ht or melting into a drizzle of silver. We made our way along the
rounded summits of these well-grazed heights--mild, breezy inland
downs--and descended through long-drawn slopes of fields, green to
cottage doors, to where a rural village beckoned us from its seat
among the meadows. Close beside it, I admit, the railway shoots
fiercely from its tunnel in the hills; and yet there broods upon this
charming hamlet an old-time quietude and privacy, which seems to make
it a violation of confidence to tell its name so far away. We struck
through a narrow lane, a green lane, dim with its height of hedges; it
led us to a superb old farm-house, now jostled by the multiplied lanes
and roads which have curtailed its ancient appanage. It stands in
stubborn picturesqueness, at the receipt of sad-eyed contemplation and
the sufferance of "sketches." I doubt whether out of Nuremberg--or
Pompeii!--you may find so forcible an image of the domiciliary genius
of the past. It is cruelly complete; its bended beams and joists,
beneath the burden of its gables, seem to ache and groan with memories
and regrets. The short, low windows, where lead and glass combine in
equal proportions to hint to the wondering stranger of the medieval
gloom within, still prefer their darksome office to the grace of
modern day.

Such an old house fills an American with an indefinable feeling of
respect. So propt and patched and tinkered with clumsy tenderness,
clustered so richly about its central English sturdiness, its oaken
vertebrations, so humanized with ages of use and touches of beneficent
affection, it seemed to offer to our grateful eyes a small, rude
synthesis of the great English social order. Passing out upon the
highroad, we came to the common browsing-patch, the "village green" of
the tales of our youth. Nothing was wanting; the shaggy, mouse-colored
donkey, nosing the turf with his mild and huge proboscis, the geese,
the old woman--the old woman, in person, with her red cloak and black
bonnet, frilled about the face and double-frilled beside her decent,
placid cheeks--the towering plowman with his white smock-frock,
puckered on chest and back, his short corduroys, his mighty calves,
his big, red, rural face. We greeted these things as children greet
the loved pictures in a story book, lost and mourned and found again.
It was marvelous how well we knew them. Beside the road we saw a
plow-boy straddle, whistling on a stile. Gainsborough might have
pa