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Now by way of ending! Being a modern man you will grumble and say, "Yes, but it is bad to live on." You are wrong. It is the best soil of any to live on. True, if you are a town man you find that your feet get wet on it; you cannot walk about after a shower as you can in London; therefore you prefer to be upon gravel or sand. That is because you are artificial and a snob. You were intended, my lamb, to plunge about in mud when the weather is muddy—it is an excellent discipline for the soul. And all that love of sand and gravel goes with rhododendrons, copper beeches, and villas of red brick, and the death of the soul. You will then object that the house built upon clay goes up and down, heaving, as it were, with the weather. Why not? All things that live and are worthy have in themselves the principle of motion. Would you inhabit something dead? Aristotle has said it, that death, the absence of life, is essentially rigidity, the absence of motion. Give thanks then that your house should shift, and that the water that you must drink on clay is of a muddy kind; it is better for your health than that sparkling stuff which gives men goitre in the high hills.