On Some
We Are Never Long Without The Sound Of Wheels, And Folk Pass Us By
So Thickly That We Lose The Sense Of Their Number.
But on others,
about little-frequented districts, a meeting is an affair of
moment; we have the sight far
Off of some one coming towards us,
the growing definiteness of the person, and then the brief passage
and salutation, and the road left empty in front of us for perhaps
a great while to come. Such encounters have a wistful interest
that can hardly be understood by the dweller in places more
populous. We remember standing beside a countryman once, in the
mouth of a quiet by-street in a city that was more than ordinarily
crowded and bustling; he seemed stunned and bewildered by the
continual passage of different faces; and after a long pause,
during which he appeared to search for some suitable expression, he
said timidly that there seemed to be a GREAT DEAL OF MEETING
THEREABOUTS. The phrase is significant. It is the expression of
town-life in the language of the long, solitary country highways.
A meeting of one with one was what this man had been used to in the
pastoral uplands from which he came; and the concourse of the
streets was in his eyes only an extraordinary multiplication of
such 'meetings.'
And now we come to that last and most subtle quality of all, to
that sense of prospect, of outlook, that is brought so powerfully
to our minds by a road.
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