before she could bring herself to let me sleep in her front
room. In the evening I descended to the semi-subterranean kitchen, and
talked with her and her old man, Thomas Mugridge by name.

And as I talked to them, all the subtleties and complexities of this
tremendous machine civilisation vanished away. It seemed that I went
down through the skin and the flesh to the naked soul of it, and in
Thomas Mugridge and his old woman gripped hold of the essence of this
remarkable English breed. I found there the spirit of the wanderlust
which has lured Albion's sons across the zones; and I found there the
colossal unreckoning which has tricked the English into foolish
squabblings and preposterous fights, and the doggedness and stubbornness
which have brought them blindly through to empire and greatness; and
likewise I found that vast, incomprehensible patience which has enabled
the home population to endure under the burden of it all, to toil without
complaint through the weary years, and docilely to yield the best of its
sons to fight and colonise to the ends of the earth.

Thomas Mugridge was seventy-one years old and a little man. It was
because he was little that he had not gone for a soldier. He had
remained at home and worked. His first recollections were connected with
work. He knew nothing else but work. He had worked all his days, and at
seventy-one he still worked. Each morning saw him up with the lark and
afield, a day labourer, for as such he had been born. Mrs. Mugridge was
seventy-three. From seven years of age she had worked in the fields,
doing a boy's work at first, and later a man's. She still worked,
keeping the house shining, washing, boiling, and baking, and, with my
advent, cooking for me and shaming me by making my bed. At the end of
threescore years and more of work they possessed nothing, had nothing to
look forward to save more work. And they were contented. They expected
nothing else, desired nothing else.

They lived simply. Their wants were few--a pint of beer at the end of
the day, sipped in the semi-subterranean kitchen, a weekly paper to pore
over for seven nights hand-running, and conversation as meditative and
vacant as the chewing of a heifer's cud. From a wood engraving on the
wall a slender, angelic girl looked down upon them, and underneath was
the legend: "Our Future Queen." And from a highly coloured lithograph
alongside looked down a stout and elderly lady, with under