, and
seeing so many black-clothed people about, said to his driver:

'What is it--a wedding?'

'No, zurr, they say 'tis for the rector, like; he've a just been
acquitted for larceny.'

* * * * *

On the Tuesday following, the rector's ravaged face and red-grey hair
appeared in Mrs. Gloyn's doorway, and his voice, creaking like a saw,
said:

'Can you let me have a pound of butter? Pay you soon.'

What else could he do? Not even to God's elect does the sky always send
down manna.

1916.

IV

A STRANGE THING

Not very long ago, during a sojourn in a part of the West country never
yet visited by me, I went out one fine but rather cold March morning for
a long ramble. I was in one of those disillusioned moods that come to
writers, bankrupt of ideas, bankrupt of confidence, a prey to that
recurrent despair, the struggle with which makes the profession of the
pen--as a friend once said to me--"a manly one." "Yes"--I was thinking,
for all that the air was so brisk, and the sun so bright--"nothing comes
to me nowadays, no flashes of light, none of those suddenly shaped
visions that bring cheer and warmth to a poor devil's heart, and set his
brain and pen to driving on. A bad, bad business!" And my eyes,
wandering over the dip and rise, the woods, the moor, the rocks of that
fine countryside, took in the loveliness thereof with the profound
discontent of one who, seeing beauty, feels that he cannot render it.
The high lane-banks had just been pollarded, one could see right down
over the fields and gorse and bare woods tinged with that rosy brown of
beech and birch twigs, and the dusty saffron of the larches. And
suddenly my glance was arrested by something vivid, a sort of black and
white excitement in the air. "Aha!" I thought, "a magpie. Two! Three!
Good! Is it an omen?" The birds had risen at the bottom of a field,
their twining, fluttering voyage--most decorative of all bird
flights--was soon lost in the wood beyond, but something it had left
behind in my heart; I felt more hopeful, less inclined to think about
the failure of my spirit, better able to give myself up to this new
country I was passing through. Over the next rise in the very winding
lane I heard the sound of brisk church bells, and not three hundred
yards beyond came to a village green, where knots of men dressed in the
dark clothes, light ties, and bowler hats of village festivity, and of
women smartened up