COCKERMOUTH
I Was Lighting My Pipe As I Stepped Out Of The Inn At Cockermouth,
And Did Not Raise My Head Until I Was Fairly In The Street.
When I
did so, it flashed upon me that I was in England; the evening
sunlight lit up English houses, English faces, an English
conformation of street, - as it were, an English atmosphere blew
against my face.
There is nothing perhaps more puzzling (if one
thing in sociology can ever really be more unaccountable than
another) than the great gulf that is set between England and
Scotland - a gulf so easy in appearance, in reality so difficult to
traverse. Here are two people almost identical in blood; pent up
together on one small island, so that their intercourse (one would
have thought) must be as close as that of prisoners who shared one
cell of the Bastille; the same in language and religion; and yet a
few years of quarrelsome isolation - a mere forenoon's tiff, as one
may call it, in comparison with the great historical cycles - has so
separated their thoughts and ways that not unions, not mutual
dangers, nor steamers, nor railways, nor all the king's horses and
all the king's men, seem able to obliterate the broad distinction.
In the trituration of another century or so the corners may
disappear; but in the meantime, in the year of grace 1871, I was as
much in a new country as if I had been walking out of the Hotel St.
Antoine at Antwerp.
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