THE FAERY YEAR 



style, at his own season, much restricted. Other- 

 wise he would have no cause to complain of change 

 about the place or folk : for this is the Anglo-Saxon 

 hamlet of Domesday, its name scarcely changed in 

 the spelling by eight centuries. Mead and marsh, 

 osier copse, elmy lane and uplands, the whole place 

 is steeped in a wonderful dewy freshness and a deep 

 repose, things diverse, yet here never clashing 

 always the radiant morning of youth, always the 

 accumulating quiet of age. 



Less than a score of cottages, mostly thatched, 

 a mill, the angling inn, and the seventeenth-century 

 farmhouse, a population of fifty or, all told, sixty 

 at harvest time this is the hamlet. The mill-wheel 

 has ceased to turn, like a dozen others from source 

 to sea on the stream. The trade of the old small 

 mills is done. In some places, as though in sym- 

 pathy, the very head springs have ceased to flow, 

 so that you see mouldering woodwork and rusty 

 iron gear lying on the dry bed of the once brook 

 there was a brook, whose waters, trembling off the 

 slow wheel, caught and broke the sunlight to a 

 spray of sapphire ruby fragments. 



But, if the wheel has stopped, the mill of the 

 angling hamlet has suffered in no other way. It 

 was never deeper in the meadow grasses than in 

 the May-fly season nowadays ; its old willows never 

 sprinkled a richer gold flour than they will this 

 month and next. When the springs are high about 

 this elmy hamlet, and the even elmier angling vil- 

 lage or group of hamlets a mile up-stream, crystal 



56 



