1 82 AN ANGLER'S HOURS xi 



But it does not follow that Lady Maud 

 knows a bowl when she sees it ; she 

 may not have had actual experience of one. 

 Perhaps, poor unquiet lady, she took them 

 to be skulls, relics of the rude forefathers of 

 the hamlet, a mistake natural enough for a 

 lady long dead and probably unlearned in 

 anatomy, and, if it were not Sunday, I 

 would almost say permissible when I con- 

 sider the descendants of the rude forefathers 

 and the seeming texture of their heads. If 

 that was her thought it was but becoming 

 in her to grieve over their unburied state 

 and to carry them over to the churchyard 

 without the garden, there to repose decently 

 in some hollow tomb. 



Truly comfort is a great stimulus to un- 

 prejudiced thought ; I am able to look at a 

 question from all sides to-day, and on further 

 consideration I see that I am doing Lady 

 Maud a great injustice in imputing to her 

 ignorance of skulls. No doubt she saw 

 plenty of them ; she lived in the good old 

 times when skeletons and even horrid corpses 

 dabbled in gore were to be met at every 

 turn. Horrors and yet more horrors made 

 up the life of man ; one wonders that he 



