TRANQUILLITY OR DULNESS country house, actually complain of the painful stillness there, averring that he could not sleep for it! So silent is Nature when at rest, and so unaccustomed is the average town-dweller to its quietude. To Charles Lamb the tranquillity of the country was "intolerable dulness"; to others it is infinite rest. Lamb wrote: "Let not the lying poets be believed, who entice men from the cheerful streets. . . . Let no native Londoner imagine that health and rest, innocent occupation, interchange of converse sweet, and recreative study, can make the country anything better than altogether odious and detestable. A garden was the primitive prison, till man, with Promethean felicity and boldness, luckily sinned himself out of it"!
Driving on, we observed a large old house to our right close to the roadway; this we imagined from appearances had formerly been a fine old coaching hostelry, but now it is divided down the centre, one half doing duty as a farmstead, the other half still being a house of entertainment, that proclaims itself with the sign of the "Crown and Woolpack." I find that an inn so named is marked at this very spot on a last-century travelling map I possess, so that it was presumably then of some importance. To-day it struck us that the farmhouse looked more prosperous than the inn.
As we proceeded, the country all around had a mellow, home-like look, smiling and humanised with long abiding and the tireless toil of generations of hardy workers: it was a delightful compound of green fields, leafy trees, tangled hedgerows,
