M1Y OLD VILLAGE. 323 
could feel the rippling and the singing and the sparkling 
back through the centuries. The brook is dead, for 
when man goes nature ends. I dare say there is water 
there still, but it is not the brook; the brook is gone 
like John Brown’s soul. There used to be clouds cver 
the fields, white clouds in blue summer skies. I have 
lived a good deal on clouds ; they have been meat to 
me often ; they bring something to the spirit which even 
the trees do not. I see clouds now sometimes when the 
iron grip of hell permits for a minute or two ; they are 
very different clouds, and speak differently. I long for 
some of the old clouds that had no memories. There 
were nights in those times over those fields, not dark- 
ness, but Night, full of glowing suns and glowing 
richness of life that sprang up to meet them. The 
nights are there still; they are everywhere, nothing 
local in the night; but it is not the Night to me seen 
through the window. 
There used to be footpaths. Following one of them, 
the first field always had a good crop of grass ; over the 
next stile there was a great oak standing alone in the 
centre of the field, generally a great cart-horse under it, 
and a few rushes scattered about the furrows; the 
fourth was always full of the finest clover; in the fifth 
you could scent the beans on the hill, and there was a 
hedge like a wood, and a nest of the long-tailed tit ; the 
sixth had a runnel and blue forget-me-nots ; the seventh 
had a brooklet and scattered trees along it ; from the 
eighth you looked back on the slope and saw the thatched 
houses you had left behind under passing shadows, and 
rounded white clouds going straight for the distant hills, 
each cloud visibly bulging and bowed down like a bag. 
I cannot think how the distant thatched houses came to 
stand out with such clear definition and etched outline 
