o shadeless a place, or one so unfitted for human intercourse,
so lacking in the comfort, which human sensibilities need. We live in
nature as hunted things, beasts of chase. Every eye is upon us in fear
or dislike; but in our turn, cursed as well as blessed by imagination,
we people the wild with dreadful shapes of menace. The heat, the cold,
the wind and the rain work as much against us as for us. We endow them
with minds like our own, but magnified by our dismay to be the minds
of gods maleficent. Without shelter of our own provision we are
comfortless, and without comfort our souls perish, then our bodies.
Salisbury Plain, swooning in the heat, is a paradise for insects. In
those desolate dwellings both flies and (I am sure) fleas abounded,
dreadfully healthy and alive. I only guess at the fleas, but the flies
I can answer for. They swarmed on the baking walls and wove webs in
the air above us. The rooms were black with them, and their humming
filled them up with noise.

Here lived the shepherd, too heavily taxed as he thought for his
hermitage; here lived his family of half a dozen swarthy and beautiful
children; and here we discussed the state of affairs, since the
shepherd was abroad, with his daughter, a flower of the field. She
came out of this stivy tenement at the sound of our boiling radiator,
and stood framed in the doorway, shading her eyes against the sun, a
tall and graceful, very pretty girl, dressed in cool white which might
have been fresh from its cardboard box, as she herself might have
stepped from her typewriter and Government office at Whitehall.
Gentle-voiced, quiet and self-possessed, she showed us the conditions
of her lot. One living-room, two bedrooms, and a washhouse in a shed:
three miles over the grass to shop, church, post-office, and doctor;
half a mile to call up a neighbour in case of need. A rain-water tank,
less than a quarter full of last winter's rain, must keep clean her
house and her, and for drinking she was served by a galvanised tank in
full sun, which she was lucky to get filled once a week.

I tasted of it. The water was warm, flat, and not too clean. "Where
does this come from?" "It is fetched in a barrel from over the hill."
"Who brings it?" "The farmer--but he makes a fuss whenever we ask for
it." "He must water the stock, surely?" "Oh yes, and the sheep, too,
but--" A pregnant aposiopesis. I wondered if that tank could not be
put in the shade; but it seemed that it cou