Our Gallery of Happy Phrases. I.
"Mr. Tooth, whose name was in everybody's mouth a generation or so ago."
Dublin Daily Express.
POINTS OF VIEW.
If you are the sort of person who likes detail and accuracy, who can always tell where the north is even in a strange house (there are people like this; I met one the other day), and—this generally goes with it—are good at geography, you had better skip this article. It might annoy you. But if you like Debussy, and like watching the sun shine through a mist, and have no bump of locality, and hate being shown over ruins, you are the sort of person I am, and you will sympathise with me.
My trouble is this. Whenever I go to stay in the country I am always sooner or later taken a walk, generally a long one, to the highest hill they happen to have, and there I am shown a view. Not that I would mind if they left it at that, but they don't. One's host generally seems to have an absurd pride in some distant church, or gap in a hill "through which on fine days you can see the sea;" but even if he hasn't he will always—if you happen to be in the south of England—point out a patch of trees like a small piece of black sticking-plaster and tell you that that is Chanctonbury Ring. I never escape Chanctonbury Ring, though I have often gone far, even refused invitations, to avoid it. Once in Yorkshire—but nobody ever will believe that story, though I never pretended it was the same Ring. What I said was that there may be two of the same name, or even more: like Richmond, for instance.
"Do you see that hill over there?" he begins. I look where he is pointing and see three. "No, not that one," and he comes behind me and points over my shoulder. "Follow my finger," he says, and I follow it and see a perfectly flat field. But he has to be humoured, and anyhow there is lunch to be thought of.