me as if I had been an old friend or one of his own kindred, and freely gave up his time to me for the rest of that day.  To count his years he was old:  he had been vicar of Coombe for half a century, but he was a young man still and had never had a day’s illness in his life—­he did not know what a headache was.  He smoked with me, and to prove that he was not a total abstainer he drank my health in a glass of port wine—­very good wine.  It was Coombe that did it—­its peaceful life, isolated from a distracting world in that hollow hill, and the marvellous purity of its air.  “Sitting there on my lawn,” he said, “you are six hundred feet above the sea, although in a hollow four hundred feet deep.”  It was an ideal open-air room, round and green, with the sky for a roof.  In winter it was sometimes very cold, and after a heavy fall of snow the scene was strange and impressive from the tiny village set in its stupendous dazzling white bowl.  Not only on those rare arctic days, but at all times it was wonderfully quiet.  The shout of a child or the peaceful crow of a cock was the loudest sound you heard.  Once a gentleman from London town came down to spend a week at the parsonage.  Towards evening on the very first day he grew restless and complained of the abnormal stillness.  “I like a quiet place well enough,” he exclaimed, “but this tingling silence I can’t stand!” And stand it he wouldn’t and didn’t, for on the very next morning he took himself off.  Many years had gone by, but the vicar could not forget the Londoner who had come down to invent a new way of describing the Coombe silence.  His tingling phrase was a joy for ever.

He took me to the church—­one of the tiniest churches in the country, just the right size for a church in a tiny village and assured me that he had never once locked the door in his fifty years—­day and night it was open to any one to enter.  It was a refuge and shelter from the storm and the Tempest, and many a poor homeless wretch had found a dry place to sleep in that church during the last half a century.  This man’s feeling of pity and tenderness for the very poor, even the outcast and tramp, was a passion.  But how strange all this would sound in the ears of many country clergymen!  How many have told me when I have gone to the parsonage to “borrow the key” that it had been found necessary to keep the church door locked, to prevent damage, thefts, etc.  “Have you never had anything stolen?” I asked him.  Yes, once, a great many years ago, the church plate had been taken away in the night.  But it was recovered:  the thief had taken it to the top of the hill and thrown it into the dewpond there, no doubt intending to take it out and dispose of it at some more convenient time.  But it was found, and had ever since then been kept safe at the vicarage.  Nothing of value to tempt a man to steal was kept in the church.  He had never locked it, but once in his fifty years it had been locked against him by the churchwardens.