was pleasant even indoors with that wide prospect before
the window, the wooded country stretching many miles away to the hills
of Kingsclere, blue in the distance and crowned with their beechen rings
and groves. Of Roman Calleva itself and the thoughts I had there I will
write in the following chapter; here I will only relate how on Easter
Sunday, two days after arriving, we went to morning service in the old
church standing on a mound inside the walls, a mile from the village and
common.

It came to pass that during the service the sun began to shine very
brightly after several days of cloud and misty windy wet weather, and
that brilliance and the warmth in it served to bring a butterfly out of
hiding; then another; then a third; red admirals all; and they were seen
through all the prayers, and psalms, and hymns, and lessons, and the
sermon preached by the white-haired Rector, fluttering against the
translucent glass, wanting to be out in that splendour and renew their
life after so long a period of suspension. But the glass was between
them and their world of blue heavens and woods and meadow flowers; then
I thought that after the service I would make an attempt to get them
out; but soon reflected that to release them it would be necessary to
capture them first, and that that could not be done without a ladder and
butterfly net. Among the women (ladies) on either side of and before
me there were no fewer than five wearing aigrettes of egret and
bird-of-paradise plumes in their hats or bonnets, and these five all
remained to take part in that ceremony of eating bread and drinking wine
in remembrance of an event supposed to be of importance to their souls,
here and hereafter. It saddened me to leave my poor red admirals in
their prison, beating their red wings against the coloured glass--to
leave them too in such company, where the aigrette wearers were
worshipping a little god of their own little imaginations, who did not
create and does not regard the swallow and dove and white egret and
bird-of-paradise, and who was therefore not my god and whose will as
they understood it was nothing to me.

It was a consolation when I went out, still thinking of the butterflies
in their prison, and stood by the old ruined walls grown over with
ivy and crowned with oak and holly trees, to think that in another two
thousand years there will be no archaeologist and no soul in Silchester,
or anywhere else in Britain, or in the world,