Buckinghamshire was my favoured English county so perhaps it was fitting that, after my first return from India, I went there to write A Search in Secret India. The two rooms over an ancient village inn gave an open view of quiet countryside. The buxom, red-faced landlady brought up the simple and rather plain vegetarian meals every day--how deliciously garden-fresh they were! On Sundays, I walked over to a neighbouring Quaker village and sat with those grave sober and pious figures in the morning service at the seventeenth-century Meeting-house. Sometimes I would wander through beechwoods, cross streams, look at the graves of William Penn and George Fox, ruminate over America's unique history and England's religious background, and finally return to the table where the book grew.
-- Notebooks Category 12: Reflections > Chapter 6 : The Profane and The Profound > # 174
