Making a change

Monday, February 26th., Trinity Hall Farm, Hockliffe. 

The latter half of "The Queen's Necklace" is one of the finest examples of Dumas's skill, supreme skill, in handling a purely artificial intrigue. The complexity of it is only equalled by its perfect clarity, its diversity only by its unity and coherence. I have also been reading Gaboriau's "Lecoq" and its sequel (which is not a sequel, but he solution of the problem) for the Academy. It struck me as among the best of all detective stories. And the plot has a touch of Dumas at his most melodramatic and 'plotty'.

Only persons of imagination can enter into my feelings at the moment. I have spent two thirds of my life in a squalid industrial town and the rest in a city. I think I knew every creosoted block in Fleet Street, every bookstall in Shoreditch, and every hosiers in Piccadilly. I certainly did know the order of the stations on the Inner Circle. Also the various frowns of publishers, the strange, hysteric, silly atmosphere of theatrical first-nights, the stars of the Empire and the Alhambra (by sight), and the vicious odours of a thousand and one restaurants. And now I am here 'in the country'. Not many people can stamp the top of their notepaper "Watling Street, England".

Down in the village early this morning I entered, not without a certain self-consciousness, the village shop. I had read about 'the village shop' in novels; I had even ventured to describe it in fiction of my own; and I was equally surprised and delighted to find that the village shop of fiction was also the village shop of fact. It was the mere truth that one could buy everything in this diminutive emporium, that the multifarious odours assailed the nostrils, and that the proprietor, who had never seen me before, instantly knew me and all about me. Soon I was in a fair way to knowing something about the proprietor.

As I left the shop a flamboyant person of, I should say, travelling stock asked me if I wanted to buy a pony. I didn't.