ck hidden
doors, I make no doubt.

We went back silently over the fields, with the wonder of the thing
still in our minds. To think of the pure wells bubbling and flashing,
by day and by night, in the hot summer weather, when the smell of the
wood lies warm in the sun; on cold winter nights under moon and stars,
for ever casting up the bright elastic jewel, that men call water, and
feeding the flowing stream that wanders to the sea. I was very full of
gratitude to the pure maiden saint that lent her name to the well and I
am sure she never had a more devout pair of worshippers.

So we sped on in silence, thinking--at least I thought--how the water
leaped and winked in the sacred wells, and how clear showed the chalk,
and the leaves that lay at the bottom: till at last we drew to our
other goal. "Here is the gate," said my companion at last.

On one side of the road stood a big substantial farm; on the other, by
a gate, was a little lodge. Here a key was given us by an old hearty
man, with plenty of advice of a simple and sententious kind, until I
felt as though I were enacting a part in some little _Pilgrim's
Progress_, and as if _Mr Interpreter_ himself, with a very grave smile,
would come out and have me into a room by myself, to see some odd
pleasant show that he had provided. But it was perhaps more in the
manner of _Evangelist_, for our guide pointed with his finger across a
very wide field, and showed us a wicket to enter in at.

Here was a great flat grassy pasture, the water again very near the
surface, as the long-leaved water-plants, that sprawled in all the
ditches, showed. But when we reached the wicket we seemed to be as far
removed from humanity as dwellers in a lonely isle. A few cattle
grazed drowsily, and the crisp tearing of the grass by their big lips
came softly across the pasture. Inside the wicket stood a single
ancient house, uninhabited, and festooned with ivy into a thing more
bush than house; though a small Tudor window peeped from the leaves,
like the little suspicious eye of some shaggy beast.

A stone's throw away lay a large square moat, full of water, all
fringed with ancient gnarled trees; the island which it enclosed was
overgrown with tiny thickets of dishevelled box-trees, and huge
sprawling laurels; we walked softly round it, and there was our goal: a
small church of a whitish stone, in the middle of a little close of old
sycamores in stiff summer leaf.

It stood so rem