Sometimes for days together, a whole week, perhaps, I may never set foot outside the area of the village. These are generally times when the tide of work runs high, and one must keep steadily pulling to make any real headway against it. They are days, and nights too, of necessarily close and constant application, varied, however, by odd half-hours of quiet loafing hither and thither about the village—delicious moments pilfered recklessly from the eternal grindstone of the study, to be remembered for their pipes smoked and their talks with old acquaintance at street corners, long after the labour which sweetened them has passed, maybe fruitlessly, away.

So it has happened this last week, during which the season has journeyed out of April into May. At one time or another in the chain of busy hours, I have renewed acquaintance with all my favourite bits of old Windlecombe, and the personalities from which they are inseparable.Getting out into the sunshine, I usually find my steps turning, first of all, towards the smithy. It stands just behind the Clemmers’ cottage, its yawning black doorway wreathed about with elder branches full of white blossom, and deep green spray reminding one of the foliage in old paintings, which looks as if it were compounded of indigo and gamboge. I never knew a smith who could beat out such ear-assuaging music from an anvil as young Tom Clemmer. If you hear it in passing, you are bound to turn aside, and stand for awhile looking in at the door, and fall adreaming under the spell of its quiet melody. But standing out there, with the sun across your eyes, you can see nothing at first save a sputtering red spot of fire, and hear nothing but the chime of hammer and anvil, to which the gruff, wheezy bellows add a sort of complaining undertone. When you catch sight of young Tom Clemmer, it is to make him out as one of great height, immensely broad in the shoulder and lean of hip—a peg-top figure of a man. Through the smoke and flying sparks he shows you a black face with a pair of grey eyes, deep-set, glittering, mirthful, and a great head covered with crisp flaxen curls. He is of the old South-Saxon blood through and through.

But at the wheelwright’s yard, a little farther along the green, you are confronted with quite a different breed of Sussex peasant. The Drays are thickset, of middle height; and dark, almost swarthy of feature. Up in the churchyard, you come upon the two names at every step. You read Clemmer, Dray, Dray and Clemmer, everywhere amidst the moss-grown stones, in varying degrees of illegibility back for hundreds of years. The two families are by far the oldest in Windlecombe. You note that the Clemmers were nearly always Thomases, and the Drays for the most part Daniels; while the females of both races were, and are still, either Marthas or Janes. Looking over the ranks of this silent company, it is impossible to think of any member of the former clan as other than long-limbed, grey-eyed and fair; and a Dray, even though he were a serf under Harold, who was not dark of glance and visage would be an anomaly unthinkable. Young Daniel now—as you pass by and see him bending to and fro over his cavern of a sawpit, with the red elm-dust spurting up fountain-like in the sunshine between his gaitered legs—must be the very counterpart of the Dray who, doubtless, fought at Hastings; or him of older times who, daubed in blue war-paint, might have watched with wrath and wonder from his seaside ambush the first Phoenician galley that came adventuring after Cornish tin.

When it rains, though work and the house have for the nonce become alike intolerable, I have several havens wherein I can be sure of finding just that quiet anchorage that the moment needs. The little sweetstuff shop is foremost among them. Over the long, low window, with its curious lattice panes of bull’s-eye glass, there runs a legend, in one uniform character and without stop or break:—‘BERLIN WOOLS TOYS SUSAN ANGEL ALL KINDS OF SWEETS.’ And within at her fireside behind the little counter, sits Miss Angel, always busily knitting, and always ready for a chat.

I reserve Miss Angel and her flute-like under-flow of small-talk, for moments of placidity. But at unruly seasons of mind, I go to the cobbler’s den, and getting my elbows upon the half-door, look in upon him, often without spoken word on either side, for ten minutes at a stretch. It is dark in there, with a penetrating smell of tanned leather wonderfully soothing in certain states of the nerves. My own taciturnity is real enough at these times; but that of the cobbler, a garrulous old soul by nature, is usually forced upon him by circumstances. His mouth seems to be permanently full of brass brads, which come automatically through his closed lips one by one, and always miraculously head-first, to be ready when his quick left hand needs them. With his right hand he keeps up an incessant monotonous tattoo on the boot between his knees; and to watch the shining brass pins flowing from his mouth into symmetrical rows on the leather is pure balm for eyes tired of staring at paper and ink. I know the cobbler means to talk directly he has finished his mouthful. Now and again he looks up with premonitory gleams of politics or ground-bait in his eye; or, worse still, with that slow double-wink which I know presages a story ancient even in his great-grandfather’s time. So I watch the flow of the brads, and when I judge the supply to be nearly exhausted, I generally execute a stealthy retreat.

The parlour of the Three Thatchers Inn is, I know of old, an unrivalled place for the rejuvenation of a jaded faith in the reality of life, at times of idleness and dismal weather. It is not the talk of the old landlord behind his bar—talk at once serenely simple and shrewdly worldly-wise; nor the unending volley of song from the three canaries, each in its crinoline-like cage overhead; nor even the quality of the liquor, that draws me to this cosy, sawdust-carpeted, crimson-curtained nook. It is the furniture of the bar itself, all that stands upon its shelves and hangs upon its old wainscoted walls, that attracts me at these odd, unemployable moments—a collection of articles never to be got together, I think, in less than four generations of like-minded men.

All the woodwork is of oak, planted, grown, and felled, no doubt, within an arrow-flight of the village. On the walls of the parlour hang various framed and coloured prints, disreputable by tradition, yet so embrowned with varnish as to be long ago relegated into harmless indecipherability. There is a picture of a bird of dubious species, from whose open beak issue the words—‘As a bird is known by his song, so is a man by his conversation.’ Opposite the door, where all entering must immediately observe it, hangs another picture, this time of a dog lying upon its back with all four legs rigidly pointing upwards, and a very long red tongue lolling out of its mouth; and, underneath, the inscription—‘Poor Trust is dead: bad pay killed him.’

Behind the bar, the walls are lined with shelves, backed up by scrolled looking-glass, wherein all the treasures that crowd before it have their blurred and distorted counterparts. On the uppermost shelves, hard against the smoke-blackened ceiling, stand rows of pewter-pots, kept scrupulously clean and bright, but never taken down for use within living memory. Below these is a regiment of cut-glass bottles in different rich colours, quaintly fluted, each with a gilt vine-leaf upon it; and between the bottles stand inverted wine-glasses, every one upon a little mat of gaudy wool, and balancing a lemon upon its upturned foot. Other shelves are taken up with toby-jugs, curious old snuff-boxes and tobacco-jars, row upon row of earthenware mugs, ringed with brown and blue, and stamped with a mysterious ornament like black seaweed. There are three large wooden kegs with brass taps, marked respectively with the letters—O.T., J.R., and C.B. The local pleasantry has it that these are needed to store the special liquor of three devoted patrons of the inn. The ferryman and Bleak the cobbler reject the insinuation with contumely; but O.T., as I have the best of all reasons for knowing, regards it as a compliment of subtle hue.

But perhaps the most fascinating item in the whole collection is a certain ancient puzzle-mug of blue crockery-ware, with a suspiciously heavy handle and an elaborately perforated lip. A stranger is invited to drink from this, but, by reason of the open lattice-work all round the rim, it appears an impossible feat. The trick, however, is easy to one in the secret. The handle of the cup is hollow, and communicates with the interior at its lowest extremity. By setting the mouth to a small hole in the handle-top, the liquor can be slowly sucked through.

II

It being the day of the fortnightly market at Stavisham, and the weather fair, Runridge and I took the little green punt from its moorings this afternoon, and set out to explore the Long Back-Reach.

The Reach is just a winding side-alley of the river, overgrown with willows and reeds—a mere crevice of glimmering water hiding itself in the heart of the wood. Coming into it from the dazzling sunlight of the main river, it strikes at first almost chill and gloomy, for all it is an afternoon in May. But this is only an illusion that soon passes. After a minute or two you get its quiet keynote; the green dusk becomes deliciously tempered sunlight, the cool air something finer and more delicate than the sun-scorched breath of the open river-way.

Runridge pulls a long clean stroke, and dips his oar-blades with a perfect rhythm. He is silent company, as far as words go; but he has an eloquence of look and gesture which more than takes the place of speech. And there is something about his mute system of comradeship that irresistibly impels itself on others. With his tanned, wrinkled face sedately smiling under the brim of his battered old felt hat, and his thoughtful eyes for ever roaming over the landscape, you feel that the ordinary human method of conveying ideas by sounds is somehow out of place in the little green wherry. Over and over again to-day, when a scarce bird or uncommon flower showed itself on the river bank, and I would direct his notice thither, I found myself insensibly adopting his silent way of a waved hand or an inclination of the head, when, in other company, my tongue would have been set agoing on the instant with less sufficing words.

Out on the broad water-way the tide was still running up, but here in the Long Back-Reach the drift of the current was hardly perceptible. The old ferryman had laid by his oars, and now sat filling an ancient pipe with tobacco that looked like chips of ebony. As for me, I lay back in the boat, head pillowed on clasped hands, dimly recalling a dream I had had, ages and ages back, of a world without green leaves or nightingales—a weirdly impossible world of nipping frost and firesides, the sob of the winter wind, and the dreary deluge of winter rain.

The reeds stood high on either hand: above, the old yellow reeds, with their nodding mauve-grey plumes, and below, the fresh green growth, wherein the reed-warblers would soon be building—a living emerald thronging up amidst the old dead stems. Over the solid rampart of the reeds the willows reached down, trailing their ferny branches in the water. And beyond these, the great forest trees hemmed us in, oak and elm and beech in two vast cliffs of verdure towering above us, and interlocking their laden boughs against the far blue sky.

The little sugar-scoop of a boat drifted on. Everywhere about us the martins were skimming over the clear water, chattering as they went. The seeding willows sent down tiny flecks of white, that hovered and dwelt in the dim air, like snow-flakes; and from the beeches overhead there was a constant rain of light fine atoms, the discarded sheaths of the leaf-buds, that fell upon the waters and gathered into all the little nooks and bays among the reeds like pale, dun foam.

Somewhere far in the distance a cuckoo sang. Runridge took his pipe from his mouth, and gave it a rocking motion. Never a word he said, but his thought passed to me just as if he had spoken it: a see-saw melody it was, and will be until the hay is down. There were willow-wrens singing far above in the tree-tops. A chiff-chaff went looping by with his soft, broken note. To count the nightingales that we heard as the boat stemmed onward were almost to count the white-budded hawthorns that shone out through every gap in the reeds. And now the old ferryman put out an oar, and turned the little craft towards the bank, where a great willow-tree drooped half across the stream. The boat-prow clove its way into the heart of this leafy shelter, and we came to rest. The pipe went up warningly. In the dense reed thicket hard by there was a new maytide song.

Of all utterances of wild birds, perhaps none attains to a human-like quality more nearly than that of the sedge-warbler. It is not so much a song as a continuous complaint, and that of a characteristically feminine kind. To me the little sedge-bird, restlessly flitting from stem to stem through the waving jungle of reeds, and singing as she goes, inevitably suggests a type of dutiful, laborious womanhood, all affection and unselfishness, but ever ready alike with sharp words and an aggressive tearfulness that disarms as completely as it maddens. And the sweetness, the occasional sudden bright abandon of the song only serves to strengthen the comparison. You can picture the bird stopping in the midst of her most fretful, self-commiserate strain, bravely to estimate her compensations. The sun shines, the nest is well-built and furnished, the larder easy to be filled. Material good is unlacking; but— And then the singer goes hopelessly under again. Now the song is nothing but sweetly lachrymose expostulation, voiced grief all the more intolerable for its tunefulness,—an epic of melodious woe.

Turning over in my mind this fantasy about the sedge-bird, as we lingered under the willow bower, I found the old ferryman looking at me with a strangely reminiscent eye. It flashed across me that long ago, when all days were as good as market days to us, I had put before him just these thoughts, and had received his silent, amused concurrence in them. Then there had been no chance of inconvenient application; but now—I sat bolt upright and looked closer at him. I was beaten at this talk of eyes. I harked back to the old safe path with which I was familiar. He had turned away now, and did not revert his glance though my hand was upon his arm.

‘Why, why did you do it, Runridge?’ I blurted out, almost as forlornly as the sedge-bird. ‘You never minded living alone! You were happy enough! And I—I—’

He was looking at me straightly enough now.

‘Do it?’ His breath whistled in through his set teeth. ‘Do it—did ye say? I do it?—never! ’A did it hersel’! Kind o’ mesmerised, I wur. Never rightly knowed as ’twur done, till ’twur all ower. But there ’tis i’ th’ book, an’ no gettin’ ower it now. Ah! well, well! purty near time we was skorkin’ hoame-along, bean’t it? Gie tired women-folk a could kettle for welcome, an’ ’tis trouble wi’out end.’

III

Whitsuntide has fallen early this year, and that seems to me always the fittest thing. It should come, as it has come now, at the full fair tide of the spring, when the apple-blossom, last ebullition of the year’s youth, is at the zenith of its glory, and summer is still only a promise yet to be fulfilled.

Whitsunday in Windlecombe, to all average folk, at least, excels in importance every other day in the year, Christmas Day alone excepted. There is neither man, woman, nor child in the parish, with the ability to get to church, but arrives there somehow and sometime during the day. For the old vicar, from his early communion service to the time he gives the benediction at close of evensong, it is a day of ceaseless action and exaltation. Every Whitsunday—when, in fulfilment of an ancient compact between us, I go to the vicarage to share the last light of day with him alone—I find him sitting in the little summer-house at the foot of the garden, radiantly happy, yet tired as a navigator, and hoarse as a crow. What befalls the curate at the end of this arduous day no one knows; for he is never visible after the final service. But Miss Sweet is said to pervade the neighbourhood of his lodging like an unquiet ghost far into the twilight, waylaying his housekeeper with offers of night-socks and eau-de-cologne.

On this fine Whitsunday morning I got to my corner in the grey old church earlier than my wont, before, indeed, the bell began its measured tolling. The school children were in their places in the south aisle, a whispering, nudging crew. The curate flitted about the chancel in his long black cassock like a bat disturbed from its dreams. The little organist sat at her harmonium. No one else as yet had come to church.

It was good to sit thus in the cool and quiet before the service began, letting the heart go back over all the other Whitsuntides I had spent in Windlecombe, and letting the eye rove here and there through the hollow, sun-barred twilight of the old place, comparing the garlands that beautified it now with those that, in former years, had registered the attained prosperity of the season. For though, wherever you looked, from the window-ledges of the sanctuary to the multi-centred arch of the west door, there were flowers and greenery in profusion, no garden blossom shone amongst them. They were all wildflowers. Every child, most of the women, and many of the men, who could spare an hour from work the day before, had been busy in the woods and fields to make this House Beautiful. The old vicar’s ambition was known to all—that in the church to-day every wild Maytide blossom should have its place. I looked hither and thither, but could think of none that was missing. The altar was golden with cowslips, primroses, buttercups, every flower that bore the colour of gold. Bluebells hid the old oak carving of the pulpit, and with them others that were blue or purple, violet and veronica, forget-me-not and pimpernel. On all the window-ledges, not to vie with the richness of the painted glass, white flowers alone were assembled—chervil and elder, daisies that are snow-white in the mass, sprays of silver stitchwort, wreaths of hawthorn entwining all. The chancel screen was hung with festoons of pink herb-robert and deadnettle; and the steps beneath it flanked with those wild growths that bear greenish flowers as well as green leaves—the woodspurge and the paler green of arum and bryony. No colour was crowded unthinkingly upon another. Each blossom held by its kinsfolk of a like complexion, and a hundred forms and shades of verdure underflowed them all. Gladly I marked that there were no roses anywhere, and this it was that gave the day its special meaning. Last year I remembered how the wild dog-roses lorded it over everything, making Whitsun a summer feast, which it never should be. But this year we are weeks in front of the roses and the may is scarce half-blown.

Now the bell commenced its slow rhythmic chime, and in the south porch, where the surplices hung, the choir boys began to assemble. The west door stood open, and, mingling with the songs of the birds and the joyous note of the wind in the trees, footsteps sounded on the churchyard path. At first they came singly, then in twos and threes. After awhile their shuffling note became continuous, and the church began to fill on all sides. I could no longer look about me, but must sit straight in my pew, contenting myself with rare side glances. I heard the stump of old Tom Clemmer’s crutches afar off in the street, heard it grow gradually louder and nearer, until it ceased on the floor of the pew behind me, and Clemmer set himself to subdue the hurricane of his breath. Mrs. Runridge fluttered up the aisle, with the tall old ferryman so close behind her, and his head so decorously lowered, that he seemed to be regaling himself with the smell of the roses in her new bonnet as they went. Farmer Coles and his retinue arrived, blocking the aisle for a full minute, until hot and flurried Mrs. Coles, by much pointing and nudging, and a hubbub of whispered directions, had succeeded in packing all her family into the two great pews. With astonishing suddenness the erstwhile empty church had become a crowded building. All Windlecombe was there, every woman or girl in her new Whitsuntide bonnet and gay new cotton frock.

And now the bell stopped; a few late stragglers came hurrying up the path, and into the rustling silence of the church with but half-restrained momentum; a sonorous Amen came from the south porch; the little harmonium uplifted its voice afar off in the chancel; the white-robed choristers began to pour up the nave, singing as they went; the curate followed, and last of all the old vicar, as upright as any, with his sure, unfaltering stride. No stranger, seeing him keep the true centre of the way, and pass unhesitatingly to his desk in the chancel, would have dreamed that he walked in almost utter darkness; nor when he faced about, and began the service with that deep-toned serene voice of his, did any one of us believe it, though we had known him all our lives. Not a word halted, not a word went awry. Only when the time for the Bible lessons came did he give place to his helper; and even at these times we were not always delivered over to the sad-voiced, diffident curate. How much of the Bible he knew by heart not even he himself could say; but often he would come down to the lectern, and with a face of inspiration turned upon us, recite the whole lesson as though he who wrote it ages back stood whispering at his side. Many a time, as he ceased, and turned back to his chancel seat with unerring step, and every man fetched his breath in the silence, I have marvelled at the force of habit that, when all hearts were inwardly exclaiming, could hold us mute of voice.

The same thought came to me when, a little later, he stood in the pulpit, his deep tones rumbling in the rafters over our heads; and most of all it pressed itself upon me when, at close of the long service, I beheld him afar off in the radiant flower-garden of the sanctuary, a towering white figure, with arm uplifted, nebulous, uncertain, in the multitudinous lights. But, with the thought, came always a kind of fear, a sensation that we were all living recklessly outside our defences, going our ways like children sheltered, aided, and irresponsible:—what would happen to Windlecombe, and to us all, when the strong arm failed and the voice no longer guided? At these times my comfort was always in a word of Susan Angel’s, spoken with a cheery, quiet conviction from behind her rows of sweetstuff bottles and knick-knack trays. With her young, almost girlish eyes shining out of her crabbed, ancient face, she pointed a knitting-needle at me for emphasis.‘Depend on ’t, my dear,’ said she, ‘’a wunt goo far, when th’ call comes. Him as has christened, an’ married, ay! an’ buried well-nigh all i’ th’ place, an’ been more ’n a faather to us, what ’ud ’a be doin’ aloane up there i’ the skies? Na, na! Man or sperit, ’a belongs to Windlecombe. Here ’a’s treasure be, an’ here ’a’ll bide.’

IV

I heard a weird, tom-toming somewhere in the village to-day, and going forth, soon tracked the sound down to cobbler Bleak’s garden that lay at the far end of the green.

The old man was ringing his bees. Through a gap in the hawthorn hedge, I could see him standing under his apple-trees surrounded by the hives, and beating on a saucepan with a door-key, while the air above was alive with flashing wings, and resonant with the high shrill music of the swarm. This was the first swarm of the season, although it was well on in May. Most of the Windlecombe folk kept a few hives in some odd nook or other of the garden, and these were nearly all of the ancient straw pattern. He who could get the earliest swarm was accounted at once the luckiest and most astute of beemen; and the old cobbler’s face glowed with pride through its encircling fringe of ragged white hair and whisker, as he pounded away with his key, never doubting for a moment that the noise would soon induce the swarm to settle.

But the bees were in no hurry to end this one mad frolic of their laborious lives. They rose higher and higher into the blue air and sunshine, drifting to all parts of the compass in turn. They veered out far over the roadway; swept back towards the cottage, hovering awhile like a grey cloud over the chimney-tops; took an indecisive turn round the next garden; reappeared in their old station above the orchard, as little inclined as ever, apparently, to make a permanent halt. And all the time their high tremulous music burdened the air, every dog in the village barked, and every goose quacked its sympathy, and the old cobbler beat steadily on his pan.

I got my elbows comfortably into the gap in the hedgerow, the better to enjoy the scene. The garden was completely surrounded by the hawthorn-hedge, a glowing wreath of white, against which shone masses of blooming lilac and laburnum and red garden-may. The little cottage at the back of the shop stood up to its window-sills in bright colour, every old-fashioned flower crowding about it. The winding red-tiled paths ran between borders of the same rich living hues. And beyond in the orchard, splashed over with blue-grey shadows and quivering gold, as the sunshine filtered through the leaves, were innumerable hives, old-fashioned skeps of straw, each with its little chanting company of bees.

The old cobbler spied me in the hedgerow gap, and beckoned me to join him. He was without hat or coat, and wore his leather apron. A half-mended boot thrown down on the path showed how hastily he had been summoned from work. As I came up, he managed somehow to extract from the saucepan an exultant, almost jeering tune.

‘Ah, ha!’ cried he, blinking up at his whirligig property, ‘can ye show th’ like o’ that ’n?—you as keeps bees in patent machines? Naun like straw, there be; as I allers telled ye! These yere new-fangled boxes!—ye’ll ha’ ne’er a swarm this side o’ Corp Christian, I’ll lay a pot o’ six!’

It wanted still four or five days to the date of the great Roman festival of Corpus Christi in Stavisham, which annually drew all village sightseers from far and near. I reflected sadly, and rather shamefacedly, that not only was a swarm from my modern, roomy frame-hives little to be expected during that interval, but that it was the last thing I had hitherto desired. Working at home among my trim, up-to-date hives, with all the latest scientific methods in apiculture at my finger-tips, it seemed a fine thing to possess bees that had almost forgotten how to swarm, and that could bring me in a double or treble harvest of honey. But here in the beautiful old bee-garden, I began dimly to perceive another side to the argument. Whether courage or ignorance had led him to resist the tide of progress in beekeeping that has all but engulfed this gentlest, most picturesque of village crafts, the old cobbler might be right after all. My honey was better and more abundant than his; but it might well be dear at the price.

The swarm was coming lower now, and the wildly flying bees closing their ranks. Above our heads the air grew dark with them. It was plain that they would soon be settling. Of a sudden the clanging key-music ceased. Bleak pointed triumphantly to a bough in a tree hard by. A little knot of bees had fastened there, no bigger than a clenched fist. But as I looked it doubled its size with every moment. From all the regions of sunny air above us the bees thronged towards the cluster. In a short five minutes hardly one remained on the wing; and in place of the wild trek-song, a dull, uncanny silence held the air. From the drooping apple-bough the whole multitude hung together in a dark brown mass, looking strangely like a huge cigar, as it swayed idly to and fro in the gentle breeze.And now the old cobbler went about the work of hiving the swarm in the old way, punctiliously observing all the traditional rites of the craft. A jar of ale was brought out, from which we must both drink, to sweeten our breath for the coming ceremony. Then, having washed his hands, Bleak set about the dressing of the hive. It was a new skep, one of many he had himself made during the long winter evenings bygone. He gathered first a handful of mint and balm and lavender, and with this he carefully scrubbed out the skep. Then he made a syrup of brown sugar and beer, wherewith he gave the hive a second thorough dressing. Finally, having cut two or three leafy boughs of elder, he took the skep with its baseboard under his arm, and approached the swarm on tiptoe and with bated breath.

The bees hung in the sunshine, as silent, as inert as ever; except that a dozen or so were hovering about the cluster, humming a drowsy song. The note contrasted oddly with the wild merry music of the flying swarm, when all had seemed mad with excitement, as though they were setting forth on some fierce neck-or-nothing adventure, instead of the rather tame business in which they were at present absorbed.

The old beeman stepped warily towards them, and holding the skep mouth upwards beneath the cluster, gave the branch a vigorous shake. Like so many blackcurrants, the entire mass of bees rattled down into the hive, when the baseboard was swiftly clapped over them, and the whole inverted and placed upon the ground. Waiting a minute or two, the old man then gently raised one edge of the skep, and propped it up with a stone. A few hundred bees came tumbling out with a sound like the boiling-over of a cauldron; but the greater part of the swarm remained within the hive. Before half an hour had passed, they had completely accepted the situation, and the worker-bees were lancing busily off in all directions in search of provender for the new home.

The old cobbler’s prediction that I should have no swarm by Corpus Christi, fell true enough. Every day I watched until the hours for swarming had passed by eventlessly. And then, on the great Stavisham feast-day, in the sunny calm of afternoon, I followed the straggling line of sightseers by the river-way to the town.

V

A hush is over the little precipitous market-town. The hot May sun beats down on the waiting lines of people, on the fragrant linden-trees shading the quiet street, on the fluttering banners and pennants everywhere.

The air is full of dim sound; wild drift of far-off bell-music, the deep hum and stir of the expectant people, the voice of the wind, sweet and low, in the green lime labyrinth overhead. Every glance is turned up the street, where the church of Saint Francis of Assisi lifts its bluff sandstone tower against the blue. The great west door stands open. Straining the eye, the nearest watchers can just make out a glint of altar lights through the cavernous dark within—the rich uncertain glow of candles given back from a thousand gleaming points of silver chalice and golden cross and glittering filigree.

And now the last rumbling harmony of the organ dies away. For a moment a deeper silence than ever fills the Gothic gloom. Then the thin fine note of a clarinet lifts up its trembling signal in the darkness. The brazen trombones join in with their passionate, deep-voiced music. The lights begin to move and dance, growing nearer and stronger. ‘They are coming!’—to the remotest end of the waiting line the whisper spreads.

Slowly the procession winds its way through the great church door, and down the precipitous street. First the gilded, jewel-encumbered cross, borne aloft by a young priest in a black cassock and snowy, deep-laced surplice. Then the singing multitude of schoolgirls, all in white, with wreath-crowned veils like so many Lilliputian brides. Now the boys from the convent seminary in crimson shoulder-sashes, with their fussing marshals; and the elder women after, in their doleful, decorous black. Banners swaying; rainbow streamers flying; the shrill child-voices blent with the sound of the wind in the glad green leaves overhead.

Now the trumpets and clarinets have turned the bend of the street. The singing gives way to deeper music. More banners come flinging and flaunting into the sunny vista. The gay procession takes on a darker tinge. Sisters in black, sisters in brown, sisters in grey; weary faces, sad faces, comely faces; winter and glowing spring and ripe calm autumn, all in the same cold livery of sorrow, all with the like abandonment to destiny so plainly fettering the innate unrule of will.

The musicians pass on: the deep blurring melody fades: the pageant changes.

Monks and friars now. An old Capuchin father totters by in his rough brown frock, carrying a candle on a brazen stick. After him a score of his own degree, all bearing lights that glimmer and blink superfluously in the sunshine, and all chanting a long slow antiphon in a minor key. Old men reeking of the cloister, bent nearly double with their weight of years; sturdy young friars, ruddy-jowled, tonsured, with only half an eye to their book; suave-faced, grey-headed superiors, eyes in the sky, calm, transfigured, the vanquished world behind every man’s broad back.

And now a weird, dirge-like note creeps down the sun-bathed street, and a murmur follows it through the craning, nudging crowd. The end, the crown, of the pageant is suddenly in view. It is all shining celestial white now, as the choristers sweep slowly by in their spotless lawn and lace, chanting their pseudo-requiem as they move. Behind them a bevy of major priests, of comfortable figure, gorgeously caparisoned. Little scarlet-robed acolytes walking backwards and strewing the way with rich-hued flowers; swinging censers vouchsafing their hallow of dim smoke upon the common air. And then at last—under the great square baldacchino—the old Roman bishop himself, holding aloft the precious monstrance, like a glittering captive star.

A vision now of billowing white and gold; and the low, sad chant swelling, falling; and the languorous fragrance of the incense and the trampled flowers. Wrapped to the eyes in his heavy, gilt-encrusted cope, the old priest grasps his cherished burden with all the little might of his trembling blue-veined hands. His eyes are on the gold-rayed treasure-casket, held but an inch or two beyond his flushed, illuminated face. A trance-like stupor seems to be upon him as he moves, guided on either side by those other two, almost as splendidly robed as himself, who keep a grip on the fringe of his silken coat, and lead him onward in his passionate ecstasy, treading thin air, enrapt, magnificent with other-worldly light.

It is over now. The great canopy has moved on, its bearers keeping ceremonious step and step. More richly accoutred priests follow in a holy rear-guard. Then the crowd closes up eagerly behind, and surges after them, bare-headed, jostling together; catching now and again a phrase of the mournful melody, and giving it an echo that sobs away into silence far in the sunny length of the street.

As I stand apart, here in the deep shadow of the convent wall, the thronging multitude sweeps by, growing thinner with every moment. The gleaming star of the monstrance sends back a last clear flash of sunlight as it turns the distant foot of the hill. Soon the straggling human fringe of the procession vanishes after it. A debris of blossom litters the long deserted way. Flags and streamers wave their bright hues over the dusty solitude. The street is forsaken, quiet again; save for the bells in the upper air, and the wind in the trees.