re metalling, perhaps, another generation of
menders, and so on. The traffic, of course, was different, for the
traffic is the world. Indeed, when you stop and reflect, you will see
that a great road like this one I was walking on that warm spring day,
is a pulsing artery. London, that immense heart, with its systole and
diastole, its ebb and flow and putrefying growth, lay beating behind me.
Ahead lay that grey, brooding North, that vast coal-field whose output
had made us masters of the world. Take it how you will, you must have
roads. That is America's need to day--roads. Without roads no art, no
literature, no real progress. No canals or railroads will do. Canals are
too slow, railroads too fast. It is true they have brought trade and
prosperity to the Great North West and the Great South West and the
Great Middle West and all the other wests; but you cannot build up a
great civilization on railroads. You must have roads, with pilgrims, or
hoboes if you like, and artists and poets on foot, and taverns and talk.
Railroads are the tentacles of plutocracy. Roads are democratic things.

"I was thinking very much on these lines that day and I was in the
little hollow just beyond the Kingmaker's obelisk. The sun had gone
down behind Mill Hill and the evening was full of blue shadows, full of
the odour of smoke and sap, full of mysteriously comfortable silences.
For a few moments that particular rod, pole or perch of the great road
was empty save for me and a lamplighter on a bicycle, who was coming
towards me, riding one hand, his torch over his shoulder, a sort of
elderly Mercury illuminating an empty world. On the left the great trees
stood up close to the road, great shafts, the children of those who had
stood there when the legions came up out of the Thames valley and
marched north into the jungle. On the right the meadows rolled away
eastward towards Enfield and Cheshunt and Broxbourne, meadow and copse
and cornland. The lamplighter passed me with a soft buzz and click of
sprocket wheels, and looking back at him idly, I caught the sound of the
church-clock at Barnet striking the hour. The chime focussed my thoughts
on the great peace of the land. Here at any rate, I thought, man has
topped the rise. He has accomplished all he set out to do and the result
is peace and happiness. I was sentimentalizing, no doubt, for I have
never been able to live in the country. But as I stood there, looking
back, the spell was broken.