SEPTEMBER 329 



September 6. Sunday was again very hot, but yesterday the 

 sky became overcast, so we took the opportunity to push forward 

 with the cutting of the beans on No. 26 and with the carting of 

 those that are already down. Beans are things which it is very diffi- 

 cult to deal with in hot weather, as the sun causes the pods to open 

 and the grain to shed out. When dead ripe, also, they are a 

 strange-looking crop, especially if, as is the case with this field, they 

 chance to have grown very tall. I recommend them to the attention 

 of Mr. Horton, the artist, who, with strange success, uses natural 

 objects in furtherance of a symbolical art that, to my mind, is full 

 of grim and spiritual imagination, and to Mr. Sime, to whom the 

 gift is given of portraying scenes connected with what the old 

 Egyptians called the Underworld as surely man seldom did before 

 him. Seen beneath a sullen sky, or in the light of an angry sunset, 

 there is something forbidding about a large expanse of their black, 

 ungainly stalks, dead, but still standing. The crop would be 

 eminently appropriate to the infernal fields, which one might 

 expect to approach through an avenue of shivering and melan- 

 choly blue gums, or of huge cedars hung with greybeard Spanish 

 moss, such as the traveller may see in the home of the ill- 

 fated Emperor Montezuma at Chapoltepec, in Mexico, and lurid 

 * nepenthe ' plants. 



To-day I heard by chance that in the course of the repairs of 

 Mettingham church, in this neighbourhood, a skeleton had been 

 discovered very peculiarly disposed. Knowing that such things 

 are apt to be disturbed or quickly bricked up out of sight, I 

 started at once to investigate the matter. Arriving at the church 

 just as the workmen were leaving, I asked them if they knew 

 where the bones lay, but they had no knowledge of any bones, 

 and could only show me one or two ancient stone coffin lids. 

 Then they departed and we began to search on our own account, 

 but for a long while without results. At length my companion 

 called to me that she had found them. On the south side of the 

 church is an annexe or chapel, dating apparently from the fifteenth 

 century, and in the wall of this annexe a recess, resembling the 



