lake to
couch on the herbage, while one on a little height is lowing for the
milkmaid and her pails. Along the road I see the labourers coming home
for supper, while the sun setting behind me makes the village windows
blaze; and so I take out my oars, and pull leisurely through waters
faintly flushed with evening colours.

I do not think that Mr. Buckle could have written his "History of
Civilization" in Dreamthorp, because in it books, conversation, and the
other appurtenances of intellectual life, are not to be procured. I am
acquainted with birds, and the building of nests--with wild-flowers,
and the seasons in which they blow,--but with the big world far away,
with what men and women are thinking, and doing, and saying, I am
acquainted only through the _Times_, and the occasional magazine or
review, sent by friends whom I have not looked upon for years, but by
whom, it seems, I am not yet forgotten. The village has but few
intellectual wants, and the intellectual supply is strictly measured by
the demand. Still there is something. Down in the village, and
opposite the curiously-carved fountain, is a schoolroom which can
accommodate a couple of hundred people on a pinch. There are our
public meetings held. Musical entertainments have been given there by
a single performer. In that schoolroom last winter an American
biologist terrified the villagers, and, to their simple understandings,
mingled up the next world with this. Now and again some rare bird of
an itinerant lecturer covers dead walls with posters, yellow and blue,
and to that schoolroom we flock to hear him. His rounded periods the
eloquent gentleman devolves amidst a respectful silence. His audience
do not understand him, but they see that the clergyman does, and the
doctor does; and so they are content, and look as attentive and wise as
possible. Then, in connexion with the schoolroom, there is a public
library, where books are exchanged once a month. This library is a
kind of Greenwich Hospital for disabled novels and romances. Each of
these books has been in the wars; some are unquestionable antiques.
The tears of three generations have fallen upon their dusky pages. The
heroes and the heroines are of another age than ours. Sir Charles
Grandison is standing with his hat under his arm. Tom Jones plops from
the tree into the water, to the infinite distress of Sophia. Moses
comes home from market with his stock of shagreen spectacles. Lo