1 78 THE SOUTH COUNTRY 



the ripples of an umbrageous ford — many a polished stile 

 and gate — the group of rigid but still gracious bowery- 

 thorns dotted with crimson haws in the middle of a 

 meadow, their boles and lower branches rubbed hard and 

 smooth and ruddy like iron by the cows — the ash staff 

 beginning to bend like its master, the old man upon the 

 roads who once wore scarlet and wound the horn for Mr. 



's hounds. Odd it is how old use sanctifies a little 



thing. There was once a hut where a good man, but a 

 poor and a weak and unwise, stayed all one fair summer 

 and talked of English roads — he was a lord of the roads, 

 at least of South Country roads — and of ships, which 

 he knew. Now on the first night of his stay, needing 

 a candlestick he kicked ofi the top of a pointed wooden 

 paling, so as to make a five-angled piece on which he 

 stuck the candle in its own grease. All through his stay 

 he used the candlestick, when he read the Divina Com- 

 tnedia and Pantagruel and Henry Brocken and recollected 

 airs of Italy and Spain, amidst the sound of nightjars and 

 two leafy streams : the light flickered out as he mused 

 about the open sea, calm but boundless and without 

 known harbour, on which he was drifting cheerfully, 

 regardless of Time, pied with nights and days. The hut 

 was burnt and the man went — to drown a little after- 

 wards with a hundred unlike himself in the sea — but 

 among nettle and dock the candlestick was picked up 

 safe. It had broken off straight and the simple shape 

 was pleasant; it was dark with age; along with the mound 

 and little pillar of wax remaining it had the shape of a 

 natural thing; and it was his. 



Animate as well as inanimate things are open to this 

 sanctification by age or use. I am not here thinking of 



