If I Make Notes For Future Use, Or If I
Am Obliged To Write Letters During The Course Of My
Little
excursion, I so interfere with the process that I can never again
find out what is worthy of being
Preserved, or what should be given
in full length, what in torso, or what merely in profile. This
process of incubation may be unreasonably prolonged; and I am
somewhat afraid that I have made this mistake with the present
journey. Like a bad daguerreotype, great part of it has been
entirely lost; I can tell you nothing about the beginning and
nothing about the end; but the doings of some fifty or sixty hours
about the middle remain quite distinct and definite, like a little
patch of sunshine on a long, shadowy plain, or the one spot on an
old picture that has been restored by the dexterous hand of the
cleaner. I remember a tale of an old Scots minister called upon
suddenly to preach, who had hastily snatched an old sermon out of
his study and found himself in the pulpit before he noticed that
the rats had been making free with his manuscript and eaten the
first two or three pages away; he gravely explained to the
congregation how he found himself situated: 'And now,' said he,
'let us just begin where the rats have left off.' I must follow
the divine's example, and take up the thread of my discourse where
it first distinctly issues from the limbo of forgetfulness.
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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