HAPPY VILLAGE 9 



not one of Old George s quotations, which consisted 

 wholly of proverbs with a line or two from the hymns or 

 the Bible. Some of us went to see him after the surgeon 

 had left ; and made sympathetic enquiries . &quot; No/ he 

 said, &quot; I don t know as it hurt much ; but I wish it had 

 been the other eye. It s the better one that s gone &quot; 

 and that was all. He had a green old age. He was quite 

 happy to wander down and look at the cows and sit in 

 his stiff arm-chair in the cottage and have a few visitors 

 and be told the latest about &quot; our children/ to wit, the 

 family of the master he had served for some forty years. 

 He died happy, in his eighty-fourth year, and had a hun 

 dred pounds in the savings bank. 



The village characters, except as they are spoiled by 

 later thinking, leave an impression of the same simple 

 and stable character as the landscape. Distinctest of all 

 in this relationship with what older people call inanimate 

 objects is the village schoolmaster, the loneliest and stern 

 est feature in the landscape. Indeed he represented an 

 intrusive stratum. There are no men like him now. 

 They died with the new education. Goldsmith honoured 

 his schoolmaster for preserving his wit even among the 

 desert of sweet Auburn, where the children laughed at 

 his jests &quot; for many a jest had he.&quot; Old Melford, of the 

 Midland hamlet, never jested but once, and that by acci 

 dent. One would not have let him find out his slip for 

 worlds. A pun would have hurt him as much as that 

 fellow spirit among Oxford dons, to whom Lewis 

 Carroll propounded a play upon words. &quot; Why, sir/ 

 he said, after consideration, &quot; it is a false analogy, a mere 

 jest.&quot; The aberration in verbal humour happened in this 

 way. Forgetful of Puritan morals, two small children 

 came into school one Sunday morning with bunches of 

 fresh violets in their hands, and the playful sight on such 



