A Wiltshire Village - Page 2

north-east.
The aspect of the country, as far as one could see in that level plain,
was wintry and colourless. The hedges in that part are kept cut and
trimmed so closely that they seemed less like hedges than mere faint
greyish fences of brushwood, dividing field from field: they would not
have afforded shelter to a hedge-sparrow. The trees were few and far
apart--grey naked oaks, un-visited even by the tits that find their
food in bark and twig; the wide fields between were bare and devoid of
life of man or beast or bird. Ploughed and grass lands were equally
desolate; for the grass was last year's, long dead and now of that
neutral, faded, and palest of all pale dead colours in nature. It is
not white nor yellow, and there is no name for it. Looking down when I
walked in the fields the young spring grass could be seen thrusting up
its blades among the old and dead, but at a distance of a few yards
these delicate living green threads were invisible.

Coming back out of the bleak wind it always seemed strangely warm in
the village street--it was like coming into a room in which a fire has
been burning all day. So grateful did I find this warmth of the deep
old sheltered road, so vocal too and full of life did it seem after the
pallor and silence of the desolate world without, that I made it my
favourite walk, measuring its length from end to end. Nor was it
strange that at last, unconsciously, in spite of a preoccupied brain
and of the assurance given that I would reside in the village, like a
snail in its shell, without seeing it, an impression began to form and
an influence to be felt.

Some vague speculations passed through my mind as to how old the
village might be. I had heard some person remark that it had formerly
been much more populous, that many of its people had from time to time
drifted away to the towns; their old empty cottages pulled down and no
new ones built. The road was deep and the cottages on either side stood
six to eight or nine feet above it. Where a cottage stood close to the
edge of the road and faced it, the door was reached by a flight of
stone or brick steps; at such cottages the landing above the steps was
like a balcony, where one could stand and look down upon a passing
cart, or the daily long straggling procession of children going to or
returning from the village school. I counted the steps that led up to
my own front door and landing place and found there were ten: I took it
that each step represented a century's wear of the road by hoof and
wheel and human feet, and the conclusion was thus that the village was
a thousand years old--probably it was over two thousand. A few
centuries more or less did not seem to matter much; the subject did not
interest me in the