JOHN TYNDALL
fringed the sides with pine-branches to give it the effect of reality. He also planted small pines and firs around the screen and along the edge of his property to form natural barriers against the invasion of oncoming villas, for they began to multiply rapidly. Viewed from the road approaching Hindhead the screen was an eyesore, and it caused a feeling of irritation among the good people of Haslemere who were in the habit of making excursions to the Devil's Punch Bowl. The screen was only remarkable because of the place, for similar shields of all sorts are put up in the gardens and parks of great estates every day without exciting any comment. Mrs. Tyndall gave me a long history of the transaction, and she aroused my sympathy and my indignation against the neighbour; for had he possessed a grain of neighbourly behaviour in his nature, he would have selected another spot just as good for his house, and out of view of Tyndall's.
This love of solitude which appeals so strongly to certain temperaments recalls a vivid imagination of my boyhood. The desire to be alone was so strong within me, that my idea of perfect happiness was to live in a planet all my own. I can now recall these visions of a time when I could see myself "paddling my own canoe" on a placid river overhung with flower-bearing trees and fruit-laden vines, where the stillness was broken only by the voices of birds. And if Edgar Allan Poe's theory, as explained by Agathos to Einos, be true, that motion creates, and that the source of all motion is thought, who may gainsay that my boyish thought may not have created a planet somewhere in space that is to receive me in the evermore? How often have I sought the solitude of the forest with my gun, where the mysterious and whispering music of insects was broken
93
