Library, if ever it came into existence. He took the path
through the fields; it was pleasanter than the road. At the first
stile a group of village boys, loutish young fellows all dressed in the
hideous ill-fitting black which makes a funeral of every English Sunday
and holiday, were assembled, drearily guffawing as they smoked their
cigarettes. They made way for Henry Wimbush, touching their caps as he
passed. He returned their salute; his bowler and face were one in their
unruffled gravity.

In Sir Ferdinando's time, he reflected, in the time of his son, Sir
Julius, these young men would have had their Sunday diversions even at
Crome, remote and rustic Crome. There would have been archery, skittles,
dancing--social amusements in which they would have partaken as members
of a conscious community. Now they had nothing, nothing except Mr.
Bodiham's forbidding Boys' Club and the rare dances and concerts
organised by himself. Boredom or the urban pleasures of the county
metropolis were the alternatives that presented themselves to these poor
youths. Country pleasures were no more; they had been stamped out by the
Puritans.

In Manningham's Diary for 1600 there was a queer passage, he remembered,
a very queer passage. Certain magistrates in Berkshire, Puritan
magistrates, had had wind of a scandal. One moonlit summer night they
had ridden out with their posse and there, among the hills, they had
come upon a company of men and women, dancing, stark naked, among the
sheepcotes. The magistrates and their men had ridden their horses into
the crowd. How self-conscious the poor people must suddenly have felt,
how helpless without their clothes against armed and booted horsemen!
The dancers were arrested, whipped, gaoled, set in the stocks; the
moonlight dance is never danced again. What old, earthy, Panic rite came
to extinction here? he wondered. Who knows?--perhaps their ancestors had
danced like this in the moonlight ages before Adam and Eve were so much
as thought of. He liked to think so. And now it was no more. These weary
young men, if they wanted to dance, would have to bicycle six miles to
the town. The country was desolate, without life of its own, without
indigenous pleasures. The pious magistrates had snuffed out for ever a
little happy flame that had burned from the beginning of time.

"And as on Tullia's tomb one lamp burned clear, Unchanged for fifteen
hundred year..."

He repeated the lines to himself, and w