up a big sycamore at the end of our garden
with my book, Pope's Odyssey, or the
Arabian Nights, to find a green tent where
I could enjoy my dream-world all alone.
With the delight of Jack-of-the-Bean-Stalk,
I used to climb and climb till I could find
out a snug combination of boughs, where
I could either sit or sleep. The thrushes
sang to me as I lay there listening to the
rustling of the sunny, transparent leaves,
or, with book half closed, wondering how
Aladdin would ever escape from the cave in
which the cruel magician, his proud uncle,
had just immured him. Then throwing
my arm round a bough, with a delicious
fear and a full knowledge that I might
break my neck if I let go my hold, I used
to snatch a moment or two of sleep. I
had precedent for it, too, for some Ethiopian
nation, I had heard of from Herodotus, used
to live in trees.

There is something supremely delightful
in the first night of a country visit.
Everything is so quiet. One's ignorance
of the place rouses the imagination, and
sends it wandering. The sheets are so
white, the air so pure; you open the lattice
to smell the honeysuckle, and a moth
puts out the candle. In the morning the
birds greet you with a pleasant welcome;
as you paddle across the floor with bare feet,
and look out and find the window
surrounded with white and crimson roses, a
breath of paradise wafts in, rendering even
early shaving an exquisite enjoyment.

    Brave chanticleer with noisy din
    Scatters the rear of darkness thin.

The pompous turkey-cock in an adjacent
farm-yard breaks into hysterical laughter
in his pharisaical pride at having got up
earlier than his master. The geese gabble
fussily as they betake themselves to their
fashionable watering-place in the nearest
meadow, that pond crusted with green
weed not unlike mint sauce. On the fresh
dewy lawn, all in a grey bloom, thrushes
are pulling and hauling at reluctant worms,
who, refusing to come up out of the hold,
resist and wriggle like detected stow-
aways. Dishwashers, most graceful and
coquettish of birds, are pacing about, flirting
their tails over the grass just under the
big Portugal laurel; and every now and
then scudding after flies, who, intent on
ascertaining if their heads are screwed on
firmly for the day, do not observe their
pursuers till they are swallowed by them.
By-and-bye the house begins to awake, some
one shuffles unwillingly down-stairs, a broom
drops with ostentatious clatter. The next
thing is the jolting open of a window-
shutter; soon after that the kitchen fire
begins to crackle, while some one moves
chairs about and sings a snatch of some
country melody. Presently there is a clatter
of young voices, a cry and clamour of children;
a bell rings sharply and chidingly.
The house is getting up; then there comes
the splash of a bath being filled, and the
next moment comes a rap at your door,
and a rough country voice says in pure
Doric:

"If you please, zur, it is past zeven, and
here's some warm water."

Eastern travellers, who have spent any
time in the Desert, say that on their return
to civilisation and four-post beds, there is,
for a period, a feeling of constraint and
oppression at night that renders sleep almost
impossible. They miss the starry canopy
and the great airy roof of night's black
palace. I can well believe this, for I have
myself felt a similar transition. Some
years ago I rode for ten days or so through
a part of Greece: every day's bivouac was
an immortal spot. Thebes or Thermopylae,
Leuctra or Platea, Delphi or Lepanto. I
was literally riding through Thucydides
and Plutarch. Sometimes I spent the
night at the houses of priests or old officers
of the War of Independence; oftener
I slept out in the open air. I and my
dragoman, our two horses, and my soorijee,
who drove the baggage horse (such a horse,
I wondered sometimes he did not come to
pieces on those bridle tracks of white
marble round the roots of Parnassus),
shifted as we best could. A day's journey
or so from Delphi we were benighted
in a wood close to the Gulf of Corinth:
it was a wood of tamarisk and myrtle,
myrtle twelve and fourteen feet high, the
leaves green and glossy.

We rode on and on through the wood
(within sound of the melancholy music of
the sea washing upon the deserted shore),
like travellers in a fairy story, until, led by
the faint ray of the first star, we became aware
of a little water-mill, at the dusty door of
which sat a stolid old Greek, white with age,
but still more with flour, who received us
with the immovable, wonderless gravity of
the Turk. He slew grimly a thin and
muscular fowl which he roughly aroused from
his first sleep; he roasted the bird with
gravity; he boiled us water; he brought us
bread, then, with the servile shyness of a
serf, he sat apart under a myrtle tree,
getting our coffee ready, affecting to take