I chose to fancy
that unhuman nature sympathized with the English mood; in the
sheep bleating from the pastures I heard the note of Wordsworth's
verse; and by the sky, hung in its low blue with rough, dusky
clouds, I was canopied as with a canvas of Constable's.
It was the more pity, then, that at the station a shooting party,
approaching from the other quarter with their servants and guns
and dogs, and their bags of hares and partridges, should have
given English life another complexion to the wanderer so willing
to see it always rose color. The gunners gained the station
platform first, and at once occupied the benches, strewing all
the vacant places with their still bleeding prey. I did not fail
of the opportunity to see in them the arrogance of class, which I
had hitherto so vainly expected, and I disabled their looks by
finding them as rude as their behavior. How different they were
from the kind bicycler, or the gentleman in the dog-cart, or
either one of the farm-wives who sorrowed so civilly not to know
where my lost battle-field was!
In England, it is always open to the passenger to enforce a claim
to his share of the public facilities, but I chose to go into the
licensed victualler's next the station and sit down to a
peaceable cup of tea rather than contest a place on that bloody
benching; and so I made the acquaintance of an interior out of
literature, such as my beloved Thomas Hardy likes to paint.
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