The church has stood since the Conquest, and, as it still stands, grey and fine, with its mass of square tower, and despite the state of its roof, is not yet given wholly to the winds and weather, it will, no doubt, stand a few centuries longer.  The Court, however, cannot long remain a possible habitation, if it is not given a new lease of life.  I do not mean that it will crumble to-morrow, or the day after, but we should not think it habitable now, even while we should admit that nothing could be more delightful to look at.  The cottages in the village are already, many of them, amazing, when regarded as the dwellings of human beings.  How long ago the cottagers gave up expecting that anything in particular would be done for them, I do not know.  I am impressed by the fact that they are an unexpecting people.  Their calm non-expectancy fills me with interest.  Only centuries of waiting for their superiors in rank to do things for them, and the slow formation of the habit of realising that not to submit to disappointment was no use, could have produced the almost serenity of their attitude.  It is all very well for newborn republican nations—­meaning my native land—­to sniff sternly and say that such a state of affairs is an insult to the spirit of the race.  Perhaps it is now, but it was not apparently centuries ago, which was when it all began and when ‘Man’ and the ‘Race’ had not developed to the point of asking questions, to which they demand replies, about themselves and the things which happened to them.  It began in the time of Egbert and Canute, and earlier, in the days of the Druids, when they used peacefully to allow themselves to be burned by the score, enclosed in wicker idols, as natural offerings to placate the gods.  The modern acceptance of things is only a somewhat attenuated remnant of the ancient idea.  And this is what I have to deal with and understand.  When I begin to do the things I am going to do, with the aid of your practical advice, if I have your approval, the people will be at first rather afraid of me.  They will privately suspect I am mad.  It will, also, not seem at all unlikely that an American should be of unreasoningly extravagant and flighty mind.  Stornham, having long slumbered in remote peace through lack of railroad convenience, still regards America as almost of the character of wild rumour.  Rosy was their one American, and she disappeared from their view so soon that she had not time to make any lasting impression.  I am asking myself how difficult, or how simple, it will be to quite understand these people, and to make them understand me.  I greatly doubt its being simple.  Layers and layers and layers of centuries must be far from easy to burrow through.  They look simple, they do not know that they are not simple, but really they are not.  Their point of view has been the point of view of the English peasant so many hundred years that an American point of view, which has had no more than a trifling century and a half to form