narrow.

First on the tow-path, then on the road, then on the grass, then back
on the tow-path, I pieced out the last baking mile into Charmes, that
lies at the foot of a rather higher hill, and at last was dragging
myself up the street just as the bell was ringing the noon Angelus;
nor, however tedious you may have found it to read this final effort
of mine, can you have found it a quarter as wearisome as I did to walk
it; and surely between writer and reader there should be give and
take, now the one furnishing the entertainment and now the other.

The delightful thing in Charmes is its name. Of this name I had indeed
been thinking as I went along the last miles of that dusty and
deplorable road--that a town should be called 'Charms'.

Not but that towns, if they are left to themselves and not hurried,
have a way of settling into right names suited to the hills about them
and recalling their own fields. I remember Sussex, and as I remember
it I must, if only for example, set down my roll-call of such names,
as--Fittleworth, where the Inn has painted panels; Amberley in the
marshes; delicate Fernhurst, and Ditchling under its hill; Arundel,
that is well known to every one; and Climping, that no one knows, set
on a lonely beach and lost at the vague end of an impassable road; and
Barlton, and Burton, and Duncton, and Coldwatham, that stand under in
the shadow and look up at the great downs; and Petworth, where the
spire leans sideways; and Timberley, that the floods make into an
island; and No Man's Land, where first there breaks on you the distant
sea. I never knew a Sussex man yet but, if you noted him such a list,
would answer: 'There I was on such and such a day; this I came to
after such and such a run; and that other is my home.' But it is not
his recollection alone which moves him, it is sound of the names. He
feels the accent of them, and all the men who live between Hind-head
and the Channel know these names stand for Eden; the noise is enough
to prove it. So it is also with the hidden valleys of the lie de
France; and when you say Jouy or Chevreuse to a man that was born in
those shadows he grows dreamy--yet they are within a walk of Paris.

But the wonderful thing about a name like Charmes is that it hands
down the dead. For some dead man gave it a keen name proceeding from
his own immediate delight, and made general what had been a private
pleasure, and, so to speak, bequeathed a poem to his town. They