshine I listen to a blackcap warbling very beautifully in a thorn bush near the cottage; then to the great shout of excited joy of the children just released from school, as they rush pell-mell forth and scatter about the village, and it strikes me that the bird in the thorn is not more blithe-hearted than they.  An old rook—­I fancy he is old, a many-wintered crow—­is loudly caw-cawing from the elm tree top; he has been abroad all day in the fields and has seen his young able to feed themselves; and his own crop full, and now he is calling to the others to come and sit there to enjoy the sunshine with him.  I doubt if he is happier than the human inhabitants of the village, the field labourers and shepherds who have been out toiling since the early hours, and are now busy in their own gardens and allotments or placidly smoking their pipes at their cottage doors.

But I could not stay longer in that village of old unhappy memories and of quiet, happy, uninteresting lives that leave no memory, so after waiting two more days I forced myself to say good-bye to my poor old landlady.  Or rather to say “Good night,” as I had to start at one o’clock in the morning so as to have a couple, of hours before sunrise at “The Stones” on my way to Salisbury.  Her latest effort to detain me a day longer had been made and there was no more to say.

“Do you know,” she said in a low mysterious voice, “that it is not safe to be alone at midnight on this long lonely road—­the loneliest place in all Salisbury Plain?” “The safest,” I said.  “Safe as the Tower of London—­the protectors of all England are there.”  “Ah, there’s where the danger is!” she returned.  “If you meet some desperate man, a deserter with his rifle in his hand perhaps, do you think he would hesitate about knocking you over to save himself and at the same time get a little money to help him on his way?”