e box: but, as I turned away, momentarily
glancing up the long street, I caught sight of an approaching figure that
could hardly be mistaken. Good Heavens! it was David, and he too was
carrying a letter.

SANDRA BELLONI'S PINEWOOD

(TO THE SWEET MEMORY OF FRANCES WYNNE)

I felt jaded and dusty, I needed flowers and sunshine; and remembering
that some one had told me--erroneously, I have since discovered!--that the
pinewood wherein Sandra Belloni used to sing to her harp, like a nixie, in
the moonlit nights, lay near Oxshott in Surrey, I vowed myself there and
then to the Meredithian pilgrimage.

The very resolution uplifted me with lyric gladness, and I went swinging
out of the old Inn where I live with the heart of a boy. Across Lincoln's
Inn Fields, down by the Law Courts, and so to Waterloo. I felt I must have
a confidante, so I told the slate-coloured pigeons in the square where I
was off--out among the thrushes, the broom, and the may. But they wouldn't
come. They evidently deemed that a legal purlieu was a better place for
'pickings.'

Half-a-crown return to Oxshott and a train at 12.35. You know the ride
better than I, probably, and what Surrey is at the beginning of June. The
first gush of green on our getting clear of Clapham was like the big drink
after an afternoon's haymaking. There was but one cloud on the little
journey. She got into the next carriage.

I dreamed all the way. On arriving at Oxshott I immediately became
systematic. Having a very practical belief in the material basis of all
exquisite experience, I simply nodded to the great pinewoods half a mile
off, on the brow of long heathy downs to the left of the railway
bridge--as who should say, 'I shall enjoy you all the better presently for
some sandwiches and a pint of ale'--and promptly, not to say
scientifically, turned down the Oxshott road in search of an inn.

Oxshott is a quaint little hamlet, one of the hundred villages where we
are going to live when we have written great novels; but I didn't care
for the village inn, so walked a quarter of a mile nearer Leatherhead,
till the Old Bear came in sight.

There I sat in the drowsy parlour, the humming afternoon coming in at the
door, 'the blue fly' singing on the hot pane, dreaming all kinds of
gauzy-winged dreams, while my body absorbed ham sandwiches and some
excellent ale. Of course I did not leave the place without the inevitable
reflection on Lamb and the inns _he_ had imm