anger
without an introduction or any excuse for such intrusion came down like
a wolf on his luncheon-table, he received me as if I had been an old
friend or one of his own kindred, and freely gave up his time to me for
the rest of that day. To count his years he was old: he had been vicar
of Coombe for half a century, but he was a young man still and had never
had a day's illness in his life--he did not know what a headache was. He
smoked with me, and to prove that he was not a total abstainer he drank
my health in a glass of port wine--very good wine. It was Coombe that
did it--its peaceful life, isolated from a distracting world in that
hollow hill, and the marvellous purity of its air. "Sitting there on my
lawn," he said, "you are six hundred feet above the sea, although in a
hollow four hundred feet deep." It was an ideal open-air room, round and
green, with the sky for a roof. In winter it was sometimes very cold,
and after a heavy fall of snow the scene was strange and impressive from
the tiny village set in its stupendous dazzling white bowl. Not only on
those rare arctic days, but at all times it was wonderfully quiet. The
shout of a child or the peaceful crow of a cock was the loudest sound
you heard. Once a gentleman from London town came down to spend a week
at the parsonage. Towards evening on the very first day he grew restless
and complained of the abnormal stillness. "I like a quiet place well
enough," he exclaimed, "but this tingling silence I can't stand!" And
stand it he wouldn't and didn't, for on the very next morning he took
himself off. Many years had gone by, but the vicar could not forget the
Londoner who had come down to invent a new way of describing the Coombe
silence. His tingling phrase was a joy for ever.

He took me to the church--one of the tiniest churches in the country,
just the right size for a church in a tiny village and assured me that
he had never once locked the door in his fifty years--day and night it
was open to any one to enter. It was a refuge and shelter from the storm
and the Tempest, and many a poor homeless wretch had found a dry place
to sleep in that church during the last half a century. This man's
feeling of pity and tenderness for the very poor, even the outcast and
tramp, was a passion. But how strange all this would sound in the ears
of many country clergymen! How many have told me when I have gone to the
parsonage to "borrow the key" that it had been found necessa