June - Page 2

to our servants, it being left entirely to individual taste to decide
what "slight" shall be, and my neighbour really seems to enjoy
using this privilege, judging from the way she talks about it.
I would give much to be able to peep through a keyhole and see
the dauntless little lady, terrible in her wrath and dignity,
standing on tiptoe to box the ears of some great strapping
girl big enough to eat her.

The making of cheese and butter and sausages
_excellently_ well is a work which requires brains,
and is, to my thinking, a very admirable form of activity,
and entirely worthy of the attention of the intelligent.
That my neighbour is intelligent is at once made evident
by the bright alertness of her eyes--eyes that nothing escapes,
and that only gain in prettiness by being used to some good purpose.
She is a recognised authority for miles around on the mysteries
of sausage-making, the care of calves, and the slaughtering of swine;
and with all her manifold duties and daily prolonged absences
from home, her children are patterns of health and neatness,
and of what dear little German children, with white pigtails
and fearless eyes and thick legs, should be. Who shall say
that such a life is sordid and dull and unworthy of a high order
of intelligence? I protest that to me it is a beautiful life,
full of wholesome outdoor work, and with no room for those
listless moments of depression and boredom, and of wondering
what you will do next, that leave wrinkles round a pretty
woman's eyes, and are not unknown even to the most brilliant.
But while admiring my neighbour, I don't think I shall ever try
to follow in her steps, my talents not being of the energetic
and organising variety, but rather of that order which makes
their owner almost lamentably prone to take up a volume of poetry
and wander out to where the kingcups grow, and, sitting on
a willow trunk beside a little stream, forget the very
existence of everything but green pastures and still waters,
and the glad blowing of the wind across the joyous fields.
And it would make me perfectly wretched to be confronted
by ears so refractory as to require boxing.

Sometimes callers from a distance invade my solitude, and it
is on these occasions that I realise how absolutely alone each
individual is, and how far away from his neighbour; and while they talk
(generally about babies, past, present, and to come), I fall to
wondering at the vast and impassable distance that separates one's
own soul from the soul of the person sitting in the next chair.
I am speaking of comparative strangers, people who are forced
to stay a certain time by the eccentricities of trains,
and in whose presence you grope about after common