n particular the church tower, in comparison with the
little street of cottages which compose the village, that the traveler
is apt to cast his mind back to the Middle Ages, as the only time when
so much piety could have been kept alive. So great a trust in the Church
can surely not belong to our day, and he goes on to conjecture that
every one of the villagers has reached the extreme limit of human life.
Such are the reflections of the superficial stranger, and his sight of
the population, as it is represented by two or three men hoeing in a
turnip-field, a small child carrying a jug, and a young woman shaking
a piece of carpet outside her cottage door, will not lead him to see
anything very much out of keeping with the Middle Ages in the village
of Disham as it is to-day. These people, though they seem young enough,
look so angular and so crude that they remind him of the little pictures
painted by monks in the capital letters of their manuscripts. He only
half understands what they say, and speaks very loud and clearly, as
though, indeed, his voice had to carry through a hundred years or
more before it reached them. He would have a far better chance of
understanding some dweller in Paris or Rome, Berlin or Madrid, than
these countrymen of his who have lived for the last two thousand years
not two hundred miles from the City of London.

The Rectory stands about half a mile beyond the village. It is a large
house, and has been growing steadily for some centuries round the great
kitchen, with its narrow red tiles, as the Rector would point out to
his guests on the first night of their arrival, taking his brass
candlestick, and bidding them mind the steps up and the steps down,
and notice the immense thickness of the walls, the old beams across the
ceiling, the staircases as steep as ladders, and the attics, with their
deep, tent-like roofs, in which swallows bred, and once a white owl.
But nothing very interesting or very beautiful had resulted from the
different additions made by the different rectors.

The house, however, was surrounded by a garden, in which the Rector took
considerable pride. The lawn, which fronted the drawing-room windows,
was a rich and uniform green, unspotted by a single daisy, and on the
other side of it two straight paths led past beds of tall, standing
flowers to a charming grassy walk, where the Rev. Wyndham Datchet would
pace up and down at the same hour every morning, with a sundial to
me