WELCOME.

The tones and phrases, the thoughts and the pictures of
the last few weeks had found you helpless; and as you made your
way across the terminus they still hung and danced like gnats
round your head. You pushed on, yielding mechanically to the
suggestions of the bookstall as you passed, and gained refuge
from the acres of resounding rangour in a nook amidst the quarter
of a mile of linked coaches. You were free then, if you chose,
to begin your work of resistance. But you unfolded your paper
and put off the moment of release. It is true you agreed with
yourself to relinquish it as soon as some sense should tell you
there was no longer any fear that wide cricket-grounds or border-
lands of villa-fringed common should cheat your final treasure
of its full response, but the effort of reading brought all you
had left to draw up before you in an impenetrable façade. Faced
by that you argued with your columns. They led you from formula
to formula. You pierced each one, rejecting and substituting,
applying with feverish rapidity group after group of fresh values,
playing with the sense of holding your world from fifty points
of view at once and all the while, behind you, the great gateway
was opening. . . . Still you bandied thoughts until at last when
your eyes were drawn to the windows you were ashamed and unfit,
able only to peer and catalogue. The train must have stopped
many times and laboured slowly forward again. Now it is cleaving

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steadily onwards through the still air, through a haze of tiny
glimmering sun-varnished beech-leaves; chequers of sunlight lie
upon the jewelled floor of the woodland. Gliding meadows come,
bearing shining cattle, red and cream; a roadway flashes by bone-
white and green-fringed. The silver line of a willow-shaded stream
runs towards the horizon where shadowy hills flow forward with
your going.

You must withdraw your useless eye and let the train swing
on and the dream flow by. You must deal with your prison of words,
with the dust and din, the rattle and clatter of your swaying coach
as mile follows mile of brimming magic, until the train draws slack-
ening and dragging into the little junction, and the sudden still-
ness sounds the depth of the tumult through which you have come.

Little sounds fall powerless. The clanking of a hand-
trolley, the whirring of a signal bell, the ring of your foot-
steps along the empty platform are lost in the surrounding peace.

The sight of the local train getting up steam at the far
side of the station takes you across the covered bridge and into
the shelter of one of the three ponderous coaches. Slowly the
little caravan bumps its way along between high sheltering banks,
primrose dotted still and blue with hyacinths. The banks of the
cutting drop and drop until you are down upon the breast of earth.
You are travelling so slowly that the air can flow in; and
the meadows no longer sweep by in swift succession, but

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come towards you a level tide slow-brimming to your very doors -
billowy acres of closing golden cups, seas of charlock gay against
grey leafage, meadow grass sorrel flushed, heads of coltsfoot
standing sharp and single capped for the night in sheeny emerald.
Against the deep shadow of the hedgerows feathery hemlock wavers
and beckons.

In and out winds the little train until the moving picture
slows down and is still and you may go out and breathe the gorse-
sweet air, out and across the road and over the stile. The
cushiony grass flattens under your feet; earth lies all round you
agleam: On the far-away hillsides peace dreams.

The barriers are gone; the way opens clear to the heart
and centre of which the wide scene now so safely yours for the
coming weeks is but the lavish setting.

All through the journey it had stood dim and clear and dim
again - the old brown house on the crest of the hill at the end
of the grass lane. It is four fields away now - just visible as
you break through the gap in the first hedgerow. You can see its
rich brown face shining out through the young plumes of the poplars.
Starry fruit-bloom gleams from its garden greenery. Ripe and
quiet it stands in the heart of the spring. Youth has long since
left the old house, hanging now round its deep doorway only a
passing garland. Within is harvest, hard-won bounty, the garnered
beauty of long faithful years. The last field is passing. The last

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ray kindles the curtained upper panes to a blaze. From copse and
garden the singing shrills and flutes. There is no need for
hastening footsteps, no threat of quickened blood. No challenge
stands at the gate, no fear, no shadow of reproach. The door is
open. You may press forward now, childlike, in a hungering
certainty.