We praised
together the lovely September landscape through which we were
running, and I ventured some remark upon the large holdings of
the land: a thing that always saddened me in the face of nature
with the reflection that those who tilled the soil owned none of
it; though I ought to have remembered the times when the soil
owned them, and taken heart. My notion seemed to strike him for
the first time, but he dismissed the fact as a necessary part of
the English system; it had never occurred to him that there could
be question of that system. There must be many Englishmen to whom
it does occur, but if you do not happen to meet them you cannot
blame the others.
I fancied that one of the Englishmen to whom it might have
occurred was he whom I met in Wales at Aberystwyth, where we
spoke together a moment in the shadow of the co-educational
University there, and who seemed at least of a different mind
concerning the Welsh. "These Welsh farmers," he said, "send their
sons and daughters to college as if it were quite the natural
thing to do.
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