I wrestled with it in my study, only to be driven to my
books. I walked out to meet it in the streets, only to seek
shelter from it in music-hall or theatre. Thereupon it waxed
importunate and over-bearing, till the shadow of it darkened all my
doings. The thought of it sat beside me at the table, and spoilt
my appetite. The memory of it followed me abroad, and stood
between me and my friends, so that all talk died upon my lips, and
I moved among men as one ghost-ridden.
Then the throbbing town, with its thousand distracting voices, grew
maddening to me. I felt the need of converse with solitude, that
master and teacher of all the arts, and I bethought me of the
Yorkshire Wolds, where a man may walk all day, meeting no human
creature, hearing no voice but the curlew's cry; where, lying prone
upon the sweet grass, he may feel the pulsation of the earth,
travelling at its eleven hundred miles a minute through the ether.
So one morning I bundled many things, some needful, more needless,
into a bag, hurrying lest somebody or something should happen to
stay me, and that night I lay in a small northern town that stands
upon the borders of smokedom at the gate of the great moors; and at
seven the next morning I took my seat beside a one-eyed carrier
behind an ancient piebald mare.
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