Chapter: As we went down to the boat next morning, Walter could not quite keep off
the subject of last night, though he was more hopeful than he had been
then, and seemed to think that if the unlucky homicide could not be got
to go over-sea, he might at any rate go and live somewhere in the
neighbourhood pretty much by himself; at any rate, that was what he
himself had proposed.  To Dick, and I must say to me also, this seemed a
strange remedy; and Dick said as much.  Quoth he:

"Friend Walter, don't set the man brooding on the tragedy by letting him
live alone.  That will only strengthen his idea that he has committed a
crime, and you will have him killing himself in good earnest."

Said Clara: "I don't know.  If I may say what I think of it, it is that
he had better have his fill of gloom now, and, so to say, wake up
presently to see how little need there has been for it; and then he will
live happily afterwards.  As for his killing himself, you need not be
afraid of that; for, from all you tell me, he is really very much in love
with the woman; and to speak plainly, until his love is satisfied, he
will not only stick to life as tightly as he can, but will also make the
most of every event of his life--will, so to say, hug himself up in it;
and I think that this is the real explanation of his taking the whole
matter with such an excess of tragedy."

Walter looked thoughtful, and said: "Well, you may be right; and perhaps
we should have treated it all more lightly: but you see, guest" (turning
to me), "such things happen so seldom, that when they do happen, we
cannot help being much taken up with it.  For the rest, we are all
inclined, to excuse our poor friend for making us so unhappy, on the
ground that he does it out of an exaggerated respect for human life and
its happiness.  Well, I will say no more about it; only this: will you
give me a cast up stream, as I want to look after a lonely habitation for
the poor fellow, since he will have it so, and I hear that there is one
which would suit us very well on the downs beyond Streatley; so if you
will put me ashore there I will walk up the hill and look to it."

"Is the house in question empty?" said I.

"No," said Walter, "but the man who lives there will go out of it, of
course, when he hears that we want it.  You see, we think that the fresh
air of the downs and the very emptiness of the landscape will do our
friend good."

"Yes," said Clara, smiling, "and he will not be so far from his beloved
that they cannot easily meet if they have a mind to--as they certainly
will."

This talk had brought us down to the boat, and we were presently afloat
on the beautiful broad stream, Dick driving the prow swiftly through the
windless water of the early summer morning, for it was not yet six
o'clock.  We were at the lock in a very little time; and as we lay rising
and rising on the in-coming water, I could not help wondering that my old
friend the pound-lock, and that of the very simplest and most rural kind,
should hold its place there; so I said:

"I have been wondering, as we passed lock after lock, that you people, so
prosperous as you are, and especially since you are so anxious for
pleasant work to do, have not invented something which would get rid of
this clumsy business of going up-stairs by means of these rude
contrivances."

Dick laughed.  "My dear friend," said he, "as long as water has the
clumsy habit of running down hill, I fear we must humour it by going up-
stairs when we have our faces turned from the sea.  And really I don't
see why you should fall foul of Maple-Durham lock, which I think a very
pretty place."

There was no doubt about the latter assertion, I thought, as I looked up
at the overhanging boughs of the great trees, with the sun coming
glittering through the leaves, and listened to the song of the summer
blackbirds as it mingled with the sound of the backwater near us.  So not
being able to say why I wanted the locks away--which, indeed, I didn't do
at all--I held my peace.  But Walter said--

"You see, guest, this is not an age of inventions.  The last epoch did
all that for us, and we are now content to use such of its inventions as
we find handy, and leaving those alone which we don't want.  I believe,
as a matter of fact, that some time ago (I can't give you a date) some
elaborate machinery was used for the locks, though people did not go so
far as try to make the water run up hill.  However, it was troublesome, I
suppose, and the simple hatches, and the gates, with a big counterpoising
beam, were found to answer every purpose, and were easily mended when
wanted with material always to hand: so here they are, as you see."

"Besides," said Dick, "this kind of lock is pretty, as you can see; and I
can't help thinking that your machine-lock, winding up like a watch,
would have been ugly and would have spoiled the look of the river: and
that is surely reason enough for keeping such locks as these.  Good-bye,
old fellow!" said he to the lock, as he pushed us out through the now
open gates by a vigorous stroke of the boat-hook.  "May you live long,
and have your green old age renewed for ever!"

On we went; and the water had the familiar aspect to me of the days
before Pangbourne had been thoroughly cocknified, as I have seen it.  It
(Pangbourne) was distinctly a village still--_i.e._, a definite group of
houses, and as pretty as might be.  The beech-woods still covered the
hill that rose above Basildon; but the flat fields beneath them were much
more populous than I remembered them, as there were five large houses in
sight, very carefully designed so as not to hurt the character of the
country.  Down on the green lip of the river, just where the water turns
toward the Goring and Streatley reaches, were half a dozen girls playing
about on the grass.  They hailed us as we were about passing them, as
they noted that we were travellers, and we stopped a minute to talk with
them.  They had been bathing, and were light clad and bare-footed, and
were bound for the meadows on the Berkshire side, where the haymaking had
begun, and were passing the time merrily enough till the Berkshire folk
came in their punt to fetch them.  At first nothing would content them
but we must go with them into the hay-field, and breakfast with them; but
Dick put forward his theory of beginning the hay-harvest higher up the
water, and not spoiling my pleasure therein by giving me a taste of it
elsewhere, and they gave way, though unwillingly.  In revenge they asked
me a great many questions about the country I came from and the manners
of life there, which I found rather puzzling to answer; and doubtless
what answers I did give were puzzling enough to them.  I noticed both
with these pretty girls and with everybody else we met, that in default
of serious news, such as we had heard at Maple-Durham, they were eager to
discuss all the little details of life: the weather, the hay-crop, the
last new house, the plenty or lack of such and such birds, and so on; and
they talked of these things not in a fatuous and conventional way, but as
taking, I say, real interest in them.  Moreover, I found that the women
knew as much about all these things as the men: could name a flower, and
knew its qualities; could tell you the habitat of such and such birds and
fish, and the like.

It is almost strange what a difference this intelligence made in my
estimate of the country life of that day; for it used to be said in past
times, and on the whole truly, that outside their daily work country
people knew little of the country, and at least could tell you nothing
about it; while here were these people as eager about all the goings on
in the fields and woods and downs as if they had been Cockneys newly
escaped from the tyranny of bricks and mortar.

I may mention as a detail worth noticing that not only did there seem to
be a great many more birds about of the non-predatory kinds, but their
enemies the birds of prey were also commoner.  A kite hung over our heads
as we passed Medmenham yesterday; magpies were quite common in the
hedgerows; I saw several sparrow-hawks, and I think a merlin; and now
just as we were passing the pretty bridge which had taken the place of
Basildon railway-bridge, a couple of ravens croaked above our boat, as
they sailed off to the higher ground of the downs.  I concluded from all
this that the days of the gamekeeper were over, and did not even need to
ask Dick a question about it.





Before we parted from these girls we saw two sturdy young men and a woman
putting off from the Berkshire shore, and then Dick bethought him of a
little banter of the girls, and asked them how it was that there was
nobody of the male kind to go with them across the water, and where their
boats were gone to.  Said one, the youngest of the party: "O, they have
got the big punt to lead stone from up the water."

"Who do you mean by 'they,' dear child?" said Dick.

Said an older girl, laughing: "You had better go and see them.  Look
there," and she pointed northwest, "don't you see building going on
there?"

"Yes," said Dick, "and I am rather surprised at this time of the year;
why are they not haymaking with you?"

The girls all laughed at this, and before their laugh was over, the
Berkshire boat had run on to the grass and the girls stepped in lightly,
still sniggering, while the new comers gave us the sele of the day.  But
before they were under way again, the tall girl said:

"Excuse us for laughing, dear neighbours, but we have had some friendly
bickering with the builders up yonder, and as we have no time to tell you
the story, you had better go and ask them: they will be glad to see
you--if you don't hinder their work."

They all laughed again at that, and waved us a pretty farewell as the
punters set them over toward the other shore, and left us standing on the
bank beside our boat.

"Let us go and see them," said Clara; "that is, if you are not in a hurry
to get to Streatley, Walter?"

"O no," said Walter, "I shall be glad of the excuse to have a little more
of your company."

So we left the boat moored there, and went on up the slow slope of the
hill; but I said to Dick on the way, being somewhat mystified: "What was
all that laughing about? what was the joke!"

"I can guess pretty well," said Dick; "some of them up there have got a
piece of work which interests them, and they won't go to the haymaking,
which doesn't matter at all, because there are plenty of people to do
such easy-hard work as that; only, since haymaking is a regular festival,
the neighbours find it amusing to jeer good-humouredly at them."

"I see," said I, "much as if in Dickens's time some young people were so
wrapped up in their work that they wouldn't keep Christmas."

"Just so," said Dick, "only these people need not be young either."

"But what did you mean by easy-hard work?" said I.

Quoth Dick: "Did I say that?  I mean work that tries the muscles and
hardens them and sends you pleasantly weary to bed, but which isn't
trying in other ways: doesn't harass you in short.  Such work is always
pleasant if you don't overdo it.  Only, mind you, good mowing requires
some little skill.  I'm a pretty good mower."

This talk brought us up to the house that was a-building, not a large
one, which stood at the end of a beautiful orchard surrounded by an old
stone wall.  "O yes, I see," said Dick; "I remember, a beautiful place
for a house: but a starveling of a nineteenth century house stood there:
I am glad they are rebuilding: it's all stone, too, though it need not
have been in this part of the country: my word, though, they are making a
neat job of it: but I wouldn't have made it all ashlar."

Walter and Clara were already talking to a tall man clad in his mason's
blouse, who looked about forty, but was I daresay older, who had his
mallet and chisel in hand; there were at work in the shed and on the
scaffold about half a dozen men and two women, blouse-clad like the
carles, while a very pretty woman who was not in the work but was dressed
in an elegant suit of blue linen came sauntering up to us with her
knitting in her hand.  She welcomed us and said, smiling: "So you are
come up from the water to see the Obstinate Refusers: where are you going
haymaking, neighbours?"

"O, right up above Oxford," said Dick; "it is rather a late country.  But
what share have you got with the Refusers, pretty neighbour?"

Said she, with a laugh: "O, I am the lucky one who doesn't want to work;
though sometimes I get it, for I serve as model to Mistress Philippa
there when she wants one: she is our head carver; come and see her."

She led us up to the door of the unfinished house, where a rather little
woman was working with mallet and chisel on the wall near by.  She seemed
very intent on what she was doing, and did not turn round when we came
up; but a taller woman, quite a girl she seemed, who was at work near by,
had already knocked off, and was standing looking from Clara to Dick with
delighted eyes.  None of the others paid much heed to us.

The blue-clad girl laid her hand on the carver's shoulder and said: "Now
Philippa, if you gobble up your work like that, you will soon have none
to do; and what will become of you then?"

The carver turned round hurriedly and showed us the face of a woman of
forty (or so she seemed), and said rather pettishly, but in a sweet
voice:

"Don't talk nonsense, Kate, and don't interrupt me if you can help it."
She stopped short when she saw us, then went on with the kind smile of
welcome which never failed us.  "Thank you for coming to see us,
neighbours; but I am sure that you won't think me unkind if I go on with
my work, especially when I tell you that I was ill and unable to do
anything all through April and May; and this open-air and the sun and the
work together, and my feeling well again too, make a mere delight of
every hour to me; and excuse me, I must go on."

She fell to work accordingly on a carving in low relief of flowers and
figures, but talked on amidst her mallet strokes: "You see, we all think
this the prettiest place for a house up and down these reaches; and the
site has been so long encumbered with an unworthy one, that we masons
were determined to pay off fate and destiny for once, and build the
prettiest house we could compass here--and so--and so--"

Here she lapsed into mere carving, but the tall foreman came up and said:
"Yes, neighbours, that is it: so it is going to be all ashlar because we
want to carve a kind of a wreath of flowers and figures all round it; and
we have been much hindered by one thing or other--Philippa's illness
amongst others,--and though we could have managed our wreath without
her--"

"Could you, though?" grumbled the last-named from the face of the wall.

"Well, at any rate, she is our best carver, and it would not have been
kind to begin the carving without her.  So you see," said he, looking at
Dick and me, "we really couldn't go haymaking, could we, neighbours?  But
you see, we are getting on so fast now with this splendid weather, that I
think we may well spare a week or ten days at wheat-harvest; and won't we
go at that work then!  Come down then to the acres that lie north and by
west here at our backs and you shall see good harvesters, neighbours.

"Hurrah, for a good brag!" called a voice from the scaffold above us;
"our foreman thinks that an easier job than putting one stone on
another!"

There was a general laugh at this sally, in which the tall foreman
joined; and with that we saw a lad bringing out a little table into the
shadow of the stone-shed, which he set down there, and then going back,
came out again with the inevitable big wickered flask and tall glasses,
whereon the foreman led us up to due seats on blocks of stone, and said:

"Well, neighbours, drink to my brag coming true, or I shall think you
don't believe me!  Up there!" said he, hailing the scaffold, "are you
coming down for a glass?"  Three of the workmen came running down the
ladder as men with good "building legs" will do; but the others didn't
answer, except the joker (if he must so be called), who called out
without turning round: "Excuse me, neighbours for not getting down.  I
must get on: my work is not superintending, like the gaffer's yonder;
but, you fellows, send us up a glass to drink the haymakers' health."  Of
course, Philippa would not turn away from her beloved work; but the other
woman carver came; she turned out to be Philippa's daughter, but was a
tall strong girl, black-haired and gipsey-like of face and curiously
solemn of manner.  The rest gathered round us and clinked glasses, and
the men on the scaffold turned about and drank to our healths; but the
busy little woman by the door would have none of it all, but only
shrugged her shoulders when her daughter came up to her and touched her.

So we shook hands and turned our backs on the Obstinate Refusers, went
down the slope to our boat, and before we had gone many steps heard the
full tune of tinkling trowels mingle with the humming of the bees and the
singing of the larks above the little plain of Basildon.





We set Walter ashore on the Berkshire side, amidst all the beauties of
Streatley, and so went our ways into what once would have been the deeper
country under the foot-hills of the White Horse; and though the contrast
between half-cocknified and wholly unsophisticated country existed no
longer, a feeling of exultation rose within me (as it used to do) at
sight of the familiar and still unchanged hills of the Berkshire range.

We stopped at Wallingford for our mid-day meal; of course, all signs of
squalor and poverty had disappeared from the streets of the ancient town,
and many ugly houses had been taken down and many pretty new ones built,
but I thought it curious, that the town still looked like the old place I
remembered so well; for indeed it looked like that ought to have looked.

At dinner we fell in with an old, but very bright and intelligent man,
who seemed in a country way to be another edition of old Hammond.  He had
an extraordinary detailed knowledge of the ancient history of the country-
side from the time of Alfred to the days of the Parliamentary Wars, many
events of which, as you may know, were enacted round about Wallingford.
But, what was more interesting to us, he had detailed record of the
period of the change to the present state of things, and told us a great
deal about it, and especially of that exodus of the people from the town
to the country, and the gradual recovery by the town-bred people on one
side, and the country-bred people on the other, of those arts of life
which they had each lost; which loss, as he told us, had at one time gone
so far that not only was it impossible to find a carpenter or a smith in
a village or small country town, but that people in such places had even
forgotten how to bake bread, and that at Wallingford, for instance, the
bread came down with the newspapers by an early train from London, worked
in some way, the explanation of which I could not understand.  He told us
also that the townspeople who came into the country used to pick up the
agricultural arts by carefully watching the way in which the machines
worked, gathering an idea of handicraft from machinery; because at that
time almost everything in and about the fields was done by elaborate
machines used quite unintelligently by the labourers.  On the other hand,
the old men amongst the labourers managed to teach the younger ones
gradually a little artizanship, such as the use of the saw and the plane,
the work of the smithy, and so forth; for once more, by that time it was
as much as--or rather, more than--a man could do to fix an ash pole to a
rake by handiwork; so that it would take a machine worth a thousand
pounds, a group of workmen, and half a day's travelling, to do five
shillings' worth of work.  He showed us, among other things, an account
of a certain village council who were working hard at all this business;
and the record of their intense earnestness in getting to the bottom of
some matter which in time past would have been thought quite trivial, as,
for example, the due proportions of alkali and oil for soap-making for
the village wash, or the exact heat of the water into which a leg of
mutton should be plunged for boiling--all this joined to the utter
absence of anything like party feeling, which even in a village assembly
would certainly have made its appearance in an earlier epoch, was very
amusing, and at the same time instructive.

This old man, whose name was Henry Morsom, took us, after our meal and a
rest, into a biggish hall which contained a large collection of articles
of manufacture and art from the last days of the machine period to that
day; and he went over them with us, and explained them with great care.
They also were very interesting, showing the transition from the
makeshift work of the machines (which was at about its worst a little
after the Civil War before told of) into the first years of the new
handicraft period.  Of course, there was much overlapping of the periods:
and at first the new handwork came in very slowly.

"You must remember," said the old antiquary, "that the handicraft was not
the result of what used to be called material necessity: on the contrary,
by that time the machines had been so much improved that almost all
necessary work might have been done by them: and indeed many people at
that time, and before it, used to think that machinery would entirely
supersede handicraft; which certainly, on the face of it, seemed more
than likely.  But there was another opinion, far less logical, prevalent
amongst the rich people before the days of freedom, which did not die out
at once after that epoch had begun.  This opinion, which from all I can
learn seemed as natural then, as it seems absurd now, was, that while the
ordinary daily work of the world would be done entirely by automatic
machinery, the energies of the more intelligent part of mankind would be
set free to follow the higher forms of the arts, as well as science and
the study of history.  It was strange, was it not, that they should thus
ignore that aspiration after complete equality which we now recognise as
the bond of all happy human society?"

I did not answer, but thought the more.  Dick looked thoughtful, and
said:

"Strange, neighbour?  Well, I don't know.  I have often heard my old
kinsman say the one aim of all people before our time was to avoid work,
or at least they thought it was; so of course the work which their daily
life forced them to do, seemed more like work than that which they seemed
to choose for themselves."

"True enough," said Morsom.  "Anyhow, they soon began to find out their
mistake, and that only slaves and slave-holders could live solely by
setting machines going."

Clara broke in here, flushing a little as she spoke: "Was not their
mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been
living?--a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind,
animate and inanimate--'nature,' as people used to call it--as one thing,
and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way,
that they should try to make 'nature' their slave, since they thought
'nature' was something outside them."

"Surely," said Morsom; "and they were puzzled as to what to do, till they
found the feeling against a mechanical life, which had begun before the
Great Change amongst people who had leisure to think of such things, was
spreading insensibly; till at last under the guise of pleasure that was
not supposed to be work, work that was pleasure began to push out the
mechanical toil, which they had once hoped at the best to reduce to
narrow limits indeed, but never to get rid of; and which, moreover, they
found they could not limit as they had hoped to do."

"When did this new revolution gather head?" said I.

"In the half-century that followed the Great Change," said Morsom, "it
began to be noteworthy; machine after machine was quietly dropped under
the excuse that the machines could not produce works of art, and that
works of art were more and more called for.  Look here," he said, "here
are some of the works of that time--rough and unskilful in handiwork, but
solid and showing some sense of pleasure in the making."

"They are very curious," said I, taking up a piece of pottery from
amongst the specimens which the antiquary was showing us; "not a bit like
the work of either savages or barbarians, and yet with what would once
have been called a hatred of civilisation impressed upon them."

"Yes," said Morsom, "you must not look for delicacy there: in that period
you could only have got that from a man who was practically a slave.  But
now, you see," said he, leading me on a little, "we have learned the
trick of handicraft, and have added the utmost refinement of workmanship
to the freedom of fancy and imagination."

I looked, and wondered indeed at the deftness and abundance of beauty of
the work of men who had at last learned to accept life itself as a
pleasure, and the satisfaction of the common needs of mankind and the
preparation for them, as work fit for the best of the race.  I mused
silently; but at last I said--

"What is to come after this?"

The old man laughed.  "I don't know," said he; "we will meet it when it
comes."

"Meanwhile," quoth Dick, "we have got to meet the rest of our day's
journey; so out into the street and down to the strand!  Will you come a
turn with us, neighbour?  Our friend is greedy of your stories."

"I will go as far as Oxford with you," said he; "I want a book or two out
of the Bodleian Library.  I suppose you will sleep in the old city?"

"No," said Dick, "we are going higher up; the hay is waiting us there,
you know."

Morsom nodded, and we all went into the street together, and got into the
boat a little above the town bridge.  But just as Dick was getting the
sculls into the rowlocks, the bows of another boat came thrusting through
the low arch.  Even at first sight it was a gay little craft
indeed--bright green, and painted over with elegantly drawn flowers.  As
it cleared the arch, a figure as bright and gay-clad as the boat rose up
in it; a slim girl dressed in light blue silk that fluttered in the
draughty wind of the bridge.  I thought I knew the figure, and sure
enough, as she turned her head to us, and showed her beautiful face, I
saw with joy that it was none other than the fairy godmother from the
abundant garden on Runnymede--Ellen, to wit.

We all stopped to receive her.  Dick rose in the boat and cried out a
genial good morrow; I tried to be as genial as Dick, but failed; Clara
waved a delicate hand to her; and Morsom nodded and looked on with
interest.  As to Ellen, the beautiful brown of her face was deepened by a
flush, as she brought the gunwale of her boat alongside ours, and said:

"You see, neighbours, I had some doubt if you would all three come back
past Runnymede, or if you did, whether you would stop there; and besides,
I am not sure whether we--my father and I--shall not be away in a week or
two, for he wants to see a brother of his in the north country, and I
should not like him to go without me.  So I thought I might never see you
again, and that seemed uncomfortable to me, and--and so I came after
you."

"Well," said Dick, "I am sure we are all very glad of that; although you
may be sure that as for Clara and me, we should have made a point of
coming to see you, and of coming the second time, if we had found you
away the first.  But, dear neighbour, there you are alone in the boat,
and you have been sculling pretty hard I should think, and might find a
little quiet sitting pleasant; so we had better part our company into
two."

"Yes," said Ellen, "I thought you would do that, so I have brought a
rudder for my boat: will you help me to ship it, please?"

And she went aft in her boat and pushed along our side till she had
brought the stern close to Dick's hand.  He knelt down in our boat and
she in hers, and the usual fumbling took place over hanging the rudder on
its hooks; for, as you may imagine, no change had taken place in the
arrangement of such an unimportant matter as the rudder of a pleasure-
boat.  As the two beautiful young faces bent over the rudder, they seemed
to me to be very close together, and though it only lasted a moment, a
sort of pang shot through me as I looked on.  Clara sat in her place and
did not look round, but presently she said, with just the least stiffness
in her tone:

"How shall we divide?  Won't you go into Ellen's boat, Dick, since,
without offence to our guest, you are the better sculler?"

Dick stood up and laid his hand on her shoulder, and said: "No, no; let
Guest try what he can do--he ought to be getting into training now.
Besides, we are in no hurry: we are not going far above Oxford; and even
if we are benighted, we shall have the moon, which will give us nothing
worse of a night than a greyer day."

"Besides," said I, "I may manage to do a little more with my sculling
than merely keeping the boat from drifting down stream."

They all laughed at this, as if it had a been very good joke; and I
thought that Ellen's laugh, even amongst the others, was one of the
pleasantest sounds I had ever heard.

To be short, I got into the new-come boat, not a little elated, and
taking the sculls, set to work to show off a little.  For--must I say
it?--I felt as if even that happy world were made the happier for my
being so near this strange girl; although I must say that of all the
persons I had seen in that world renewed, she was the most unfamiliar to
me, the most unlike what I could have thought of.  Clara, for instance,
beautiful and bright as she was, was not unlike a _very_ pleasant and
unaffected young lady; and the other girls also seemed nothing more than
specimens of very much improved types which I had known in other times.
But this girl was not only beautiful with a beauty quite different from
that of "a young lady," but was in all ways so strangely interesting; so
that I kept wondering what she would say or do next to surprise and
please me.  Not, indeed, that there was anything startling in what she
actually said or did; but it was all done in a new way, and always with
that indefinable interest and pleasure of life, which I had noticed more
or less in everybody, but which in her was more marked and more charming
than in anyone else that I had seen.

We were soon under way and going at a fair pace through the beautiful
reaches of the river, between Bensington and Dorchester.  It was now
about the middle of the afternoon, warm rather than hot, and quite
windless; the clouds high up and light, pearly white, and gleaming,
softened the sun's burning, but did not hide the pale blue in most
places, though they seemed to give it height and consistency; the sky, in
short, looked really like a vault, as poets have sometimes called it, and
not like mere limitless air, but a vault so vast and full of light that
it did not in any way oppress the spirits.  It was the sort of afternoon
that Tennyson must have been thinking about, when he said of the Lotos-
Eaters' land that it was a land where it was always afternoon.

Ellen leaned back in the stern and seemed to enjoy herself thoroughly.  I
could see that she was really looking at things and let nothing escape
her, and as I watched her, an uncomfortable feeling that she had been a
little touched by love of the deft, ready, and handsome Dick, and that
she had been constrained to follow us because of it, faded out of my
mind; since if it had been so, she surely could not have been so
excitedly pleased, even with the beautiful scenes we were passing
through.  For some time she did not say much, but at last, as we had
passed under Shillingford Bridge (new built, but somewhat on its old
lines), she bade me hold the boat while she had a good look at the
landscape through the graceful arch.  Then she turned about to me and
said:

"I do not know whether to be sorry or glad that this is the first time
that I have been in these reaches.  It is true that it is a great
pleasure to see all this for the first time; but if I had had a year or
two of memory of it, how sweetly it would all have mingled with my life,
waking or dreaming!  I am so glad Dick has been pulling slowly, so as to
linger out the time here.  How do you feel about your first visit to
these waters?"

I do not suppose she meant a trap for me, but anyhow I fell into it, and
said: "My first visit!  It is not my first visit by many a time.  I know
these reaches well; indeed, I may say that I know every yard of the
Thames from Hammersmith to Cricklade."

I saw the complications that might follow, as her eyes fixed mine with a
curious look in them, that I had seen before at Runnymede, when I had
said something which made it difficult for others to understand my
present position amongst these people.  I reddened, and said, in order to
cover my mistake: "I wonder you have never been up so high as this, since
you live on the Thames, and moreover row so well that it would be no
great labour to you.  Let alone," quoth I, insinuatingly, "that anybody
would be glad to row you."

She laughed, clearly not at my compliment (as I am sure she need not have
done, since it was a very commonplace fact), but at something which was
stirring in her mind; and she still looked at me kindly, but with the
above-said keen look in her eyes, and then she said:

"Well, perhaps it is strange, though I have a good deal to do at home,
what with looking after my father, and dealing with two or three young
men who have taken a special liking to me, and all of whom I cannot
please at once.  But you, dear neighbour; it seems to me stranger that
you should know the upper river, than that I should not know it; for, as
I understand, you have only been in England a few days.  But perhaps you
mean that you have read about it in books, and seen pictures of
it?--though that does not come to much, either."

"Truly," said I.  "Besides, I have not read any books about the Thames:
it was one of the minor stupidities of our time that no one thought fit
to write a decent book about what may fairly be called our only English
river."

The words were no sooner out of my mouth than I saw that I had made
another mistake; and I felt really annoyed with myself, as I did not want
to go into a long explanation just then, or begin another series of
Odyssean lies.  Somehow, Ellen seemed to see this, and she took no
advantage of my slip; her piercing look changed into one of mere frank
kindness, and she said:

"Well, anyhow I am glad that I am travelling these waters with you, since
you know our river so well, and I know little of it past Pangbourne, for
you can tell me all I want to know about it."  She paused a minute, and
then said: "Yet you must understand that the part I do know, I know as
thoroughly as you do.  I should be sorry for you to think that I am
careless of a thing so beautiful and interesting as the Thames."

She said this quite earnestly, and with an air of affectionate appeal to
me which pleased me very much; but I could see that she was only keeping
her doubts about me for another time.

Presently we came to Day's Lock, where Dick and his two sitters had
waited for us.  He would have me go ashore, as if to show me something
which I had never seen before; and nothing loth I followed him, Ellen by
my side, to the well-remembered Dykes, and the long church beyond them,
which was still used for various purposes by the good folk of Dorchester:
where, by the way, the village guest-house still had the sign of the
Fleur-de-luce which it used to bear in the days when hospitality had to
be bought and sold.  This time, however, I made no sign of all this being
familiar to me: though as we sat for a while on the mound of the Dykes
looking up at Sinodun and its clear-cut trench, and its sister _mamelon_
of Whittenham, I felt somewhat uncomfortable under Ellen's serious
attentive look, which almost drew from me the cry, "How little anything
is changed here!"

We stopped again at Abingdon, which, like Wallingford, was in a way both
old and new to me, since it had been lifted out of its nineteenth-century
degradation, and otherwise was as little altered as might be.

Sunset was in the sky as we skirted Oxford by Oseney; we stopped a minute
or two hard by the ancient castle to put Henry Morsom ashore.  It was a
matter of course that so far as they could be seen from the river, I
missed none of the towers and spires of that once don-beridden city; but
the meadows all round, which, when I had last passed through them, were
getting daily more and more squalid, more and more impressed with the
seal of the "stir and intellectual life of the nineteenth century," were
no longer intellectual, but had once again become as beautiful as they
should be, and the little hill of Hinksey, with two or three very pretty
stone houses new-grown on it (I use the word advisedly; for they seemed
to belong to it) looked down happily on the full streams and waving
grass, grey now, but for the sunset, with its fast-ripening seeds.

The railway having disappeared, and therewith the various level bridges
over the streams of Thames, we were soon through Medley Lock and in the
wide water that washes Port Meadow, with its numerous population of geese
nowise diminished; and I thought with interest how its name and use had
survived from the older imperfect communal period, through the time of
the confused struggle and tyranny of the rights of property, into the
present rest and happiness of complete Communism.

I was taken ashore again at Godstow, to see the remains of the old
nunnery, pretty nearly in the same condition as I had remembered them;
and from the high bridge over the cut close by, I could see, even in the
twilight, how beautiful the little village with its grey stone houses had
become; for we had now come into the stone-country, in which every house
must be either built, walls and roof, of grey stone or be a blot on the
landscape.

We still rowed on after this, Ellen taking the sculls in my boat; we
passed a weir a little higher up, and about three miles beyond it came by
moonlight again to a little town, where we slept at a house thinly
inhabited, as its folk were mostly tented in the hay-fields.





We started before six o'clock the next morning, as we were still twenty-
five miles from our resting place, and Dick wanted to be there before
dusk.  The journey was pleasant, though to those who do not know the
upper Thames, there is little to say about it.  Ellen and I were once
more together in her boat, though Dick, for fairness' sake, was for
having me in his, and letting the two women scull the green toy.  Ellen,
however, would not allow this, but claimed me as the interesting person
of the company.  "After having come so far," said she, "I will not be put
off with a companion who will be always thinking of somebody else than
me: the guest is the only person who can amuse me properly.  I mean that
really," said she, turning to me, "and have not said it merely as a
pretty saying."

Clara blushed and looked very happy at all this; for I think up to this
time she had been rather frightened of Ellen.  As for me I felt young
again, and strange hopes of my youth were mingling with the pleasure of
the present; almost destroying it, and quickening it into something like
pain.

As we passed through the short and winding reaches of the now quickly
lessening stream, Ellen said: "How pleasant this little river is to me,
who am used to a great wide wash of water; it almost seems as if we shall
have to stop at every reach-end.  I expect before I get home this evening
I shall have realised what a little country England is, since we can so
soon get to the end of its biggest river."

"It is not big," said I, "but it is pretty."

"Yes," she said, "and don't you find it difficult to imagine the times
when this little pretty country was treated by its folk as if it had been
an ugly characterless waste, with no delicate beauty to be guarded, with
no heed taken of the ever fresh pleasure of the recurring seasons, and
changeful weather, and diverse quality of the soil, and so forth?  How
could people be so cruel to themselves?"

"And to each other," said I.  Then a sudden resolution took hold of me,
and I said: "Dear neighbour, I may as well tell you at once that I find
it easier to imagine all that ugly past than you do, because I myself
have been part of it.  I see both that you have divined something of this
in me; and also I think you will believe me when I tell you of it, so
that I am going to hide nothing from you at all."

She was silent a little, and then she said: "My friend, you have guessed
right about me; and to tell you the truth I have followed you up from
Runnymede in order that I might ask you many questions, and because I saw
that you were not one of us; and that interested and pleased me, and I
wanted to make you as happy as you could be.  To say the truth, there was
a risk in it," said she, blushing--"I mean as to Dick and Clara; for I
must tell you, since we are going to be such close friends, that even
amongst us, where there are so many beautiful women, I have often
troubled men's minds disastrously.  That is one reason why I was living
alone with my father in the cottage at Runnymede.  But it did not answer
on that score; for of course people came there, as the place is not a
desert, and they seemed to find me all the more interesting for living
alone like that, and fell to making stories of me to themselves--like I
know you did, my friend.  Well, let that pass.  This evening, or
to-morrow morning, I shall make a proposal to you to do something which
would please me very much, and I think would not hurt you."

I broke in eagerly, saying that I would do anything in the world for her;
for indeed, in spite of my years and the too obvious signs of them
(though that feeling of renewed youth was not a mere passing sensation, I
think)--in spite of my years, I say, I felt altogether too happy in the
company of this delightful girl, and was prepared to take her confidences
for more than they meant perhaps.

She laughed now, but looked very kindly on me.  "Well," she said,
"meantime for the present we will let it be; for I must look at this new
country that we are passing through.  See how the river has changed
character again: it is broad now, and the reaches are long and very slow-
running.  And look, there is a ferry!"

I told her the name of it, as I slowed off to put the ferry-chain over
our heads; and on we went passing by a bank clad with oak trees on our
left hand, till the stream narrowed again and deepened, and we rowed on
between walls of tall reeds, whose population of reed sparrows and
warblers were delightfully restless, twittering and chuckling as the wash
of the boats stirred the reeds from the water upwards in the still, hot
morning.

She smiled with pleasure, and her lazy enjoyment of the new scene seemed
to bring out her beauty doubly as she leaned back amidst the cushions,
though she was far from languid; her idleness being the idleness of a
person, strong and well-knit both in body and mind, deliberately resting.

"Look!" she said, springing up suddenly from her place without any
obvious effort, and balancing herself with exquisite grace and ease;
"look at the beautiful old bridge ahead!"

"I need scarcely look at that," said I, not turning my head away from her
beauty.  "I know what it is; though" (with a smile) "we used not to call
it the Old Bridge time agone."

She looked down upon me kindly, and said, "How well we get on now you are
no longer on your guard against me!"

And she stood looking thoughtfully at me still, till she had to sit down
as we passed under the middle one of the row of little pointed arches of
the oldest bridge across the Thames.

"O the beautiful fields!" she said; "I had no idea of the charm of a very
small river like this.  The smallness of the scale of everything, the
short reaches, and the speedy change of the banks, give one a feeling of
going somewhere, of coming to something strange, a feeling of adventure
which I have not felt in bigger waters."

I looked up at her delightedly; for her voice, saying the very thing
which I was thinking, was like a caress to me.  She caught my eye and her
cheeks reddened under their tan, and she said simply:

"I must tell you, my friend, that when my father leaves the Thames this
summer he will take me away to a place near the Roman wall in Cumberland;
so that this voyage of mine is farewell to the south; of course with my
goodwill in a way; and yet I am sorry for it.  I hadn't the heart to tell
Dick yesterday that we were as good as gone from the Thames-side; but
somehow to you I must needs tell it."

She stopped and seemed very thoughtful for awhile, and then said smiling:

"I must say that I don't like moving about from one home to another; one
gets so pleasantly used to all the detail of the life about one; it fits
so harmoniously and happily into one's own life, that beginning again,
even in a small way, is a kind of pain.  But I daresay in the country
which you come from, you would think this petty and unadventurous, and
would think the worse of me for it."

She smiled at me caressingly as she spoke, and I made haste to answer:
"O, no, indeed; again you echo my very thoughts.  But I hardly expected
to hear you speak so.  I gathered from all I have heard that there was a
great deal of changing of abode amongst you in this country."

"Well," she said, "of course people are free to move about; but except
for pleasure-parties, especially in harvest and hay-time, like this of
ours, I don't think they do so much.  I admit that I also have other
moods than that of stay-at-home, as I hinted just now, and I should like
to go with you all through the west country--thinking of nothing,"
concluded she smiling.

"I should have plenty to think of," said I.





Presently at a place where the river flowed round a headland of the
meadows, we stopped a while for rest and victuals, and settled ourselves
on a beautiful bank which almost reached the dignity of a hill-side: the
wide meadows spread before us, and already the scythe was busy amidst the
hay.  One change I noticed amidst the quiet beauty of the fields--to wit,
that they were planted with trees here and there, often fruit-trees, and
that there was none of the niggardly begrudging of space to a handsome
tree which I remembered too well; and though the willows were often
polled (or shrowded, as they call it in that country-side), this was done
with some regard to beauty: I mean that there was no polling of rows on
rows so as to destroy the pleasantness of half a mile of country, but a
thoughtful sequence in the cutting, that prevented a sudden bareness
anywhere.  To be short, the fields were everywhere treated as a garden
made for the pleasure as well as the livelihood of all, as old Hammond
told me was the case.

On this bank or bent of the hill, then, we had our mid-day meal; somewhat
early for dinner, if that mattered, but we had been stirring early: the
slender stream of the Thames winding below us between the garden of a
country I have been telling of; a furlong from us was a beautiful little
islet begrown with graceful trees; on the slopes westward of us was a
wood of varied growth overhanging the narrow meadow on the south side of
the river; while to the north was a wide stretch of mead rising very
gradually from the river's edge.  A delicate spire of an ancient building
rose up from out of the trees in the middle distance, with a few grey
houses clustered about it; while nearer to us, in fact not half a furlong
from the water, was a quite modern stone house--a wide quadrangle of one
story, the buildings that made it being quite low.  There was no garden
between it and the river, nothing but a row of pear-trees still quite
young and slender; and though there did not seem to be much ornament
about it, it had a sort of natural elegance, like that of the trees
themselves.

As we sat looking down on all this in the sweet June day, rather happy
than merry, Ellen, who sat next me, her hand clasped about one knee,
leaned sideways to me, and said in a low voice which Dick and Clara might
have noted if they had not been busy in happy wordless love-making:
"Friend, in your country were the houses of your field-labourers anything
like that?"

I said: "Well, at any rate the houses of our rich men were not; they were
mere blots upon the face of the land."

"I find that hard to understand," she said.  "I can see why the workmen,
who were so oppressed, should not have been able to live in beautiful
houses; for it takes time and leisure, and minds not over-burdened with
care, to make beautiful dwellings; and I quite understand that these poor
people were not allowed to live in such a way as to have these (to us)
necessary good things.  But why the rich men, who had the time and the
leisure and the materials for building, as it would be in this case,
should not have housed themselves well, I do not understand as yet.  I
know what you are meaning to say to me," she said, looking me full in the
eyes and blushing, "to wit that their houses and all belonging to them
were generally ugly and base, unless they chanced to be ancient like
yonder remnant of our forefathers' work" (pointing to the spire); "that
they were--let me see; what is the word?"

"Vulgar," said I.  "We used to say," said I, "that the ugliness and
vulgarity of the rich men's dwellings was a necessary reflection from the
sordidness and bareness of life which they forced upon the poor people."

She knit her brows as in thought; then turned a brightened face on me, as
if she had caught the idea, and said: "Yes, friend, I see what you mean.
We have sometimes--those of us who look into these things--talked this
very matter over; because, to say the truth, we have plenty of record of
the so-called arts of the time before Equality of Life; and there are not
wanting people who say that the state of that society was not the cause
of all that ugliness; that they were ugly in their life because they
liked to be, and could have had beautiful things about them if they had
chosen; just as a man or body of men now may, if they please, make things
more or less beautiful--Stop!  I know what you are going to say."

"Do you?" said I, smiling, yet with a beating heart.

"Yes," she said; "you are answering me, teaching me, in some way or
another, although you have not spoken the words aloud.  You were going to
say that in times of inequality it was an essential condition of the life
of these rich men that they should not themselves make what they wanted
for the adornment of their lives, but should force those to make them
whom they forced to live pinched and sordid lives; and that as a
necessary consequence the sordidness and pinching, the ugly barrenness of
those ruined lives, were worked up into the adornment of the lives of the
rich, and art died out amongst men?  Was that what you would say, my
friend?"

"Yes, yes," I said, looking at her eagerly; for she had risen and was
standing on the edge of the bent, the light wind stirring her dainty
raiment, one hand laid on her bosom, the other arm stretched downward and
clenched in her earnestness.

"It is true," she said, "it is true!  We have proved it true!"

I think amidst my--something more than interest in her, and admiration
for her, I was beginning to wonder how it would all end.  I had a
glimmering of fear of what might follow; of anxiety as to the remedy
which this new age might offer for the missing of something one might set
one's heart on.  But now Dick rose to his feet and cried out in his
hearty manner: "Neighbour Ellen, are you quarrelling with the guest, or
are you worrying him to tell you things which he cannot properly explain
to our ignorance?"

"Neither, dear neighbour," she said.  "I was so far from quarrelling with
him that I think I have been making him good friends both with himself
and me.  Is it so, dear guest?" she said, looking down at me with a
delightful smile of confidence in being understood.

"Indeed it is," said I.

"Well, moreover," she said, "I must say for him that he has explained
himself to me very well indeed, so that I quite understand him."

"All right," quoth Dick.  "When I first set eyes on you at Runnymede I
knew that there was something wonderful in your keenness of wits.  I
don't say that as a mere pretty speech to please you," said he quickly,
"but because it is true; and it made me want to see more of you.  But,
come, we ought to be going; for we are not half way, and we ought to be
in well before sunset."

And therewith he took Clara's hand, and led her down the bent.  But Ellen
stood thoughtfully looking down for a little, and as I took her hand to
follow Dick, she turned round to me and said:

"You might tell me a great deal and make many things clear to me, if you
would."

"Yes," said I, "I am pretty well fit for that,--and for nothing else--an
old man like me."

She did not notice the bitterness which, whether I liked it or not, was
in my voice as I spoke, but went on: "It is not so much for myself; I
should be quite content to dream about past times, and if I could not
idealise them, yet at least idealise some of the people who lived in
them.  But I think sometimes people are too careless of the history of
the past--too apt to leave it in the hands of old learned men like
Hammond.  Who knows?  Happy as we are, times may alter; we may be bitten
with some impulse towards change, and many things may seem too wonderful
for us to resist, too exciting not to catch at, if we do not know that
they are but phases of what has been before; and withal ruinous,
deceitful, and sordid."

As we went slowly down toward the boats she said again: "Not for myself
alone, dear friend; I shall have children; perhaps before the end a good
many;--I hope so.  And though of course I cannot force any special kind
of knowledge upon them, yet, my Friend, I cannot help thinking that just
as they might be like me in body, so I might impress upon them some part
of my ways of thinking; that is, indeed, some of the essential part of
myself; that part which was not mere moods, created by the matters and
events round about me.  What do you think?"

Of one thing I was sure, that her beauty and kindness and eagerness
combined, forced me to think as she did, when she was not earnestly
laying herself open to receive my thoughts.  I said, what at the time was
true, that I thought it most important; and presently stood entranced by
the wonder of her grace as she stepped into the light boat, and held out
her hand to me.  And so on we went up the Thames still--or whither?





On we went.  In spite of my new-born excitement about Ellen, and my
gathering fear of where it would land me, I could not help taking
abundant interest in the condition of the river and its banks; all the
more as she never seemed weary of the changing picture, but looked at
every yard of flowery bank and gurgling eddy with the same kind of
affectionate interest which I myself once had so fully, as I used to
think, and perhaps had not altogether lost even in this strangely changed
society with all its wonders.  Ellen seemed delighted with my pleasure at
this, that, or the other piece of carefulness in dealing with the river:
the nursing of pretty corners; the ingenuity in dealing with difficulties
of water-engineering, so that the most obviously useful works looked
beautiful and natural also.  All this, I say, pleased me hugely, and she
was pleased at my pleasure--but rather puzzled too.

"You seem astonished," she said, just after we had passed a mill {2}
which spanned all the stream save the water-way for traffic, but which
was as beautiful in its way as a Gothic cathedral--"You seem astonished
at this being so pleasant to look at."

"Yes," I said, "in a way I am; though I don't see why it should not be."

"Ah!" she said, looking at me admiringly, yet with a lurking smile in her
face, "you know all about the history of the past.  Were they not always
careful about this little stream which now adds so much pleasantness to
the country side?  It would always be easy to manage this little river.
Ah!  I forgot, though," she said, as her eye caught mine, "in the days we
are thinking of pleasure was wholly neglected in such matters.  But how
did they manage the river in the days that you--"  Lived in she was going
to say; but correcting herself, said--"in the days of which you have
record?"

"They _mis_managed it," quoth I.  "Up to the first half of the nineteenth
century, when it was still more or less of a highway for the country
people, some care was taken of the river and its banks; and though I
don't suppose anyone troubled himself about its aspect, yet it was trim
and beautiful.  But when the railways--of which no doubt you have
heard--came into power, they would not allow the people of the country to
use either the natural or artificial waterways, of which latter there
were a great many.  I suppose when we get higher up we shall see one of
these; a very important one, which one of these railways entirely closed
to the public, so that they might force people to send their goods by
their private road, and so tax them as heavily as they could."

Ellen laughed heartily.  "Well," she said, "that is not stated clearly
enough in our history-books, and it is worth knowing.  But certainly the
people of those days must have been a curiously lazy set.  We are not
either fidgety or quarrelsome now, but if any one tried such a piece of
folly on us, we should use the said waterways, whoever gainsaid us:
surely that would be simple enough.  However, I remember other cases of
this stupidity: when I was on the Rhine two years ago, I remember they
showed us ruins of old castles, which, according to what we heard, must
have been made for pretty much the same purpose as the railways were.  But
I am interrupting your history of the river: pray go on."

"It is both short and stupid enough," said I.  "The river having lost its
practical or commercial value--that is, being of no use to make money
of--"

She nodded.  "I understand what that queer phrase means," said she.  "Go
on!"

"Well, it was utterly neglected, till at last it became a nuisance--"

"Yes," quoth Ellen, "I understand: like the railways and the robber
knights.  Yes?"

"So then they turned the makeshift business on to it, and handed it over
to a body up in London, who from time to time, in order to show that they
had something to do, did some damage here and there,--cut down trees,
destroying the banks thereby; dredged the river (where it was not needed
always), and threw the dredgings on the fields so as to spoil them; and
so forth.  But for the most part they practised 'masterly inactivity,' as
it was then called--that is, they drew their salaries, and let things
alone."

"Drew their salaries," she said.  "I know that means that they were
allowed to take an extra lot of other people's goods for doing nothing.
And if that had been all, it really might have been worth while to let
them do so, if you couldn't find any other way of keeping them quiet; but
it seems to me that being so paid, they could not help doing something,
and that something was bound to be mischief,--because," said she,
kindling with sudden anger, "the whole business was founded on lies and
false pretensions.  I don't mean only these river-guardians, but all
these master-people I have read of."

"Yes," said I, "how happy you are to have got out of the parsimony of
oppression!"

"Why do you sigh?" she said, kindly and somewhat anxiously.  "You seem to
think that it will not last?"

"It will last for you," quoth I.

"But why not for you?" said she.  "Surely it is for all the world; and if
your country is somewhat backward, it will come into line before long.
Or," she said quickly, "are you thinking that you must soon go back
again?  I will make my proposal which I told you of at once, and so
perhaps put an end to your anxiety.  I was going to propose that you
should live with us where we are going.  I feel quite old friends with
you, and should be sorry to lose you."  Then she smiled on me, and said:
"Do you know, I begin to suspect you of wanting to nurse a sham sorrow,
like the ridiculous characters in some of those queer old novels that I
have come across now and then."

I really had almost begun to suspect it myself, but I refused to admit so
much; so I sighed no more, but fell to giving my delightful companion
what little pieces of history I knew about the river and its borderlands;
and the time passed pleasantly enough; and between the two of us (she was
a better sculler than I was, and seemed quite tireless) we kept up fairly
well with Dick, hot as the afternoon was, and swallowed up the way at a
great rate.  At last we passed under another ancient bridge; and through
meadows bordered at first with huge elm-trees mingled with sweet chestnut
of younger but very elegant growth; and the meadows widened out so much
that it seemed as if the trees must now be on the bents only, or about
the houses, except for the growth of willows on the immediate banks; so
that the wide stretch of grass was little broken here.  Dick got very
much excited now, and often stood up in the boat to cry out to us that
this was such and such a field, and so forth; and we caught fire at his
enthusiasm for the hay-field and its harvest, and pulled our best.

At last as we were passing through a reach of the river where on the side
of the towing-path was a highish bank with a thick whispering bed of
reeds before it, and on the other side a higher bank, clothed with
willows that dipped into the stream and crowned by ancient elm-trees, we
saw bright figures coming along close to the bank, as if they were
looking for something; as, indeed, they were, and we--that is, Dick and
his company--were what they were looking for.  Dick lay on his oars, and
we followed his example.  He gave a joyous shout to the people on the
bank, which was echoed back from it in many voices, deep and sweetly
shrill; for there were above a dozen persons, both men, women, and
children.  A tall handsome woman, with black wavy hair and deep-set grey
eyes, came forward on the bank and waved her hand gracefully to us, and
said:

"Dick, my friend, we have almost had to wait for you!  What excuse have
you to make for your slavish punctuality?  Why didn't you take us by
surprise, and come yesterday?"

"O," said Dick, with an almost imperceptible jerk of his head toward our
boat, "we didn't want to come too quick up the water; there is so much to
see for those who have not been up here before."

"True, true," said the stately lady, for stately is the word that must be
used for her; "and we want them to get to know the wet way from the east
thoroughly well, since they must often use it now.  But come ashore at
once, Dick, and you, dear neighbours; there is a break in the reeds and a
good landing-place just round the corner.  We can carry up your things,
or send some of the lads after them."

"No, no," said Dick; "it is easier going by water, though it is but a
step.  Besides, I want to bring my friend here to the proper place.  We
will go on to the Ford; and you can talk to us from the bank as we paddle
along."

He pulled his sculls through the water, and on we went, turning a sharp
angle and going north a little.  Presently we saw before us a bank of elm-
trees, which told us of a house amidst them, though I looked in vain for
the grey walls that I expected to see there.  As we went, the folk on the
bank talked indeed, mingling their kind voices with the cuckoo's song,
the sweet strong whistle of the blackbirds, and the ceaseless note of the
corn-crake as he crept through the long grass of the mowing-field; whence
came waves of fragrance from the flowering clover amidst of the ripe
grass.

In a few minutes we had passed through a deep eddying pool into the sharp
stream that ran from the ford, and beached our craft on a tiny strand of
limestone-gravel, and stepped ashore into the arms of our up-river
friends, our journey done.

I disentangled myself from the merry throng, and mounting on the cart-
road that ran along the river some feet above the water, I looked round
about me.  The river came down through a wide meadow on my left, which
was grey now with the ripened seeding grasses; the gleaming water was
lost presently by a turn of the bank, but over the meadow I could see the
mingled gables of a building where I knew the lock must be, and which now
seemed to combine a mill with it.  A low wooded ridge bounded the river-
plain to the south and south-east, whence we had come, and a few low
houses lay about its feet and up its slope.  I turned a little to my
right, and through the hawthorn sprays and long shoots of the wild roses
could see the flat country spreading out far away under the sun of the
calm evening, till something that might be called hills with a look of
sheep-pastures about them bounded it with a soft blue line.  Before me,
the elm-boughs still hid most of what houses there might be in this river-
side dwelling of men; but to the right of the cart-road a few grey
buildings of the simplest kind showed here and there.

There I stood in a dreamy mood, and rubbed my eyes as if I were not
wholly awake, and half expected to see the gay-clad company of beautiful
men and women change to two or three spindle-legged back-bowed men and
haggard, hollow-eyed, ill-favoured women, who once wore down the soil of
this land with their heavy hopeless feet, from day to day, and season to
season, and year to year.  But no change came as yet, and my heart
swelled with joy as I thought of all the beautiful grey villages, from
the river to the plain and the plain to the uplands, which I could
picture to myself so well, all peopled now with this happy and lovely
folk, who had cast away riches and attained to wealth.





As I stood there Ellen detached herself from our happy friends who still
stood on the little strand and came up to me.  She took me by the hand,
and said softly, "Take me on to the house at once; we need not wait for
the others: I had rather not."

I had a mind to say that I did not know the way thither, and that the
river-side dwellers should lead; but almost without my will my feet moved
on along the road they knew.  The raised way led us into a little field
bounded by a backwater of the river on one side; on the right hand we
could see a cluster of small houses and barns, new and old, and before us
a grey stone barn and a wall partly overgrown with ivy, over which a few
grey gables showed.  The village road ended in the shallow of the
aforesaid backwater.  We crossed the road, and again almost without my
will my hand raised the latch of a door in the wall, and we stood
presently on a stone path which led up to the old house to which fate in
the shape of Dick had so strangely brought me in this new world of men.
My companion gave a sigh of pleased surprise and enjoyment; nor did I
wonder, for the garden between the wall and the house was redolent of the
June flowers, and the roses were rolling over one another with that
delicious superabundance of small well-tended gardens which at first
sight takes away all thought from the beholder save that of beauty.  The
blackbirds were singing their loudest, the doves were cooing on the roof-
ridge, the rooks in the high elm-trees beyond were garrulous among the
young leaves, and the swifts wheeled whining about the gables.  And the
house itself was a fit guardian for all the beauty of this heart of
summer.

Once again Ellen echoed my thoughts as she said:

"Yes, friend, this is what I came out for to see; this many-gabled old
house built by the simple country-folk of the long-past times, regardless
of all the turmoil that was going on in cities and courts, is lovely
still amidst all the beauty which these latter days have created; and I
do not wonder at our friends tending it carefully and making much of it.
It seems to me as if it had waited for these happy days, and held in it
the gathered crumbs of happiness of the confused and turbulent past."

She led me up close to the house, and laid her shapely sun-browned hand
and arm on the lichened wall as if to embrace it, and cried out, "O me!  O
me!  How I love the earth, and the seasons, and weather, and all things
that deal with it, and all that grows out of it,--as this has done!"

I could not answer her, or say a word.  Her exultation and pleasure were
so keen and exquisite, and her beauty, so delicate, yet so interfused
with energy, expressed it so fully, that any added word would have been
commonplace and futile.  I dreaded lest the others should come in
suddenly and break the spell she had cast about me; but we stood there a
while by the corner of the big gable of the house, and no one came.  I
heard the merry voices some way off presently, and knew that they were
going along the river to the great meadow on the other side of the house
and garden.

We drew back a little, and looked up at the house: the door and the
windows were open to the fragrant sun-cured air; from the upper window-
sills hung festoons of flowers in honour of the festival, as if the
others shared in the love for the old house.

"Come in," said Ellen.  "I hope nothing will spoil it inside; but I don't
think it will.  Come! we must go back presently to the others.  They have
gone on to the tents; for surely they must have tents pitched for the
haymakers--the house would not hold a tithe of the folk, I am sure."

She led me on to the door, murmuring little above her breath as she did
so, "The earth and the growth of it and the life of it!  If I could but
say or show how I love it!"

We went in, and found no soul in any room as we wandered from room to
room,--from the rose-covered porch to the strange and quaint garrets
amongst the great timbers of the roof, where of old time the tillers and
herdsmen of the manor slept, but which a-nights seemed now, by the small
size of the beds, and the litter of useless and disregarded
matters--bunches of dying flowers, feathers of birds, shells of
starling's eggs, caddis worms in mugs, and the like--seemed to be
inhabited for the time by children.

Everywhere there was but little furniture, and that only the most
necessary, and of the simplest forms.  The extravagant love of ornament
which I had noted in this people elsewhere seemed here to have given
place to the feeling that the house itself and its associations was the
ornament of the country life amidst which it had been left stranded from
old times, and that to re-ornament it would but take away its use as a
piece of natural beauty.

We sat down at last in a room over the wall which Ellen had caressed, and
which was still hung with old tapestry, originally of no artistic value,
but now faded into pleasant grey tones which harmonised thoroughly well
with the quiet of the place, and which would have been ill supplanted by
brighter and more striking decoration.

I asked a few random questions of Ellen as we sat there, but scarcely
listened to her answers, and presently became silent, and then scarce
conscious of anything, but that I was there in that old room, the doves
crooning from the roofs of the barn and dovecot beyond the window
opposite to me.

My thought returned to me after what I think was but a minute or two, but
which, as in a vivid dream, seemed as if it had lasted a long time, when
I saw Ellen sitting, looking all the fuller of life and pleasure and
desire from the contrast with the grey faded tapestry with its futile
design, which was now only bearable because it had grown so faint and
feeble.

She looked at me kindly, but as if she read me through and through.  She
said: "You have begun again your never-ending contrast between the past
and this present.  Is it not so?"

"True," said I.  "I was thinking of what you, with your capacity and
intelligence, joined to your love of pleasure, and your impatience of
unreasonable restraint--of what you would have been in that past.  And
even now, when all is won and has been for a long time, my heart is
sickened with thinking of all the waste of life that has gone on for so
many years."

"So many centuries," she said, "so many ages!"

"True," I said; "too true," and sat silent again.

She rose up and said: "Come, I must not let you go off into a dream again
so soon.  If we must lose you, I want you to see all that you can see
first before you go back again."

"Lose me?" I said--"go back again?  Am I not to go up to the North with
you?  What do you mean?"

She smiled somewhat sadly, and said: "Not yet; we will not talk of that
yet.  Only, what were you thinking of just now?"

I said falteringly: "I was saying to myself, The past, the present?
Should she not have said the contrast of the present with the future: of
blind despair with hope?"

"I knew it," she said.  Then she caught my hand and said excitedly,
"Come, while there is yet time!  Come!" And she led me out of the room;
and as we were going downstairs and out of the house into the garden by a
little side door which opened out of a curious lobby, she said in a calm
voice, as if she wished me to forget her sudden nervousness: "Come! we
ought to join the others before they come here looking for us.  And let
me tell you, my friend, that I can see you are too apt to fall into mere
dreamy musing: no doubt because you are not yet used to our life of
repose amidst of energy; of work which is pleasure and pleasure which is
work."

She paused a little, and as we came out into the lovely garden again, she
said: "My friend, you were saying that you wondered what I should have
been if I had lived in those past days of turmoil and oppression.  Well,
I think I have studied the history of them to know pretty well.  I should
have been one of the poor, for my father when he was working was a mere
tiller of the soil.  Well, I could not have borne that; therefore my
beauty and cleverness and brightness" (she spoke with no blush or simper
of false shame) "would have been sold to rich men, and my life would have
been wasted indeed; for I know enough of that to know that I should have
had no choice, no power of will over my life; and that I should never
have bought pleasure from the rich men, or even opportunity of action,
whereby I might have won some true excitement.  I should have wrecked and
wasted in one way or another, either by penury or by luxury.  Is it not
so?"

"Indeed it is," said I.

She was going to say something else, when a little gate in the fence,
which led into a small elm-shaded field, was opened, and Dick came with
hasty cheerfulness up the garden path, and was presently standing between
us, a hand laid on the shoulder of each.  He said: "Well, neighbours, I
thought you two would like to see the old house quietly without a crowd
in it.  Isn't it a jewel of a house after its kind?  Well, come along,
for it is getting towards dinner-time.  Perhaps you, guest, would like a
swim before we sit down to what I fancy will be a pretty long feast?"

"Yes," I said, "I should like that."

"Well, good-bye for the present, neighbour Ellen," said Dick.  "Here
comes Clara to take care of you, as I fancy she is more at home amongst
our friends here."

Clara came out of the fields as he spoke; and with one look at Ellen I
turned and went with Dick, doubting, if I must say the truth, whether I
should see her again.





Dick brought me at once into the little field which, as I had seen from
the garden, was covered with gaily-coloured tents arranged in orderly
lanes, about which were sitting and lying on the grass some fifty or
sixty men, women, and children, all of them in the height of good temper
and enjoyment--with their holiday mood on, so to say.

"You are thinking that we don't make a great show as to numbers," said
Dick; "but you must remember that we shall have more to-morrow; because
in this haymaking work there is room for a great many people who are not
over-skilled in country matters: and there are many who lead sedentary
lives, whom it would be unkind to deprive of their pleasure in the hay-
field--scientific men and close students generally: so that the skilled
workmen, outside those who are wanted as mowers, and foremen of the
haymaking, stand aside, and take a little downright rest, which you know
is good for them, whether they like it or not: or else they go to other
countrysides, as I am doing here.  You see, the scientific men and
historians, and students generally, will not be wanted till we are fairly
in the midst of the tedding, which of course will not be till the day
after to-morrow."  With that he brought me out of the little field on to
a kind of causeway above the river-side meadow, and thence turning to the
left on to a path through the mowing grass, which was thick and very
tall, led on till we came to the river above the weir and its mill.  There
we had a delightful swim in the broad piece of water above the lock,
where the river looked much bigger than its natural size from its being
dammed up by the weir.

"Now we are in a fit mood for dinner," said Dick, when we had dressed and
were going through the grass again; "and certainly of all the cheerful
meals in the year, this one of haysel is the cheerfullest; not even
excepting the corn-harvest feast; for then the year is beginning to fail,
and one cannot help having a feeling behind all the gaiety, of the coming
of the dark days, and the shorn fields and empty gardens; and the spring
is almost too far off to look forward to.  It is, then, in the autumn,
when one almost believes in death."

"How strangely you talk," said I, "of such a constantly recurring and
consequently commonplace matter as the sequence of the seasons." And
indeed these people were like children about such things, and had what
seemed to me a quite exaggerated interest in the weather, a fine day, a
dark night, or a brilliant one, and the like.

"Strangely?" said he.  "Is it strange to sympathise with the year and its
gains and losses?"

"At any rate," said I, "if you look upon the course of the year as a
beautiful and interesting drama, which is what I think you do, you should
be as much pleased and interested with the winter and its trouble and
pain as with this wonderful summer luxury."

"And am I not?" said Dick, rather warmly; "only I can't look upon it as
if I were sitting in a theatre seeing the play going on before me, myself
taking no part of it.  It is difficult," said he, smiling
good-humouredly, "for a non-literary man like me to explain myself
properly, like that dear girl Ellen would; but I mean that I am part of
it all, and feel the pain as well as the pleasure in my own person.  It
is not done for me by somebody else, merely that I may eat and drink and
sleep; but I myself do my share of it."

In his way also, as Ellen in hers, I could see that Dick had that
passionate love of the earth which was common to but few people at least,
in the days I knew; in which the prevailing feeling amongst intellectual
persons was a kind of sour distaste for the changing drama of the year,
for the life of earth and its dealings with men.  Indeed, in those days
it was thought poetic and imaginative to look upon life as a thing to be
borne, rather than enjoyed.

So I mused till Dick's laugh brought me back into the Oxfordshire hay-
fields.  "One thing seems strange to me," said he--"that I must needs
trouble myself about the winter and its scantiness, in the midst of the
summer abundance.  If it hadn't happened to me before, I should have
thought it was your doing, guest; that you had thrown a kind of evil
charm over me.  Now, you know," said he, suddenly, "that's only a joke,
so you mustn't take it to heart."

"All right," said I; "I don't."  Yet I did feel somewhat uneasy at his
words, after all.

We crossed the causeway this time, and did not turn back to the house,
but went along a path beside a field of wheat now almost ready to
blossom.  I said:

"We do not dine in the house or garden, then?--as indeed I did not expect
to do.  Where do we meet, then?  For I can see that the houses are mostly
very small."

"Yes," said Dick, "you are right, they are small in this country-side:
there are so many good old houses left, that people dwell a good deal in
such small detached houses.  As to our dinner, we are going to have our
feast in the church.  I wish, for your sake, it were as big and handsome
as that of the old Roman town to the west, or the forest town to the
north; {3} but, however, it will hold us all; and though it is a little
thing, it is beautiful in its way."

This was somewhat new to me, this dinner in a church, and I thought of
the church-ales of the Middle Ages; but I said nothing, and presently we
came out into the road which ran through the village.  Dick looked up and
down it, and seeing only two straggling groups before us, said: "It seems
as if we must be somewhat late; they are all gone on; and they will be
sure to make a point of waiting for you, as the guest of guests, since
you come from so far."

He hastened as he spoke, and I kept up with him, and presently we came to
a little avenue of lime-trees which led us straight to the church porch,
from whose open door came the sound of cheerful voices and laughter, and
varied merriment.

"Yes," said Dick, "it's the coolest place for one thing, this hot
evening.  Come along; they will be glad to see you."

Indeed, in spite of my bath, I felt the weather more sultry and
oppressive than on any day of our journey yet.

We went into the church, which was a simple little building with one
little aisle divided from the nave by three round arches, a chancel, and
a rather roomy transept for so small a building, the windows mostly of
the graceful Oxfordshire fourteenth century type.  There was no modern
architectural decoration in it; it looked, indeed, as if none had been
attempted since the Puritans whitewashed the mediaeval saints and
histories on the wall.  It was, however, gaily dressed up for this latter-
day festival, with festoons of flowers from arch to arch, and great
pitchers of flowers standing about on the floor; while under the west
window hung two cross scythes, their blades polished white, and gleaming
from out of the flowers that wreathed them.  But its best ornament was
the crowd of handsome, happy-looking men and women that were set down to
table, and who, with their bright faces and rich hair over their gay
holiday raiment, looked, as the Persian poet puts it, like a bed of
tulips in the sun.  Though the church was a small one, there was plenty
of room; for a small church makes a biggish house; and on this evening
there was no need to set cross tables along the transepts; though
doubtless these would be wanted next day, when the learned men of whom
Dick has been speaking should be come to take their more humble part in
the haymaking.

I stood on the threshold with the expectant smile on my face of a man who
is going to take part in a festivity which he is really prepared to
enjoy.  Dick, standing by me was looking round the company with an air of
proprietorship in them, I thought.  Opposite me sat Clara and Ellen, with
Dick's place open between them: they were smiling, but their beautiful
faces were each turned towards the neighbours on either side, who were
talking to them, and they did not seem to see me.  I turned to Dick,
expecting him to lead me forward, and he turned his face to me; but
strange to say, though it was as smiling and cheerful as ever, it made no
response to my glance--nay, he seemed to take no heed at all of my
presence, and I noticed that none of the company looked at me.  A pang
shot through me, as of some disaster long expected and suddenly realised.
Dick moved on a little without a word to me.  I was not three yards from
the two women who, though they had been my companions for such a short
time, had really, as I thought, become my friends.  Clara's face was
turned full upon me now, but she also did not seem to see me, though I
know I was trying to catch her eye with an appealing look.  I turned to
Ellen, and she _did_ seem to recognise me for an instant; but her bright
face turned sad directly, and she shook her head with a mournful look,
and the next moment all consciousness of my presence had faded from her
face.

I felt lonely and sick at heart past the power of words to describe.  I
hung about a minute longer, and then turned and went out of the porch
again and through the lime-avenue into the road, while the blackbirds
sang their strongest from the bushes about me in the hot June evening.

Once more without any conscious effort of will I set my face toward the
old house by the ford, but as I turned round the corner which led to the
remains of the village cross, I came upon a figure strangely contrasting
with the joyous, beautiful people I had left behind in the church.  It
was a man who looked old, but whom I knew from habit, now half forgotten,
was really not much more than fifty.  His face was rugged, and grimed
rather than dirty; his eyes dull and bleared; his body bent, his calves
thin and spindly, his feet dragging and limping.  His clothing was a
mixture of dirt and rags long over-familiar to me.  As I passed him he
touched his hat with some real goodwill and courtesy, and much servility.

Inexpressibly shocked, I hurried past him and hastened along the road
that led to the river and the lower end of the village; but suddenly I
saw as it were a black cloud rolling along to meet me, like a nightmare
of my childish days; and for a while I was conscious of nothing else than
being in the dark, and whether I was walking, or sitting, or lying down,
I could not tell.

*  * *

I lay in my bed in my house at dingy Hammersmith thinking about it all;
and trying to consider if I was overwhelmed with despair at finding I had
been dreaming a dream; and strange to say, I found that I was not so
despairing.

Or indeed _was_ it a dream?  If so, why was I so conscious all along that
I was really seeing all that new life from the outside, still wrapped up
in the prejudices, the anxieties, the distrust of this time of doubt and
struggle?

All along, though those friends were so real to me, I had been feeling as
if I had no business amongst them: as though the time would come when
they would reject me, and say, as Ellen's last mournful look seemed to
say, "No, it will not do; you cannot be of us; you belong so entirely to
the unhappiness of the past that our happiness even would weary you.  Go
back again, now you have seen us, and your outward eyes have learned that
in spite of all the infallible maxims of your day there is yet a time of
rest in store for the world, when mastery has changed into fellowship--but
not before.  Go back again, then, and while you live you will see all
round you people engaged in making others live lives which are not their
own, while they themselves care nothing for their own real lives--men who
hate life though they fear death.  Go back and be the happier for having
seen us, for having added a little hope to your struggle.  Go on living
while you may, striving, with whatsoever pain and labour needs must be,
to build up little by little the new day of fellowship, and rest, and
happiness."

Yes, surely! and if others can see it as I have seen it, then it may be
called a vision rather than a dream.




FOOTNOTES:


{1}  "Elegant," I mean, as a Persian pattern is elegant; not like a rich
"elegant" lady out for a morning call.  I should rather call that
genteel.

{2}  I should have said that all along the Thames there were abundance of
mills used for various purposes; none of which were in any degree
unsightly, and many strikingly beautiful; and the gardens about them
marvels of loveliness.

{3}  Cirencester and Burford he must have meant.

 The Third Day on the Thames The next morning, Dick, Clara, William, and Walter return to the subject of the man who killed for love. Dick suggests that the man not be allowed to live alone, since he will continue to feel worse about his crime and possibly kill himself. Clara says that she doesn't think he will kill himself because he still loves that girl, but agrees that he should stop mourning. Walter asks to come with them in the boat to look at a house for the man. They set off and William soon asks about the locks he has been seeing, asserting that such pleasure-loving people should have come up with a better way to go up stairs; Dick simply deflects this criticism, but Walter answers more fully that "this is not an age of inventions" . The boat passes by a group of girls in a hay field and the girls summon the travelers to eat with them. Dick declines, saying that they want to save the pleasures of the harvest for William until they get to their destination, and William thinks to himself that the girls all take such authentic interest in matters of conversation such as the weather and birds. Chapter 26: The Obstinate Refusers Before Dick, Clara, William, and Walter leave the group of girls, Dick teases them about the lack of men accompanying them. The girls tell them that they should go see something for themselves up a nearby hill since they have a certain rivalry with a group of builders. They ponder why the girls might laugh at the people they are about to meet, and Dick guesses that it is because haymaking isn't work that all people want to do but a festival of a sort. When they reach the house, a man comes to meet them with a mallet and chisel in his hands. Other women and men are around the room and a woman dressed nicely also approaches the visitors. She says that they have come to see "the Obstinate Refusers" and explains that she is a model for Mistress Philippa, the head carver. She leads the group inside to where Mistress Philippa is hard at work carving a relief. She tells the girl and the visitors that she does not want to be bothered while she works, but other workers in the area inform them that they aren't working on the harvest because they need to finish making this pretty house to stand in place of an ugly one that used to be there. They offer the guests drinks and joke around for a little while and then the guests say goodbye and head back to their boat. Chapter 27: The Upper Waters The group continues up the Thames, dropping Walter in Berkshire, stopping for lunch in Wallingford, and spending the evening with an old man named Henry Morsom who has more knowledge about the times of the "Parliamentary Wars" . The old man tells them how in the olden days many people had gotten so out of touch with nature that they didn't know how to bake bread or do handicrafts. This artisanship had to be passed down by the few who remembered after the revolution. They discuss the 19th-century rise of machines to avoid work and to "make 'nature' their slave" . After the revolution, machines slowly went out of style when the focus shifted to creating art, which machines could not produce. The artifacts from that time are not delicate, but they are clearly created with pleasure. Dick tells Morsom that they must be continuing toward the harvest and Morsom asks to join them for a ways to get a book from a library at Oxford. As the four set off to leave in their boat, they see another boat coming under an arch with Ellen rowing. Ellen says that she followed them because in a week or two she and her grandfather will be moving up north and she wanted to see them again before that. Clara tells Dick that he should go in Ellen's boat because he is the best sculler, but Dick says that William should go with her, and everyone is happy. Ellen relaxes while William sculls; he notices that she looks at the scenery with true interest. They talk back and forth, with William multiple times tripping over his words as he fights to not reveal where he is really from. They stop a few times along the way to look at old buildings and eventually stop for the night in a small town. Chapter 28: The Little River They start off early the next morning in the same pairs. Ellen and William start to talk and he decides to tell her how he really came to be in 21st-century England. She accepts his explanation readily and without much surprise. She tells him that she will make him a proposal soon, but doesn't tell him what this will be. They lapse into talking about scenery again, and they agree that it is not pleasant to move homes frequently. Chapter 29: A Resting-Place on the Upper Thames The pairs continue up the Thames, pausing to rest and talk about how rich men didn't used to keep beautiful houses because everything in the world back then was made quickly and vulgarly. Ellen comes to feel she is understanding the past more and more through William. Ellen asks him to keep teaching her so that she can be aware of how the world works in case of hard times and educate her children as well. Chapter 30: The Journey's End The group continues up the Thames, still remarking on the beauty of their natural surroundings, including mills. Ellen asks about how the river was managed in the past and William tells her about how it was "MISmanaged" . William starts to get upset and Clara thinks this may be because he believes he must go back to his own time soon, so she makes her proposal to him which is that he join her and her father in moving up north. Finally, they arrive at the place Dick's friends have been harvesting. He introduces William and blames him for their slow travel up the river, since they wanted to enjoy themselves and show him the sights. His friends walk on the bank as they take the boat a little further down the river to the ford. They get out of the boat and look around to see a meadow and a few buildings. William has a moment of confusion where he thinks that he sees a scene of haggard people from the past in place of the beautiful people and setting of the 21st century, but this passes after a moment. Chapter 31: An Old House Amongst New Folk William and Ellen go straight inside, delighting on the way in the beauty of nature. Inside, they also delight in the simplicity of the furniture. They chat and then William lapses into comparing his old life to this one, particularly what Ellen would have been like in the past. She decides that they should go be with more people if he may be leaving them soon. Dick meets them as they come out of the house and invites William to go for a swim with him while Clara takes care of Ellen. Chapter 32: The Feast's Beginning -- The End Dick takes William through a field full of tents and people and they talk about how more and more people will be showing up to help. They also talk about the seasons, with William commenting on how Dick talks about such a normal, natural occurrence with such passion. They head to the evening feast at the church. William and Dick enter and after surveying the room, William sees Clara and Ellen sitting and talking to other people at the table. They do not seem able to see William. William looks to Dick and he does not seem able to see his guest either. For a moment, Ellen seems to see and recognize William, but this passes for a moment and she tries to shake off the sudden sadness she felt. After another minute, William leaves the church. He sets out for the old house by the ford, but when he turns a corner he is confronted by an old, grimy man limping along. He hurries past the man, but sees a black cloud rolling toward him and soon cannot see anything or even tell whether he is walking or lying down. He wakes in his bed in Hammersmith. He contemplates whether what he just experienced was a dream, since it felt so real to him. He thinks about Ellen's last sad look at him, thinking that what it truly communicated was that he could not stay in the happy 21st century, so defiled was he by the trials of the 19th century. However, it also inspired him to see society with a new view and to work toward the socialist utopia he experienced. He ends by calling what he experienced a vision rather than a dream. Chapter 30 includes the second of only two footnotes in the novel. This footnote is about the presence of mills of various types along the side of the Thames as William and his friends travel. As with the first footnote, it seems as if the narrator could have included this note in the body of the story, so the reader must specifically question why this bit of information was called to stand outside of the text. The presence of a footnote at least calls attention to the story being communicated in writing rather than flowing in exactly the same way an oral history would.

