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Updated: June 12, 2025
Rather than such monotony of sluggish ages, loitering on a village-green, toiling in hereditary fields, listening to the parson's drone lengthened through centuries in the gray Norman church, let us welcome whatever change may come, change of place, social customs, political institutions, modes of worship, trusting, that, if all present things shall vanish, they will but make room for better systems, and for a higher type of man to clothe his life in them, and to fling them off in turn.
But dinner for two, in an oak-paneled room, when the spring dusk is falling is different. The table was lit by four naked candles. Looped back from the windows hung the marigold-tinted curtains, revealing in triangular patches the courtyard, with its mock village-green and its quaintly timbered houses. It looked very real in the half-light.
Then it would gather in volume and grow more lively, till it panted round the little village-green and quavered into silence in front of Maisie's door. Porter, with the gold light of the hall behind her, would always be there on the threshold to receive her mistress. It was difficult to guess what Porter thought. There were impromptu jaunts to theaters and dances.
Hodge, the farmer's boy, took off his hat, and Polly, the milk-maid, bobbed a curtsey, as the chaise whirled over the pleasant village-green, and the white-headed children lifted their chubby faces and cheered. The church-spires glistened with gold, the cottage-gables glared in sunshine, the great elms murmured in summer, or cast purple shadows over the grass.
Soon afterward two horsemen appeared under the trees, but paused at the edge of the woods, and talked together in low, very eager tones, as I could see by the moving shadows which were thrown across the bright village-green, and by their long dark arms pointing in various directions.
So grew the boy; and now the feast was near, When at the holy place the tribes appear. Scarce had the home-bred child of Nazareth seen Beyond the hills that girt the village-green, Save when at midnight, o'er the star-lit sands, Snatched from the steel of Herod's murdering bands, A babe, close-folded to his mother's breast, Through Edom's wilds he sought the sheltering West.
The village-green where he played is near by, alongside the churchyard wall; the church, which has been little changed, stands on the farther side of the yard, with a massive tower at the north-western angle, looking more like a fortress than a religious edifice.
I walked more quickly, the forest grew less and less dense, and in a little while I saw through the last trees a beautiful village-green, where a crowd of children were frolicking, and capering around a huge linden in the centre. Opposite me was an inn, and at a table before it were seated some peasants playing cards and smoking.
Moors rid themselves of much valuable energy in the erection, by countless thousands, of tombs to the memory of the eccentric or pious dead; and distances are measured, tracks marked, not from church to church as in Spain, nor from village to village as in England, but from saint-house to saint-house, each of which is village-green, club, or public-house rolled into one, where the men gossip, the pious read, travellers halt, offerings are brought the dead saint, and sick children arrive to be healed all at a little whitewashed building with a dome like an oven outside, and a horse-shoe arch, an olive- or a fig- or a palm-tree, a flag-staff hung with morsels of rag, and often a spring of water.
He had been traveling mean thoroughfares, when suddenly the cab swung into an old-world street of dignified respectability and turned again abruptly into a tiny quadrangle of color-washed, stucco-fronted, timbered houses. In the center was a lawn, surrounded with white posts between which black painted chains hung in loops; the apparent intention was to create the illusion of a village-green.
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