“Batrachians,” I interposed, echoing as well as I could the tone in which he had rebuked me before.

“Very well, batrachians—­I am not a naturalist.  But the impression created on their minds appeared to be that I was rather an odd person in the pulpit.  When the time came to pull the old church down the toad-keepers were bidden to remove their pets, which they did with considerable reluctance.  What became of them I do not know—­I never inquired.  I used to have a careful inspection made of the floor to make sure that these creatures were not put back in the new building, and I am happy to think it is not suited to their habits.  The floors are very well cemented, and are dry and clean.”

Having finished his story he invited me to go to the parsonage and get some refreshment.  “I daresay you are thirsty,” he said.

But it was getting late; it was almost dark in the church by now, although the figure of the golden-haired saint still glowed in the window and gazed at us out of her blue eyes.  “I must not waste more of your time,” I added.  “There are your boys still patiently waiting to begin their practice—­such nice quiet fellows!”

“Yes, they are,” he returned a little bitterly, a sudden accent of weariness in his voice and no trace now of what I had seen in his countenance a little while ago—­the light that shone and brightened behind the dark eye and the little play about the corners of the mouth as of dimpling motions on the surface of a pool.

And in that new guise, or disguise, I left him, the austere priest with nothing to suggest the whimsical or grotesque in his cold ascetic face.  Recrossing the bridge I stood a little time and looked once more at the noble church tower standing dark against the clear amber-coloured sky, and said to myself:  “Why, this is one of the oddest incidents of my life!  Not that I have seen or heard anything very wonderful—­just a small rustic village, one of a thousand in the land; a big new church in which some person was playing rather madly on the organ, a set of unruly choir-boys; a handsome stained-glass west window, and, finally, a nice little chat with the vicar.”  It was not in these things; it was a sense of something strange in the mind, of something in some way unlike all other places and people and experiences.  The sensation was like that of the reader who becomes absorbed in Henry Newbolt’s romance of The Old Country, who identifies himself with the hero and unconsciously, or without quite knowing how, slips back out of this modern world into that of half a thousand years ago.  It is the same familiar green land in which he finds himself—­the same old country and the same sort of people with feelings and habits of life and thought unchangeable as the colour of grass and flowers, the songs of birds and the smell of the earth, yet with a difference.  I recognized it chiefly in the parish priest I had been conversing with; for one thing, his mediaeval mind evidently did not regard a sense of humour and of the grotesque as out of place in or on a sacred building.  If it had been lighter I should have looked at the roof for an effigy of a semi-human toad-like creature smiling down mockingly at the worshippers as they came and went.