I. to build a chapel on his own land, "by Reason of the Floods at some
time, especially in Winter, which hindered his Accesse to the
Mother-Church." In the garden of this hall, a modest country-house, a type
of the ordinary run of English homes, stands a chapel--not the original
one, but built on its site--and from it one has a view of the level
ground, the village and the river, evidently still liable to floods. The
part of the county that joins Gloucestershire is rich in apple-orchards,
which I remember one year in the blossoming-time, while the early grass,
already green and wavy, fringed the foot of the trees, and by the road as
we passed we looked through hedges and over low walls into gardens full of
crocuses, snowdrops, narcissuses, early pansies and daffodils, for spring
gardens have become rather a mania in England within ten or twelve years.
Here and there older fragments of wall lined the road, and over one of
these, from a height of eight feet or so, dropped a curtain of glossy,
pointed leaves, making a background for the star-shaped yellow blossoms,
nearly as large as passion-flowers, of the St. John's-wort, with their
forest of stamens standing out like golden threads from the heart of the
blossom. At the rectory of the village in question was a very clever man,
an unusual specimen of a clergyman, a thorough man of the world and a born
actor. His father and brother had been famous on the stage, and he himself
struck one as having certainly missed his calling, though in his
appearance and manner he was as free as possible from that discontented
uneasiness with which an underbred person alone carries a burden. His
duties were punctually fulfilled and his parish-work always in order, yet
he went out a good deal and stayed at large houses, where he was much in
request for his marvellous powers of telling stories. This he did
systematically, having a notebook to help his memory as to what anecdotes
he had told and to whom, so that he never repeated himself to the same
audience. Besides stories which he told dramatically, and with a
professional air that made it evident that to seem inattentive would be an
offence, he had theories which he would bring out in a startling way,
supporting them by quotations apparently very learned, and practically,
for the sort of audience he had, irrefutable: one was on the subject of
the ark, which he averred to be still buried in the eternal snows of Mount
Ararat, and discoverable