What a concentration of fragrance and beauty it was!  Golden and sweet to satiety! rich in sight, and touch, and smell!  Lizzie was enchanted, and ran off with her prize, hiding amongst the trees in the very coyness of ecstasy, as if any human eye, even mine, would be a restraint on her innocent raptures.

Here the very woman is revealed to us, her tender and lively disposition, her impulsiveness and childlike love of fun and delight in everything on earth.  We see in such a passage what her merit really is, the reason of our liking or “partiality” for her.  Her pleasure in everything makes everything interesting, and in displaying her feeling without art or disguise she succeeds in giving what we may call a literary expression to personal charm—­that quality which is almost untranslatable into written words.  Many women possess it; it is in them and issues from them, and is like an essential oil in a flower, but too volatile to be captured and made use of.  Furthermore, women when they write are as a rule even more conventional than men, more artificial and out of and away from themselves.

I do not know that any literary person will agree with me; I have gone aside to write about Miss Mitford mainly for my own satisfaction.  Frequently when I have wanted to waste half an hour pleasantly with a book I have found myself picking up “Our Village” from among many others, some waiting for a first perusal, and I wanted to know why this was so—­to find out, if not to invent, some reason for my liking which would not make me ashamed.

At Swallowfield we failed to find a place to stay at; there was no such place; and of the inns, named, I think, the “Crown,” “Cricketers,” “Bird-in-the-Hand,” and “George and Dragon,” only one, was said to provide accommodation for travellers as the law orders, but on going to the house we were informed that the landlord or his wife was just dead, or dangerously ill, I forget which, and they could take no one in.  Accordingly, we had to trudge back to Three Mile Cross and the old ramshackle, well-nigh ruinous inn there.  It was a wretched place, smelling of mould and dry-rot; however, it was not so bad after a fire had been lighted in the grate, but first the young girl who waited on us brought in a bundle of newspapers, which she proceeded to thrust up the chimney-flue and kindle, “to warm the flue and make the fire burn,” she explained.

On the following day, the weather being milder, we rambled on through woods and lanes, visiting several villages, and arrived in the afternoon at Silchester, where we had resolved to put up for the night.  By a happy chance we found a pleasant cottage on the common to stay at and pleasant people in it, so that we were glad to sit down for a week there, to loiter about the furzy waste, or prowl in the forest and haunt the old walls; but it was pleasant even indoors with that wide prospect before the window, the wooded country stretching many miles away to the hills of Kingsclere, blue in the distance and crowned with their beechen rings and groves.  Of Roman Calleva itself and the thoughts I had there I will write in the following chapter; here I will only relate how on Easter Sunday, two days after arriving, we went to morning service in the old church standing on a mound inside the walls, a mile from the village and common.