Page:Guy Boothby--A Bid for Fortune.djvu/65

Rh of it, but where could I go? Every place was alike in my present humour. Then one of the original motives of my journey rose before me. And I determined to act on the suggestion.

Next morning I set off for Hampshire to try, if possible, to find my father's old home. What sort of a place it would turn out to be I had not the very remotest idea. But I'd got the address by heart, and, with the help of a Bradshaw, for that place I steered.

Leaving the train at Lyndhurst Road—for the village I was in search of was situated in the heart of the New Forest—I hired a ramshackle conveyance from the nearest innkeeper and started off for it. The man who drove me had lived, so he found early occasion to inform me, in the neighbourhood all his seventy odd years, and it struck him as a humorous circumstance that he had never even been as far as Southampton, a matter of only a few miles by road and ten minutes by rail, in his life.

And that self-same sticking at home is one of the things about England and Englishmen that for the life of me I cannot understand. It seems to me—of course, I don't put it forward that I'm right—that a man might just as well be dead as only know God's world for twenty miles around him. It argues a poverty of interest in the rest of creation, I reckon—a sort of mud turtle existence that's neither encouraging nor particularly ornamental. And yet if everybody went a-travelling where would the prosperity of England be? That's a point against my argument, I must confess.

Well, perhaps we'd travelled a matter of two miles when it struck me to ask my charioteer about the place to which we were proceeding, just to find out what he knew about it. Thinks I, perhaps the old