ered
something delightful for ourselves to know how others have been affected
by it and how they describe it.

Of many other incidents of the kind I will, in this chapter, relate one
more, which has a historical or legendary interest. I was staying with
the companion of my walks at a village in Southern England in a district
new to us. We arrived on a Saturday, and next morning after breakfast
went out for a long walk. Turning into the first path across the fields
on leaving the village, we came eventually to an oak wood, which was
like an open forest, very wild and solitary. In half an hour's walk
among the old oaks and underwood we saw no sign of human occupancy, and
heard nothing but the woodland birds. We heard, and then saw, the cuckoo
for the first time that season, though it was but April the fourth. But
the cuckoo was early that spring and had been heard by some from the
middle of March. At length, about half-past ten o'clock, we caught sight
of a number of people walking in a kind of straggling procession by a
path which crossed ours at right angles, headed by a stout old man in
a black smock frock and brown leggings, who carried a big book in one
hand. One of the processionists we spoke to told us they came from a
hamlet a mile away on the borders of the wood and were on their way to
church. We elected to follow them, thinking that the church was at some
neighbouring village; to our surprise we found it was in the wood, with
no other building in sight--a small ancient-looking church built on a
raised mound, surrounded by a wide shallow grass-grown trench, on the
border of a marshy stream. The people went in and took their seats,
while we remained standing just by the door. Then the priest came from
the vestry, and seizing the rope vigorously, pulled at it for five
minutes, after which he showed us where to sit and the service began. It
was very pleasant there, with the door open to the sunlit forest and
the little green churchyard without, with a willow wren, the first I had
heard, singing his delicate little strain at intervals.

The service over, we rambled an hour longer in the wood, then returned
to our village, which had a church of its own, and our landlady, hearing
where we had been, told us the story, or tradition, of the little church
in the wood. Its origin goes very far back to early Norman times, when
all the land in this part was owned by one of William's followers on
whom it had been bestowed. H