One can rarely be in a pleasant place without meeting with
some pleasant accident. I have a conviction that these children
would not have gone singing before the inn unless the inn-parlour had
been the delightful place it was. At least, if I had been in the
customary public room of the modern hotel, with all its
disproportions and discomforts, my ears would have been dull, and
there would have been some ugly temper or other uppermost in my
spirit, and so they would have wasted their songs upon an unworthy
hearer.
Next morning I went along to visit the church. It is a long-backed
red-and-white building, very much restored, and stands in a pleasant
graveyard among those great trees of which I have spoken already.
The sky was drowned in a mist. Now and again pulses of cold wind
went about the enclosure, and set the branches busy overhead, and the
dead leaves scurrying into the angles of the church buttresses. Now
and again, also, I could hear the dull sudden fall of a chestnut
among the grass - the dog would bark before the rectory door - or
there would come a clinking of pails from the stable-yard behind.
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