discovered certain signs of lassitude or
impatience in me, a desire to get up and go away and refresh myself in
the sun and wind. Poor old woman, she could not spring upon and hold me
fast when I attempted to move off, or pluck me back with her claws; she
could only gaze with fiercely pleading eyes and say nothing; and so,
without being fascinated, I very often sat on listening still when I
would gladly have been out-of-doors.

She was a good fluent talker; moreover, she studied her listener, and
finding that my interest in her own interminable story was becoming
exhausted she sought for other subjects, chiefly the strange events in
the lives of men and women who had lived in the village and who had long
been turned to dust. They were all more or less tragical in character,
and it astonished me to think that I had stayed in a dozen or twenty,
perhaps forty, villages in Wiltshire, and had heard stories equally
strange and moving in pretty well every one of them.

If each of these small centres possessed a scribe of genius, or at any
rate one with a capacity for taking pains, who would collect and print
in proper form these remembered events, every village would in time
have its own little library of local history, the volumes labelled
respectively, "A Village Tragedy", "The Fields of Dulditch", "Life's
Little Ironies", "Children's Children", and various others whose titles
every reader will be able to supply.

The effect of a long spell of listening to these unwritten tragedies was
sometimes strong enough to cloud my reason, for on going directly forth
into the bright sunshine and listening to the glad sounds which filled
the air, it would seem that this earth was a paradise and that
all creation rejoiced in everlasting happiness excepting man alone
who--mysterious being!--was born to trouble and disaster as the sparks
fly upwards. A pure delusion, due to our universal and ineradicable
passion for romance and tragedy. Tell a man of a hundred humdrum
lives which run their quiet contented course in this village, and the
monotonous unmoving story, or hundred stories, will go in at one ear
and out at the other. Therefore such stories are not told and not
remembered. But that which stirs our pity and terror--the frustrate
life, the glorious promise which was not fulfilled, the broken hearts
and broken fortunes, and passion, crime, remorse, retribution--all this
prints itself on the mind, and every such life is remembered f