Chance having now put me in her way, she concluded after a few preliminary or tentative talks that she had got hold of an ideal listener; but she feared to lose me—­she wanted me to go on listening for ever.  That was the reason of that painfully intense hungry look in her eyes; it was because she discovered certain signs of lassitude or impatience in me, a desire to get up and go away and refresh myself in the sun and wind.  Poor old woman, she could not spring upon and hold me fast when I attempted to move off, or pluck me back with her claws; she could only gaze with fiercely pleading eyes and say nothing; and so, without being fascinated, I very often sat on listening still when I would gladly have been out-of-doors.

She was a good fluent talker; moreover, she studied her listener, and finding that my interest in her own interminable story was becoming exhausted she sought for other subjects, chiefly the strange events in the lives of men and women who had lived in the village and who had long been turned to dust.  They were all more or less tragical in character, and it astonished me to think that I had stayed in a dozen or twenty, perhaps forty, villages in Wiltshire, and had heard stories equally strange and moving in pretty well every one of them.

If each of these small centres possessed a scribe of genius, or at any rate one with a capacity for taking pains, who would collect and print in proper form these remembered events, every village would in time have its own little library of local history, the volumes labelled respectively, “A Village Tragedy”, “The Fields of Dulditch”, “Life’s Little Ironies”, “Children’s Children”, and various others whose titles every reader will be able to supply.

The effect of a long spell of listening to these unwritten tragedies was sometimes strong enough to cloud my reason, for on going directly forth into the bright sunshine and listening to the glad sounds which filled the air, it would seem that this earth was a paradise and that all creation rejoiced in everlasting happiness excepting man alone who—­mysterious being!—­was born to trouble and disaster as the sparks fly upwards.  A pure delusion, due to our universal and ineradicable passion for romance and tragedy.  Tell a man of a hundred humdrum lives which run their quiet contented course in this village, and the monotonous unmoving story, or hundred stories, will go in at one ear and out at the other.  Therefore such stories are not told and not remembered.  But that which stirs our pity and terror—­the frustrate life, the glorious promise which was not fulfilled, the broken hearts and broken fortunes, and passion, crime, remorse, retribution—­all this prints itself on the mind, and every such life is remembered for ever and passed on from generation to generation.  But it would really form only one brief chapter in the long, long history of the village life with its thousand chapters.