Women of the Country | Page 2

was by that nickname he would speak of him this morning, but he could find no place in his intelligence for contempt, for Old Born Again now saw and knew the things which prophets and kings desire to look into.
He had lived for many years thus. He was a widower living with a married daughter, whose husband was a fisherman. She herself kept a greengrocer's shop of the poorer kind. She had five children, the eldest, a boy of thirteen, earning his living with her in the shop. He and his blind grandfather went round the district every day with a small cart and horse, selling their vegetables from house to house and thus enlarging their custom. The boy guided the horse and his grandfather helped with the selling and the money. In the early morning at the end of each week they drove the horse and cart to the sea's edge to wash them, making always for the steady channel which ran unaltering through the empty sand, when the tide was down. This morning they had gone as usual, and when they reached the water (the old man was blind you will remember, and his companion a child), they knew no difference in its appearance. A man who was gathering cockles at a distance knew and called to them, running towards them, but the old man did not see and the boy was intent upon guiding the horse and cart into the water.
That night the sand, so unstable, had moved beneath the pressure of an unusual tide. The course of the channel had changed, and when the horse, treading confidently, had approached the edge, it stepped straight into deep water and, losing its balance, being also impeded by the cart, dragged with it the vehicle, the old blind man and the child to unavoidable death. Their bodies had been recovered but too late. "Let us pray," added the minister, "for the mourners."
To a child the fact of death is not very terrible, because the fact of life is not yet understood; but I never see in imagination the level and sad-coloured country of my childhood, stretching out of sight to the sea across an expanse of sand, a country whose pomp was in the heavens, whose hills were the clouds, without seeing also, journeying across it, an old blind man, a child, and a dumb creature, to disappear for ever under the wide sky, beneath the sun, within that great waste of waters.
The life of the poor, coloured outwardly with the same passivity and acceptance of their lot as the rest of visible nature, disciplined by the same forces which break the floods and the earth, remains for most of us querulous, ignoble, disappointing. What can be said suggestive or profound of the life that is born, that labours its full day with its face to the ground, from which it looks for its sustenance, and at last is carried, spent, to the square ground which holds the memory and remains of the dead.
Yet one day the sun which has risen, stirring the only emotion in the landscape, will rise upon a tragic, significant, or patient human group, for whom sun and seasons and the wide heavens are small, whose emotion is yet contained within the room of a mean dwelling and whose destiny is accomplished within a tilled field.
Under a sky that is infinite and a heaven accessible to all, the poor "work for their living," bowed always a little towards tragedy yet understanding joy, from the bitterness of life and death and the added anguish of ignorance drinking often their safety.
CHAPTER II
It was evening in the country at harvest-time, at that moment towards sundown when the light, about to be withdrawn, glows with a fulness of gold which makes it seem impossible that it can ever die. The earth was heavy with fruition, every square field brimful of the ungathered harvest. The heavy corn swayed almost by reason of its own weight. A thunderstorm would beat it prostrate in an hour. All the crops were full and good, some almost level with the low hedges. Heat seemed to radiate from the yellow mass, that scorching heat which in autumn never seems to leave the earth, but to linger about the ground, surrounding the responsive and standing corn. But the day had brought no heaviness to the sky, blue without a cloud, only a grave and increasing heat, a sun which blinded the eyes and seemed to take no account of anything save its steady purpose of ripening the fruit and grain.
Looking round one saw that it was not an impressive country. There were no hills, no grandeurs, no proximity to the sea. It was a country whose pageants were made, not by great heights or sombre woods,