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fully_): A sort of loam? THE OTHER MAN (_calvinistically_): Ugh!--sand!... (_shaking his head_). It blaws away with a blast of wind. (_A longer silence_.) MYSELF (_as though full of interest_): Then you set your drills to sow deep about here? THE OTHER MAN (_with a gesture of fatigue_): Shoal. (_Here he sighed deeply_.) After this we ceased to speak to each other for several miles. Then: MYSELF: Who owns the land about here? THE OTHER MAN: Some owns parts and some others. MYSELF (_angrily pointing to an enormous field with a little new house in the middle_): Who owns that? THE OTHER MAN (_startled by my tone_): A Frenchman. He grows onions. Now if you know little of England and of the temper of the English (I mean of 0.999 of the English people and not of the 0.001 with which you associate), if, I say, you know little or nothing of your fellow-countrymen, you may imagine that all this conversation was wasted. "It was not to the point," you say. "You got no nearer the Griffin." You are wrong. Such conversation is like the kneading of dough or the mixing of mortar; it mollifies and makes ready; it is three-quarters of the work; for if you will let your fellow-citizen curse you and grunt at you, and if you will but talk to him on matters which he knows far better than you, then you have him ready at the end. So had I this man, for I asked him point-blank at the end of all this: "_What about the Griffin?_" He looked at me for a moment almost with intelligence, and told me that he would hand me over in the next village to a man who was going through March. So he did, and the horse of this second man was even faster than that of the baker. The horses of the Fens are like no horses in the world for speed. * * * * * This horse was twenty-three years old, yet it went as fast as though all that tomfoolery men talk about progress were true, and as though things got better by the process of time. It went so fast that one might imagine it at forty-six winning many races, and at eighty standing beyond all comparison or competition; and because it went so fast I went hammering right through the town of March before I had time to learn its name or to know whither I was driving; it whirled me past the houses and out into the country beyond; only when I had pulled up two miles beyond did I know what I had done and did I realise that I had missed for ever one of those pleasures whic
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