I had seen from the Cotswold ridge, the revelation of the priceless heritage which is England.  I imbibed a mighty quantity of history, but especially I liked the writers, like Walton, who got at the very heart of the English countryside.  Soon, too, I found the Pilgrim’s Progress not a duty but a delight.  I discovered new jewels daily in the honest old story, and my letters to Peter began to be as full of it as Peter’s own epistles.  I loved, also, the songs of the Elizabethans, for they reminded me of the girl who had sung to me in the June night.

In the afternoons I took my exercise in long tramps along the good dusty English roads.  The country fell away from Biggleswick into a plain of wood and pasture-land, with low hills on the horizon.  The Place was sown with villages, each with its green and pond and ancient church.  Most, too, had inns, and there I had many a draught of cool nutty ale, for the inn at Biggleswick was a reformed place which sold nothing but washy cider.  Often, tramping home in the dusk, I was so much in love with the land that I could have sung with the pure joy of it.  And in the evening, after a bath, there would be supper, when a rather fagged Jimson struggled between sleep and hunger, and the lady, with an artistic mutch on her untidy head, talked ruthlessly of culture.

Bit by bit I edged my way into local society.  The Jimsons were a great help, for they were popular and had a nodding acquaintance with most of the inhabitants.  They regarded me as a meritorious aspirant towards a higher life, and I was paraded before their friends with the suggestion of a vivid, if Philistine, past.  If I had any gift for writing, I would make a book about the inhabitants of Biggleswick.  About half were respectable citizens who came there for country air and low rates, but even these had a touch of queerness and had picked up the jargon of the place.  The younger men were mostly Government clerks or writers or artists.  There were a few widows with flocks of daughters, and on the outskirts were several bigger houses—­mostly houses which had been there before the garden city was planted.  One of them was brand-new, a staring villa with sham-antique timbering, stuck on the top of a hill among raw gardens.  It belonged to a man called Moxon Ivery, who was a kind of academic pacificist and a great god in the place.  Another, a quiet Georgian manor house, was owned by a London publisher, an ardent Liberal whose particular branch of business compelled him to keep in touch with the new movements.  I used to see him hurrying to the station swinging a little black bag and returning at night with the fish for dinner.