or ever
and passed on from generation to generation. But it would really form
only one brief chapter in the long, long history of the village life
with its thousand chapters.

The truth is, if we live in fairly natural healthy condition, we are
just as happy as the lower animals. Some philosopher has said that the
chief pleasure in a man's life, as in that of a cow, consists in the
processes of mastication, deglutition, and digestion, and I am very
much inclined to agree with him. The thought of death troubles us very
little--we do not believe in it. A familiar instance is that of the
consumptive, whose doctor and friends have given him up and wait but
to see the end, while he, deluded man, still sees life, an illimitable,
green, sunlit prospect, stretching away to an infinite distance before
him.

Death is a reality only when it is very near, so close on us that we can
actually hear its swift stoaty feet rustling over the dead leaves, and
for a brief bitter space we actually know that his sharp teeth will
presently be in our throat.

Out in the blessed sunshine I listen to a blackcap warbling very
beautifully in a thorn bush near the cottage; then to the great shout
of excited joy of the children just released from school, as they rush
pell-mell forth and scatter about the village, and it strikes me that
the bird in the thorn is not more blithe-hearted than they. An old
rook--I fancy he is old, a many-wintered crow--is loudly caw-cawing from
the elm tree top; he has been abroad all day in the fields and has seen
his young able to feed themselves; and his own crop full, and now he is
calling to the others to come and sit there to enjoy the sunshine with
him. I doubt if he is happier than the human inhabitants of the village,
the field labourers and shepherds who have been out toiling since the
early hours, and are now busy in their own gardens and allotments or
placidly smoking their pipes at their cottage doors.

But I could not stay longer in that village of old unhappy memories
and of quiet, happy, uninteresting lives that leave no memory, so after
waiting two more days I forced myself to say good-bye to my poor old
landlady. Or rather to say "Good night," as I had to start at one
o'clock in the morning so as to have a couple, of hours before sunrise
at "The Stones" on my way to Salisbury. Her latest effort to detain me a
day longer had been made and there was no more to say.

"Do you know," she said in a low m