When he got closer to the town, he had no difficulty in espying both cemetery and workhouse across an expanse of market-gardens and small enclosed fields. The look of these objects, combined, as they were, with outlying sheds and untidy isolated hovels, gave him a sensation that he was always thrilled to receive⁠—the peculiar sensation that is evoked by any transitional ground lying between town and country.

He had never approached any town, however insignificant, across such a margin, without experiencing a queer and quite special sense of romance. Was it that there was aroused in him some subtle memory of all the intangible sensations that his ancestors had felt, each one of them in his day, as, with so much of the unknown before them, they approached or left, in their West Country wandering, any of these historic places? Did, in fact, some floating “emanation” of human regrets and human hopes hover inevitably about such marginal tracts⁠—redolent of so many welcomes and so many farewells?