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422 from Martin—and did not return until Tuesday afternoon. A funny business took me to that unbeloved place—something to do—odd to say—with a review of my book: but the subject is not worth going into just now. On my way back I crossed that wild lonely street of pine and heath between Cadnam and Godshill where you see no house for a distance of about 7 miles, and where I encountered but two souls. One was a black cock—the first bird of the kind I have seen in Hampshire. He rose before me from the heath at the road side and fled away in proud style. The other was a very tall fine looking old man sitting by the roadside smoking his peaceful pipe in the wilderness. I sat down and had a long talk with him. He was born close by, he told me, at a small village near Fordingbridge. In the sixties he went out to America and listed and went through the war; then got land on the upper Mississippi, and married and worked hard for many years cultivating his land. It was flat marshy land and he worked too hard and [?] ague and had bad health generally. Then he lost his wife and 2 children, and fell himself into consumption. One of his lungs was completely gone. Then he came home to end his days in his old native place among his kindred; but after 2 years more of suffering began to mend, and finally got perfectly well and strong. Now he works as a Road-mender and roams up and down the roads that cross the heath on an old tricycle with his spade and pick and other tools.

To judge from Blunt's own work—from this "New Pilgrimage," the series of sonnets telling of his own varied life and occupation, or rather amusements, you are perfectly right in what you say of him. He has had "too good a time."

The Daily News is the paper I have oftenest seen in the country, and Belloc and Chesterton have been in it a good deal. I am so free from the—vice of cleverness myself that I am not very tolerant of it in others. Perhaps here I—

B. amuses me, but irritates as well, and when I read C. I am inclined to exclaim with the young fellow after witnessing the old man's feat of balancing an eel on his nose—"What made you so wonderfully clever?" Perhaps he writes too much—perhaps a