I left him then, and went towards the house.  It was quite dark, and the windows, with their square, large panes and true proportions, shone out and made it home.  The room within received me like a friend.  The open chimney at its end, round which the house is built, was filled with beech logs burning; and the candles, which were set in brass, mixed their yellow light with that of the fire.  The long ceiling was low, as are the ceilings of Heaven.  And oak was here everywhere also:  in the beams and the shelves and the mighty table.  For oak was, and will be again, the chief wood of the weald.

When they put food and ale before me, it was of the kind which has been English ever since England began, and which perhaps good fortune will preserve over the breakdown of our generation, until we have England back again.  One could see the hops in the tankard, and one could taste the barley, until, more and more sunk into the plenitude of this good house, one could dare to contemplate, as though from a distant standpoint, the corruption and the imminent danger of the time through which we must lead our lives.  And, as I so considered the ruin of the great cities and their slime, I felt as though I were in a fortress of virtue and of health, which could hold out through the pressure of the war.  And I thought to myself:  “Perhaps even before our children are men, these parts which survive from a better order will be accepted as models, and England will be built again.”

This fantasy had not time, tenuous as it was, to disappear, before there came into that room a man whose gesture and bearing promised him to be an excellent companion, but in whose eyes I also perceived some light not ordinary.  He was of middle age, fifty or more; his hair was crisp and grey, his face brown, as though he had been much upon the sea.  He was tall in stature, and of some strength.  He saluted me, and, when he had eaten, asked me if I also were familiar with this inn.

“Very familiar,” I said; “and since I can enter it at any hour freely, it is now more familiar to me even than the houses that were once my homes.  For nowadays we, who work in the State and are not idle, must be driven from one place to another; and only the very rich have certitude and continuity.  But to them it is of no service; for they are too idle to take root in the soil.”

“Yet I was of their blood,” he said; “and there is in this county a home which should be mine.  But nothing to-day is capable of endurance.  I have not seen my home (though it is but ten miles from here) since I left it in my thirtieth year; and I too would rather come to this inn, which I know as you know it, than to any house in England; because I am certain of entry, and because I know what I shall find, and because what I find is what any man of this county should find, if the soul of it is not to disappear.”

“You, then,” I answered (we were now seated side by side before the fire with but one flickering candle behind us, and on the floor between us a port just younger than the host), “you, then, come here for much the same reason as do I?”