exploded?  Has a conspiracy been discovered?  Has a revolution broken out?  The excitement has subsided, and one of them, perched on the old banner-staff, chatters confidentially to himself as he, sideways, eyes the world beneath him.  Floating about thus, time passes swiftly, for, before I know where I am, the kine have withdrawn from the lake to couch on the herbage, while one on a little height is lowing for the milkmaid and her pails.  Along the road I see the labourers coming home for supper, while the sun setting behind me makes the village windows blaze; and so I take out my oars, and pull leisurely through waters faintly flushed with evening colours.

I do not think that Mr. Buckle could have written his “History of Civilization” in Dreamthorp, because in it books, conversation, and the other appurtenances of intellectual life, are not to be procured.  I am acquainted with birds, and the building of nests—­with wild-flowers, and the seasons in which they blow,—­but with the big world far away, with what men and women are thinking, and doing, and saying, I am acquainted only through the Times, and the occasional magazine or review, sent by friends whom I have not looked upon for years, but by whom, it seems, I am not yet forgotten.  The village has but few intellectual wants, and the intellectual supply is strictly measured by the demand.  Still there is something.  Down in the village, and opposite the curiously-carved fountain, is a schoolroom which can accommodate a couple of hundred people on a pinch.  There are our public meetings held.  Musical entertainments have been given there by a single performer.  In that schoolroom last winter an American biologist terrified the villagers, and, to their simple understandings, mingled up the next world with this.  Now and again some rare bird of an itinerant lecturer covers dead walls with posters, yellow and blue, and to that schoolroom we flock to hear him.  His rounded periods the eloquent gentleman devolves amidst a respectful silence.  His audience do not understand him, but they see that the clergyman does, and the doctor does; and so they are content, and look as attentive and wise as possible.  Then, in connexion with the schoolroom, there is a public library, where books are exchanged once a month.  This library is a kind of Greenwich Hospital for disabled novels and romances.  Each of these books has been in the wars; some are unquestionable antiques.  The tears of three generations have fallen upon their dusky pages.  The heroes and the heroines are of another age than ours.  Sir Charles Grandison is standing with his hat under his arm.  Tom Jones plops from the tree into the water, to the infinite distress of Sophia.  Moses comes home from market with his stock of shagreen spectacles.  Lovers, warriors, and villains,—­as dead to the present generation of readers as Cambyses,—­are weeping, fighting, and intriguing.  These books, tattered and torn