Three Men in A Boat by Jerome K. Jerome

But, there, I don’t suppose I should really care for it when it came to actual practice.  It would be so ghastly dull and depressing in the evening, when your lamp cast uncanny shadows on the panelled walls, and the echo of distant feet rang through the cold stone corridors, and now drew nearer, and now died away, and all was death-like silence, save the beating of one’s own heart.

We are creatures of the sun, we men and women.  We love light and life.  That is why we crowd into the towns and cities, and the country grows more and more deserted every year.  In the sunlight—in the daytime, when Nature is alive and busy all around us, we like the open hill-sides and the deep woods well enough: but in the night, when our Mother Earth has gone to sleep, and left us waking, oh! the world seems so lonesome, and we get frightened, like children in a silent house.  Then we sit and sob, and long for the gas-lit streets, and the sound of human voices, and the answering throb of human life.  We feel so helpless and so little in the great stillness, when the dark trees rustle in the night-wind.  There are so many ghosts about, and their silent sighs make us feel so sad.  Let us gather together in the great cities, and light huge bonfires of a million gas-jets, and shout and sing together, and feel brave.

Harris asked me if I’d ever been in the maze at Hampton Court.  He said he went in once to show somebody else the way.  He had studied it up in a map, and it was so simple that it seemed foolish—hardly worth the twopence charged for admission.  Harris said he thought that map must have been got up as a practical joke, because it wasn’t a bit like the real thing, and only misleading.  It was a country cousin that Harris took in.  He said:

“We’ll just go in here, so that you can say you’ve been, but it’s very simple.  It’s absurd to call it a maze.  You keep on taking the first turning to the right.  We’ll just walk round for ten minutes, and then go and get some lunch.”

They met some people soon after they had got inside, who said they had been there for three-quarters of an hour, and had had about enough of it.  Harris told them they could follow him, if they liked; he was just going in, and then should turn round and come out again.  They said it was very kind of him, and fell behind, and followed.