Page:Early Reminiscences.djvu/384

320 traces? With interminable games of bridge! What traces do many of our new rich leave as they tear about the country in their cars, ripping up our roads at the same time ?They are in search of nothing. They riot along our highways only for the lust of being on the move. They leave no other traces, save some dribble of petrol. The Germans have a proverb, "Wenn der Dreck Mist wird, so will er gefahren sein"; which may be translated, "Should muck turn to manure, it will want to go on wheels."

I am not speaking of good and charitable and intellectual works. I am alluding only to such as are artistic and structural. Thousands and tens of thousands leave their traces—a family of well-conducted children, a volume of poems, a study of character in a novel, a search into dark corners of history, visits to the sick, instruction of the ignorant, ministering comfort to the broken-hearted ; none of these make any artistic or structural show, but they are all drawing of furrows, making of traces that will never be effaced.

Nature is always beautiful; there is beauty in every flower, in the curvature of every leaf, in the contortion of every branch, in the plumage of every bird, the scales of every fish, the hair of every beast; in the shapes of the mountains, in the level plains, in the blue sky of summer, even in the lowering clouds of winter ready to flush at the touch of the setting sun.

And how pathetic it is to know that Whitaker Wyse, the architect, and Joseph Dullard, the builder, are engaged together in disfiguring the fairest scenes in our land, and that Squire Acres is finding the money for the purpose, or that the County Council is employing them in perpetrating monstrosities because that same Council wants to put a job into the hands of Mr. Wyse or Joe Dullard as being one or other a cousin or a client of a Councillor. The pity of it! Oh, the pity of it!

I think that possibly if a man were suffered to build his own house after his own fancy, he would turn out something picturesque, something with his individuality in it. It is so with the backwoodsman's shanty, with the Swiss chalet; why should it not be so with the Englishman's home? But no man is suffered to do this. He must have an architect, a quantity-surveyor with his estimates, the plans must be submitted to the County