drawn me hurrying to my window in dread that outrage was
afoot; and often the sounds of obscene singing from the road, where men
were blundering homewards late from the public-houses in the town, have
startled me out of my first sleep. Then, besides the distresses brought
upon the people by their own folly, there were others thrust upon them
by their economic condition. Of poverty, with its attendant sicknesses
and neglects, there has never been any end to the tales, while the
desolations due to accidents in the day's work, on the railway, or with
horses, or upon scaffoldings of buildings, or in collapsing
gravel-quarries, have become almost a commonplace. In short, there is no
room for sentimentality about the village life. Could its annals be
written they would make no idyll; they would be too much stained by
tragedy and vice and misery.

Yet the knowledge of all this--and it was not possible to live here long
without such knowledge--left the other impressions I have spoken of
quite unimpaired. Disorders were the exception, after all. As a general
rule the village character was genial, steadfast, self-respecting; one
could not but recognize in it a great fund of strength, a great
stability; nor could one help feeling that its main features--the
limitations and the grimness, as well as the surprising virtues--were
somehow closely related to that pleasant order of things suggested by
the hay-making sounds, by the smell of the wood-smoke, by the children's
May-day garlands. And, in fact, the relationship was essential. The
temper and manners of the older people turned out to have been actually
moulded by conditions of a true village kind, so that the same
folk-quality that sounded in the little garland song reappeared more
sternly in my neighbours' attitude towards their fate. Into this valley,
it is true, much had never come that had flourished and been forgotten
in English villages elsewhere. At no time had there been any of the
more graceful folk arts here; at no time any comely social life, such as
one reads of in Goldsmith's _Deserted Village_ or Gray's _Elegy_; but,
as I gradually learnt, the impoverished labouring people I talked to had
been, in many cases, born in the more prosperous conditions of a
self-supporting peasantry.

Bit by bit the truth come home to me, in the course of unconcerned
gossip, when my informants had no idea of the significance of those
stray scraps of information which they let fall. I wa