Where England Sets her Feet by Bernard Capes

At the _Golden Lion_ by the bull-ring the two halted to drink a sack-posset, for the boy was very spent and weary. Good fifteen miles had they ridden that last day, with three yet to cover to reach their journey's end; yet his fatigue was as much of the mind as the body. The spirit which had sustained him throughout this long wayfaring seemed now, in the near achievement of its objective, to falter and lose heart. He realised all at once, as he had never yet done, his abysmal severance from the old familiar life. The thought came upon him with a force which certainly owed nothing to the dreariness or inhospitability of the country he was in, for it was a fair and friendly country, but to the felt unattainableness of his own. He was like a sleep-walker, who wakes to find himself naked and alone in spaces of impenetrable darkness, with his bed become a vague remoteness, a warm refuge impossible for his distraught mind ever again to locate or recover.

This reaction from a more expectant, or a more stoic, mood was due to many things -- physical exhaustion, that sentiment of isolation, more than all, perhaps, to a doubt which had been slowly forming in his mind as to the reality of the prospect he had pictured for himself. That doubt had not until latterly come to haunt and disturb him; there had been no room for it to germinate in the fullness and novelty of the preceding days. He had found the greater world, on this his first excursion into it, wonderful enough, but wonderful more by reason of its spiritual renaissance than its material features. He did not, of course, put it in that way, or realise that the spirit abroad was in any sense other than the spirit he might have expected to encounter. But in fact it was different, and he himself was unconsciously infected by it.