so
far away. We struck through a narrow lane, a green lane, dim with its
barriers of hawthorn; it led us to a superb old farmhouse, now rather
rudely jostled by the multiplied roads and by-ways that have reduced its
ancient appanage. It stands there in stubborn picturesqueness, doggedly
submitting to be pointed out and sketched. It is a wonderful image of
the domiciliary conditions of the past--cruelly complete; with bended
beams and joists, beneath the burden of gables, that seem to ache and
groan with memories and regrets. The short low windows, where lead and
glass combine equally to create an inward gloom, retain their opacity as
a part of the primitive idea of defence. Such an old house provokes on
the part of an American a luxury of respect. So propped and patched, so
tinkered with clumsy tenderness, clustered so richly about its central
English sturdiness, its oaken vertebrations, so humanised with ages
of use and touches of beneficent affection, it seemed to offer to our
grateful eyes a small rude symbol of the great English social order.
Passing out upon the highroad, we came to the common browsing-patch,
the "village-green" of the tales of our youth. Nothing was absent: the
shaggy mouse-coloured donkey, nosing the turf with his mild and huge
proboscis, the geese, the old woman--THE old woman, in person, with
her red cloak and her black bonnet, frilled about the face and
double-frilled beside her decent placid cheeks--the towering ploughman
with his white smock-frock puckered on chest and back, his short
corduroys, his mighty calves, his big red rural face. We greeted these
things as children greet the loved pictures in a storybook lost and
mourned and found again. We recognised them as one recognises the
handwriting on letter-backs. Beside the road we saw a ploughboy straddle
whistling on a stile, and he had the merit of being not only a ploughboy
but a Gainsborough. Beyond the stile, across the level velvet of a
meadow, a footpath wandered like a streak drawn by a finger over a
surface of fine plush. We followed it from field to field and from
stile to stile; it was all adorably the way to church. At the church we
finally arrived, lost in its rook-haunted churchyard, hidden from the
workday world by the broad stillness of pastures--a grey, grey tower, a
huge black yew, a cluster of village-graves with crooked headstones and
protrusions that had settled and sunk. The place seemed so to ache with
consecration th