The art of simplicity is a puzzle of complexity

Douglas Horton

There is nothing at all that remains: not any house; nor any castle, however strong; nor any love, however tender and sound; not any comradeship among men, however hardy. Nothing remains but the things of which I will not speak, because we have spoken enough of them already during these four days. But I who am old will give you advice, which is this: to consider chiefly from now onward those permanent things which are, as it were, the shores of this age and the harbours of our glittering and pleasant but dangerous and wholly changeful sea. When he had said this (by which he meant Death), the other two, looking sadly at me, stood silent also for about the time in which a man can say good-bye with reverence.

From The Four Men, by Hilaire Belloc

Four men--Myself, Grizzlebeard, The Sailor, and The Poet--wander through the Sussex of 1902. Their comical adventures and perceptions celebrate the vanishing landscape of unspoilt rural England and a lifestyle soon to become obsolete. The four characters are all personifications of aspects of Belloc's own nature.