ith an
elaborate cap sat doing a large piece of needlework. She had a kind of
comfortable Puritanism about her; and might have been (perhaps she was)
the original Mrs. Grundy. A little more withdrawn into the parlour sat
a tall, strong, and serious girl, with a face of beautiful honesty and
a pair of scissors stuck in her belt, doing a small piece of needlework.
Two feet behind them sat a hulking labourer with a humorous face like
wood painted scarlet, with a huge mug of mild beer which he had not
touched, and probably would not touch for hours. On the hearthrug there
was an equally motionless cat; and on the table a copy of 'Household
Words'.

I was conscious of some atmosphere, still and yet bracing, that I had
met somewhere in literature. There was poetry in it as well as piety;
and yet it was not poetry after my particular taste. It was somehow at
once solid and airy. Then I remembered that it was the atmosphere in
some of Wordsworth's rural poems; which are full of genuine freshness
and wonder, and yet are in some incurable way commonplace. This was
curious; for Wordsworth's men were of the rocks and fells, and not of
the fenlands or flats. But perhaps it is the clearness of still water
and the mirrored skies of meres and pools that produces this crystalline
virtue. Perhaps that is why Wordsworth is called a Lake Poet instead
of a mountain poet. Perhaps it is the water that does it. Certainly the
whole of that town was like a cup of water given at morning.

After a few sentences exchanged at long intervals in the manner of
rustic courtesy, I inquired casually what was the name of the town. The
old lady answered that its name was Stilton, and composedly continued
her needlework. But I had paused with my mug in air, and was gazing at
her with a suddenly arrested concern. "I suppose," I said, "that it has
nothing to do with the cheese of that name." "Oh, yes," she answered,
with a staggering indifference, "they used to make it here."

I put down my mug with a gravity far greater than her own. "But this
place is a Shrine!" I said. "Pilgrims should be pouring into it from
wherever the English legend has endured alive. There ought to be a
colossal statue in the market-place of the man who invented Stilton
cheese. There ought to be another colossal statue of the first cow who
provided the foundations of it. There should be a burnished tablet let
into the ground on the spot where some courageous man first ate Stilton
ch