In some such mood I came along a lean, pale road south of the fens, and found myself in a large, quiet, and seemingly forgotten village.  It was one of those places that instantly produce a frame of mind which, it may be, one afterwards decks out with unreal details.  I dare say that grass did not really grow in the streets, but I came away with a curious impression that it did.  I dare say the marketplace was not literally lonely and without sign of life, but it left the vague impression of being so.  The place was large and even loose in design, yet it had the air of something hidden away and always overlooked.  It seemed shy, like a big yokel; the low roofs seemed to be ducking behind the hedges and railings; and the chimneys holding their breath.  I came into it in that dead hour of the afternoon which is neither after lunch nor before tea, nor anything else even on a half-holiday; and I had a fantastic feeling that I had strayed into a lost and extra hour that is not numbered in the twenty-four.

I entered an inn which stood openly in the market-place yet was almost as private as a private house.  Those who talk of “public-houses” as if they were all one problem would have been both puzzled and pleased with such a place.  In the front window a stout old lady in black with an elaborate cap sat doing a large piece of needlework.  She had a kind of comfortable Puritanism about her; and might have been (perhaps she was) the original Mrs. Grundy.  A little more withdrawn into the parlour sat a tall, strong, and serious girl, with a face of beautiful honesty and a pair of scissors stuck in her belt, doing a small piece of needlework.  Two feet behind them sat a hulking labourer with a humorous face like wood painted scarlet, with a huge mug of mild beer which he had not touched, and probably would not touch for hours.  On the hearthrug there was an equally motionless cat; and on the table a copy of ‘Household Words’.

I was conscious of some atmosphere, still and yet bracing, that I had met somewhere in literature.  There was poetry in it as well as piety; and yet it was not poetry after my particular taste.  It was somehow at once solid and airy.  Then I remembered that it was the atmosphere in some of Wordsworth’s rural poems; which are full of genuine freshness and wonder, and yet are in some incurable way commonplace.  This was curious; for Wordsworth’s men were of the rocks and fells, and not of the fenlands or flats.  But perhaps it is the clearness of still water and the mirrored skies of meres and pools that produces this crystalline virtue.  Perhaps that is why Wordsworth is called a Lake Poet instead of a mountain poet.  Perhaps it is the water that does it.  Certainly the whole of that town was like a cup of water given at morning.

After a few sentences exchanged at long intervals in the manner of rustic courtesy, I inquired casually what was the name of the town.  The old lady answered that its name was Stilton, and composedly continued her needlework.  But I had paused with my mug in air, and was gazing at her with a suddenly arrested concern.  “I suppose,” I said, “that it has nothing to do with the cheese of that name.”  “Oh, yes,” she answered, with a staggering indifference, “they used to make it here.”