It is difficult," said he, smiling good-humouredly, "for a non-literary man like me to explain myself properly, like that dear girl Ellen would; but I mean that I am part of it all, and feel the pain as well as the pleasure in my own person.

It is not done for me by somebody else, merely that I may eat and drink and sleep; but I myself do my share of it." In his way also, as Ellen in hers, I could see that Dick had that passionate love of the earth which was common to but few people at least, in the days I knew; in which the prevailing feeling amongst intellectual persons was a kind of sour distaste for the changing drama of the year, for the life of earth and its dealings with men.

Indeed, in those days it was thought poetic and imaginative to look upon life as a thing to be borne, rather than enjoyed.
So I mused till Dick's laugh brought me back into the Oxfordshire hay- fields.

"One thing seems strange to me," said he--"that I must needs trouble myself about the winter and its scantiness, in the midst of the summer abundance.

If it hadn't happened to me before, I should have thought it was your doing, guest; that you had thrown a kind of evil charm over me.