big, ancient church, by whom built one cannot divine, because there is no squire in the village, and the farmers and labourers could no more build such a church now than they could build a stellar observatory.  It would cost nowadays not less than ten thousand pounds, and there is no record of who gave the money or who the architect was.  It has a fine tower and a couple of solid bells; it has a few bits of good brass-work, a chandelier and some candlesticks, and it has a fine eighteenth-century tomb in a corner, with a huge slab of black basalt on the top, and a heraldic shield and a very obsequious inscription, which might apply to anyone, and yet could be true of nobody.  Why the particular old gentleman should want to sleep there, or who was willing to spend so much on his lying in state, no one knows, and I fear that no one cares except myself.

There are a few little bits of old glass in the church, in the traceries of the windows, just enough to show that some one liked making pretty things, and that some one else cared enough to pay for them.  And then there is a solid rectory by the church, inhabited for centuries by fellows of a certain Cambridge college.  I do not expect that they lived there very much.  Probably they rode over on Sundays, read two services, and had a cold luncheon in between; perhaps they visited a sick parishioner, and even came over on a week-day for a marriage or a funeral; and I daresay that in the summer, when the college was deserted, they came and lived there for a few weeks, rather bored, and longing for the warm combination room and the college port and the gossip and stir of the place.

That is really all, I think.  And what is there to love in all that?

Well, it is a little space of earth in which life has been going on for I daresay a thousand years.  The whole place has grown slowly up out of the love and care and work of man.  Perhaps there were nothing but little huts and hovels at first, with a tiny rubble church; then the houses grew a little bigger and better.  Perhaps it was emptied again by the Black Death, which took a long toll of victims hereabouts.  Shepherds, ploughmen, hedgers, ditchers, farmers, an ale-house-keeper, a shopkeeper or two, and a priest—­ that has been the village for a thousand years.  Patient, stupid, toilsome, unimaginative, kindly little lives, I daresay.  Not much interested in one another, ill educated, gossipy, brutish, superstitious, but surprised perhaps into sudden passions of love, and still more surprised perhaps by the joys of fatherhood and motherhood; with children of all ages growing up, pretty and engaging and dirty and amusing and naughty, fading one by one into dull and sober age, and into decrepitude, and the churchyard at the end of all!