At
least, if I had been in the customary public room of the modern
hotel, with all its disproportions and discomforts, my ears would
have been dull, and there would have been some ugly temper or other
uppermost in my spirit, and so they would have wasted their songs
upon an unworthy hearer.
Next morning I went along to visit the church. It is a long-backed
red-and-white building, very much restored, and stands in a
pleasant graveyard among those great trees of which I have spoken
already. The sky was drowned in a mist. Now and again pulses of
cold wind went about the enclosure, and set the branches busy
overhead, and the dead leaves scurrying into the angles of the
church buttresses. Now and again, also, I could hear the dull
sudden fall of a chestnut among the grass--the dog would bark
before the rectory door--or there would come a clinking of pails
from the stable-yard behind. But in spite of these occasional
interruptions--in spite, also, of the continuous autumn twittering
that filled the trees--the chief impression somehow was one as of
utter silence, insomuch that the little greenish bell that peeped
out of a window in the tower disquieted me with a sense of some
possible and more inharmonious disturbance. The grass was wet, as
if with a hoar frost that had just been melted. I do not know that
ever I saw a morning more autumnal.
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