itality--well,
if you are of a sensitive constitution you shrink from obtruding
yourself, an alien apparition, upon the embarrassed and embarrassing
rural domesticities. Besides, to be quite honest, rural table-talk,
except in Mr. Hardy's novels or pastoral poetry, is, to say the least,
lacking in variety. Indeed, if the truth must be told, the conversation
of country people, generally speaking, and an occasional, very
occasional, character or oddity apart, is undeniably dull, and I hope it
will not be imputed to me for hardness of heart that, after some
long-winded colloquy or endless reminiscence, sententious and trivial, I
have thought that Gray's famous line should really have been
written--"the long and tedious annals of the poor."

But my heart smites me with ingratitude toward some kindly memories as I
write that--memories of homely welcome, simple and touching and
dignified. Surely I am not writing so of the genial farmer on whom we
came one lunch hour as he was stripping corn in his yard.

"Missus," he called to the house a few yards away, "can you find any
lunch for two good-looking fellows here?"

The housewife came to the door, scanned us for a second, and replied in
the affirmative. As we sat down to table, our host bowed his head and
said a simple grace for the bacon and cabbage, pumpkin-pie, cheese and
tea we were about to receive; and the unexpected old-fashioned rite, too
seldom encountered nowadays, came on me with a fresh beauty and
impressiveness, which made me feel that its discontinuance is a real loss
of gracious ritual in our lives, and perhaps even more. Thus this simple
farmer's board seemed sensitively linked with the far-away beginnings of
time. Of all our religious symbolism, the country gods and the gods of
the hearth and the household seem actual, approachable presences, and the
saying of grace before meat was a beautiful, fitting reminder of that
mysterious, invisible care and sustenance of our lives, which no longer
find any recognition in our daily routine: _Above all, worship thou the
gods, and bring great Ceres her yearly offerings_.

Another such wayside meal and another old couple live touchingly in our
memories. We were still in the broad, sun-swept valley of the Genesee,
our road lying along the edge of the wide, reed-grown flats and
water-meadows, bounded on the north by rolling hills. On our left hand,
parallel with the road, ran a sort of willowed moat banked by a
grass-gro