Page:Letters from England.djvu/87

 Essex paddocks, climbed over a hedge into a seigniorial park, and saw water-lilies and gladstonia on a dark pool, danced in the loft a dance which I did not know, climbed up a church tower and ten times a day was amazed at the harmony and perfection of the life with which the Englishman surrounds himself in his home. The English home, that is tennis and warm water, the gong summoning you to lunch, books, meadows, comfort selected, stabilized and blessed by the centuries, freedom of children and patriarchal disposition of parents, hospitality and a formalism as comfortable as a dressing gown; in brief, the English home is the English home, and therefore I have drawn it from memory together with the cuckoo and the rabbit; inside there lives and writes one of the wisest men in this world, and outside the cuckoo utters its cry as much as thirty times in succession: with this I conclude the tale of the best things in England.