g my pipe as I stepped out of the inn at Cockermouth, and
did not raise my head until I was fairly in the street. When I did so,
it flashed upon me that I was in England; the evening sunlight lit up
English houses, English faces, an English conformation of street,--as it
were, an English atmosphere blew against my face. There is nothing
perhaps more puzzling (if one thing in sociology can ever really be more
unaccountable than another) than the great gulf that is set between
England and Scotland--a gulf so easy in appearance, in reality so
difficult to traverse. Here are two people almost identical in blood;
pent up together on one small island, so that their intercourse (one
would have thought) must be as close as that of prisoners who shared one
cell of the Bastille; the same in language and religion; and yet a few
years of quarrelsome isolation--a mere forenoon's tiff, as one may call
it, in comparison with the great historical cycles--has so separated
their thoughts and ways that not unions, not mutual dangers, nor
steamers, nor railways, nor all the king's horses and all the king's
men, seem able to obliterate the broad distinction. In the trituration
of another century or so the corners may disappear; but in the meantime,
in the year of grace 1871, I was as much in a new country as if I had
been walking out of the Hotel St. Antoine at Antwerp.

I felt a little thrill of pleasure at my heart as I realised the change,
and strolled away up the street with my hands behind my back, noting in
a dull, sensual way how foreign, and yet how friendly, were the slopes
of the gables and the colour of the tiles, and even the demeanour and
voices of the gossips round about me.

Wandering in this aimless humour, I turned up a lane and found myself
following the course of the bright little river. I passed first one and
then another, then a third, several couples out love-making in the
spring evening; and a consequent feeling of loneliness was beginning to
grow upon me, when I came to a dam across the river, and a mill--a
great, gaunt promontory of building,--half on dry ground and half arched
over the stream. The road here drew in its shoulders, and crept through
between the landward extremity of the mill and a little garden
enclosure, with a small house and a large signboard within its privet
hedge. I was pleased to fancy this an inn, and drew little etchings in
fancy of a sanded parlour, and three-cornered spittoons, and a socie