outskirts of a remote English village, where
every stock and stone would have a history, and every inhabitant prove
a repository of folklore and local tradition. From actual experience I
still knew very little of rural England, though of late years I had
done some exploring. But, vicariously, I had lived much in Wessex,
East Anglia, the delectable Duchy, and other parts of the country,
through the works of favourite writers. And so I did dream at times of
an English retreat, but always such musings would end upon a note of
scepticism. These parts were not far enough away to furnish anything
so wonderful, so epoch-making, as my desired 'way out.' For persons of
my temperament one of the commonest and most disastrous blunders of
life is the tacit assumption that the thing easy of attainment and
near at hand cannot possibly prove the thing one wants.

Gradually, then, the idea developed in my mind that the true solution
of my problems lay in a working back upon my life's tracks. My
thoughts wandered insistently to the northern half of the coast of New
South Wales. Even now I could hardly say just how much of my
retrospective vision was genuine recollection, and how much the
glamour of youth. I tried to recall without sentiment the effects
produced upon me, for example, by the climate of that undoubtedly
favoured region. But I am not sure that my efforts gave results of any
practical value. For practical purposes it is extremely difficult, in
middle life, to form reliable estimates of the congeniality to one's
self of any place to which one has been a stranger since youth.
Recollections pitched in such a key as, 'How good one used to feel
when--,' or,'How beautiful the country looked at ---- when one--,' are
apt to be very misleading for a man of broken health and middle age;
the one thing he cannot properly allow for being the radical change
which has taken place in himself. I bore the name of the lad who
tramped the roads from Myall Creek down to Dursley. In most other
respects I was not now that person, but somebody else--a totally
different somebody.

I could not very well talk of the plans which now took shape in my
mind to Sidney Heron; because, in effect, he declined to discuss them.

'I think it would be a rather less reasonable step than suicide, and I
have always declined to discuss suicide. One must see some glimmer of
rationality in a project to be able to discuss it, and in this notion
of yours I can see non