rather madly on the organ, a set of unruly
choir-boys; a handsome stained-glass west window, and, finally, a nice
little chat with the vicar." It was not in these things; it was a sense
of something strange in the mind, of something in some way unlike all
other places and people and experiences. The sensation was like that of
the reader who becomes absorbed in Henry Newbolt's romance of The Old
Country, who identifies himself with the hero and unconsciously, or
without quite knowing how, slips back out of this modern world into
that of half a thousand years ago. It is the same familiar green land in
which he finds himself--the same old country and the same sort of people
with feelings and habits of life and thought unchangeable as the colour
of grass and flowers, the songs of birds and the smell of the earth, yet
with a difference. I recognized it chiefly in the parish priest I had
been conversing with; for one thing, his mediaeval mind evidently did
not regard a sense of humour and of the grotesque as out of place in or
on a sacred building. If it had been lighter I should have looked at
the roof for an effigy of a semi-human toad-like creature smiling down
mockingly at the worshippers as they came and went.

On departing it struck me that it would assuredly be a mistake to return
to this village and look at it again by the common lights of day. No,
it was better to keep the impressions I had gathered unspoilt; even to
believe, if I could, that no such place existed, but that it had
existed exactly as I had found it, even to the unruly choir-boys,
the ascetic-looking priest with a strange light in his eyes, and the
worshippers who kept pet toads in the church. They were not precisely
like people of the twentieth century. As for the eccentric middle-aged
or elderly person whose portrait adorned the west window, she was
not the lady I knew something about, but another older Lady Y--, who
flourished some six or seven centuries ago.

Chapter Three: Walking and Cycling

We know that there cannot be progression without retrogression, or gain
with no corresponding loss; and often on my wheel, when flying along
the roads at a reckless rate of very nearly nine miles an hour, I have
regretted that time of limitations, galling to me then, when I was
compelled to go on foot. I am a walker still, but with other means of
getting about I do not feel so native to the earth as formerly. That is
a loss. Yet a poorer walker it