A LONELY COUNTRY so on to our night's destination at Wainfleet we passed no villages and saw no churches. It was a lonely stretch of road; for company we had, besides the stunted trees, only the wide earth and open sky; but such loneliness has its charms to the vigorous mind, it was all so suggestive of space and freedom, begetful of broad thinking and expanded views. To look upon Nature thus is to make one realise the littleness of the minor worries of life. The mind is too apt to get cramped at times by cramped surroundings, the vision impresses the brain more than most people are aware. The wild, far-reaching marshlands to our right had a peculiarly plaintive look. Across them the mighty gleams of golden sunlight swept in utter silence, succeeded by vast purple-gray shadows blown out into the eternity of blue beyond: movement of mighty masses but no sound, yet one is so accustomed in this world to associate movement with sound that the ear waits for the latter as something that should follow though it comes not. The prospect was to a certain extent desolate, yet not dreary; the golden green of the long autumn grasses tossing in the wind, the many bright-hued marsh-flowers made the wild waste look almost gay, so splashed with colour was it over all! The vast level landscape stretching away and away to the vague far-off horizon that seemed to fade there into a mystic nothingness—neither earth, nor sea, nor sky—excited within us a sentiment of vastness that words are inadequate to convey, a sentiment very real yet impossible wholly to analyse. One cannot describe the indescribable, and of such moods of the mind one
