MEN I HAVE PAINTED
He loved to be isolated with Nature. When Tyndall first went to Hindhead there were no houses on that bleak bit of moorland, no human folk, save a few wandering gipsies, to remind him of the existence of coal-sodden cities. The air was not polluted with unburnt carbon, and there was no veil of grey smoke, which the ignorant call fog, to dim the horizon that outlined, in clear-cut purple masses, the changing skies that gave him, night and day, a spectacle always sublime and often magnificent. Here he could walk, unseen by other men, on the dry sand of the hill-tops, and study the creatures that burrowed in it, or the wild plants that matted its surface. But this dream of bliss, of splendid isolation in Nature's solitudes, was soon to be disturbed and turned into a nightmare.
By building a house in the distant haunts of Nature's wild things Tyndall had unwittingly advertised the spot, and its unquestioned purity of air. Instead of purchasing a sufficiently large tract of land to ensure his isolation, he confined himself to a moderate acreage, never for a moment thinking that anyone would come to such a lonely place. When it was too late to correct his error of judgment, he one day discovered workmen constructing a house within two hundred yards of his windows and immediately on the other side of the boundary of his property. He spared no effort to dissuade the new-comer from his design, but without avail. In a few weeks' time he found the view from his southern windows and from his garden blemished by the roof of a suburban-like villa, and, what was really far more disturbing to him, his sense of isolation gone. He now did something that to me seemed perfectly natural—he caused to be built a large screen, to imitate in its contour the appearance of growing pine-trees, and he
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