The Four Men

Name: The Four Men
Author: Hilaire Belloc

by Hilaire Belloc

Hilaire Belloc takes a pilgrimage across his beloved home English county of Sussex writing as four distinct personalities, with a wide variety of songs, stories, and digressions.

Themes: Travel · Memoir

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You're sitting by the fire sipping port when a vision of home strikes you so vividly—with color, with smell—that you find yourself saying aloud, ‘I will go from this place to my home.’

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The Twenty-Ninth of October 1902

A map of Sussex, titled “Regni Regnorum.” Various locations are labeled in Latin, others in English.

The Twenty-Ninth of October 1902

Sketch of an inn or public house at a corner of a cobbled street. A second building, perhaps a stable, is across the street to the left, with several trees going off into the distance along the road.

Nine years ago, as I was sitting in the “George” at Robertsbridge, drinking that port of theirs and staring at the fire, there arose in me a multitude of thoughts through which at last came floating a vision of the woods of home and of another place—the lake where the Arun rises.

And I said to myself, inside my own mind:

“What are you doing? You are upon some business that takes you far, not even for ambition or for adventure, but only to earn. And you will cross the sea and earn your money, and you will come back and spend more than you have earned. But all the while your life runs past you like a river, and the things that are of moment to men you do not heed at all.”

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The Four Men