and in and out, among the grey branches, binding them together, and
resting its round, dark cluster of massed leaves on the topmost boughs.
That green disc was the ivy-serpent's flat head and was the head of the
whole tree, and there it had its eyes, which gazed for ever over the
wide downs, watching all living things, cattle and sheep and birds and
men in their comings and goings; and although fast-rooted in the earth,
following them, too, in all their ways, even as it had followed him, to
break him at last.

POSTSCRIPT

I

DEAD MAN'S PLACK

One of my literary friends, who has looked at the Dead Man's Plack in
manuscript, has said by way of criticism that Elfrida's character is
veiled. I am not to blame for that; for have I not already said, by
implication at all events, in the Preamble, that my knowledge of her
comes from outside. Something, or, more likely, _Somebody_, gave me her
history, and it has occurred to me that this same Somebody was no such
obscurity as, let us say, the Monk John of Glastonbury, who told the
excavators just where to look for the buried chapel of Edgar, king and
_saint_. I suspect that my informant was some one who knew more about
Elfrida than any mere looker-on, monk or nun, and gossip-gatherer of her
own distant day; and this suspicion or surmise was suggested by the
following incident:

After haunting Dead Man's Plack, where I had my vision, I rambled in and
about Wherwell on account of its association, and in one of the cottages
in the village I became acquainted with an elderly widow, a woman in
feeble health, but singularly attractive in her person and manner.
Indeed, before making her acquaintance I had been informed by some of
her relations and others in the place that she was not only the best
person to seek information from, but was also the sweetest person in the
village. She was a native born; her family had lived there for
generations, and she was of that best South Hampshire type with an oval
face, olive-brown skin, black eyes and hair, and that soft melancholy
expression in the eyes common in Spanish women and not uncommon in the
dark-skinned Hampshire women. She had been taught at the village school,
and having attracted the attention and interest of the great lady of the
place on account of her intelligence and pleasing manners, she was taken
when quite young as lady's-maid, and in this employment continued for
many years until her marriage to a villager.