The Pocket | Page 7

shading his
eyes with his hand, he watches the long train sweep away into the
golden distance.
*
Now, there is no time when business habits are more mitigated than on
a walking tour. And so during these halts, as I say, you will feel almost
free. . . . If the evening be fine and warm, there is nothing better in life
than to lounge before the inn door in the sunset, or lean over the parapet
of the bridge, to watch the weeds and the quick fishes. It is then, if ever,
that you taste joviality to the full significance of that audacious word.
Your muscles are so agreeably slack, you feel so clean and so strong
and so idle, that whether you move or sit still, whatever you do is done
with pride and a kingly sort of pleasure. You fall in talk with any one,
wise or foolish, drunk or sober. And it seems as if a hot walk purged
you, more than of anything else, of all narrowness and pride, and left
curiosity to play its part freely, as in a child or a man of science. You
lay aside all your own hobbies to watch provincial humours develop
themselves before you, now as a laughable farce, and now grave and
beautiful like an old tale.
*
It is almost as if the millennium were arrived, when we shall throw our
clocks and watches over the housetops, and remember time and seasons
no more. Not to keep hours for a lifetime is, I was going to say, to live
for ever. You have no idea, unless you have tried it, how endlessly long
is a summer's day that you measure out only by hunger, and bring to an
end only when you are drowsy.
*
I know a village where there are hardly any clocks, where no one
knows more of the days of the week than by a sort of instinct for the

fete on Sundays, and where only one person can tell you the day of the
month, and she is generally wrong; and if people were aware how slow
Time journeyed in that village, and what armfuls of spare hours he
gives, over and above the bargain, to its wise inhabitants, I believe
there would be a stampede out of London, Liverpool, Paris, and a
variety of large towns, where the clocks lose their heads, and shake the
hours out each one faster than the other, as though they were all in a
wager. And all these foolish pilgrims would each bring his own misery
along with him, in a watch-pocket!
*
The bed was made, the room was fit, By punctual eve the stars were lit;
The air was still, the water ran; No need there was for maid or man,
When we put us, my ass and I, At God's green caravanserai.
*
To wash in one of God's rivers in the open air seems to me a sort of
cheerful solemnity or semi-pagan act of worship. To dabble among
dishes in a bedroom may perhaps make clean the body; but the
imagination takes no share in such a cleansing.
*
I own I like definite form in what my eyes are to rest upon; and if
landscapes were sold, like the sheets of characters of my boyhood, one
penny plain and twopence coloured, I should go the length of twopence
every day of my life.
*
There should be some myth (but if there is, I know it not) founded on
the shivering of the reeds. There are not many things in nature more
striking to man's eye. It is such an eloquent pantomime of terror; and to
see such a number of terrified creatures taking sanctuary in every nook
along the shore is enough to infect a silly human with alarm. Perhaps
they are only a-cold, and no wonder, standing waist deep in the stream.
Or, perhaps, they have never got accustomed to the speed and fury of
the river's flux, or the miracle of its continuous body. Pan once played
upon their forefathers; and so, by the hands of his river, he still plays
upon these later generations down all the valley of the Oise; and plays
the same air, both sweet and shrill, to tell us of the beauty and the terror
of the world.
The reeds might nod their heads in warning, and with tremulous

gestures tell how the river was as cruel as it was strong and cold, and
how death lurked in the eddy underneath the willows. But the reeds had
to stand where they were; and those who stand still are always timid
advisers.
*
The wholeday was showery, with occasional drenching plumps. We
were soaked to the skin, then partially dried in the