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I forgot to think of the vastness of the stars; they were for me neighbourly and friendly presences, talking like a wise old nurse to me of things that happened before my birth, and the ancient kindness of Him whom a daring poet calls, 'My old neighbour God! Neighbourship with the earth also became a vital pleasure and a source of peace.
And as my sense of the importance of this kind of spectacle gradually sank, my appreciation of the serious drama conducted by Nature, upon a stage as old as time, whose footlights are the changeless planets, gradually rose. I had become the neighbour of Eternity, through neighbourship with things that are themselves eternal.
There is another picture that might be painted of mountains clothed in cloud, roads deep in mire, work done under drenching rains, early darkness, lack of neighbourship, isolation and monotony, a life separated by continents of silence from all the eager movement of the world.
Among insects of the same species there is often neighbourship; but their labours are individual and not the result of co-operation. For instance, the Cricket-hunters, the Yellow-winged Sphex, settle in gangs at the foot of a sandstone cliff, but each digs her own burrow and would not suffer a neighbour to come and help in piercing the home.
Their conveyance is no handsome carriage, but a rickety dog-cart, unmistakably betraying its neighbourship to the carts and ploughs of some rural farmyard. The horse, freshly taken from the fields, is driven by a youth who, in spite of his countrified dress, is no mere bumpkin.
They sometimes treated me with such a mixture of aversion and alarm that it was plain they doubted not only my sincerity but my sanity. The travelling artist they knew, the pedlar, the insurance agent, and the cockney beanfeaster; but the stranger who desired permanent neighbourship with them they knew not; him they treated as a lunatic at large.
My ear ached for some sound more rational than the cry of blind winds, my eye for some narrower stage than this tremendous theatre, where an army might defile unnoticed. In such a mood the desire of neighbourship grows keen. One is cheered even by the comradeship of his own shadow. It becomes necessary to talk aloud merely to gain assurance that one lives.
He has endeavoured, since coming to Preston, to mind his own business, and parsons often find that a hard thing to accomplish. Polished in education, he is humble and social in manner. He will never be an ecclesiastical show-man, for his disposition is in the direction of general quietude and good neighbourship.
But I will not leave watching till I find out who is the thief. The weasel guessed what was in her mind, so he went to the mouse and said to her, 'O my sister, there is no good in him who does not observe the claims of neighbourship and shows no constancy in friendship. 'True, O my friend, answered the mouse, 'and I delight in thee and in thy neighbourhood; but what is the motive of thy speech? Quoth the weasel, 'The master of the house has brought home sesame and has eaten his fill of it, he and his family, and left much; every living soul has eaten of it, and if thou take of it in thy turn, thou art worthier thereof than any other. This pleased the mouse and she chirped and danced and frisked her ears and tail, and greed for the grain deluded her; so she rose at once and issuing forth of her hole, saw the sesame peeled and dry, shining with whiteness, and the woman sitting watching, armed with a stick.
One whom the spirit did very frequently move was Sidney's fellow-lodger; he had no gift of expression whatever, but his brief, stammering protests against this or that social wrong had such an honest, indeed such a pathetic sound, that Sidney took an opportunity of walking home with him and converting neighbourship into friendly acquaintance. John Hewett gave the young man an account of his life.
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