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Thus they consult him when they wish to form an opinion for themselves, much in the same way as a sportsman, anxious to take the field, looks up at the chanticleer on some village-steeple to know what he ought to think of the cloudy sky above; and when they see the good man sauntering past their cottages, with head erect and animated step, smiling, and evidently full of cheerful, charitable thoughts, and on good deeds intent, kissing the little children, giving a rosy apple to one, and a playful tap to another; offering a sly word of hope to the young girls, and a few kind ones to the aged and infirm, all the village is elated; and the old maids fail not to present him with a fat fowl, or some such substantial expression of their respect.
If you were not sure whether that gleaming of the sun in the vast distance flashed from swords or sickles, whether that far-off curl of smoke rose from stubble-fire or village-steeple, to protect which the peasants, still lovers of their churches, would arm themselves, women and all, with fork and scythe, still, those peasants used their scythes, in due season, for reaping their leagues of cornland, and slept with faces as tranquil as ever towards the sky, for their noonday rest.
On the hill-side beyond the shapelessly-diffused town, and in the quiet keeping of the trees that gird the village-steeple, remembrances are cut in stone, planted in common flowers, growing in grass, entwined with lowly brambles around many a mound of earth.
He went on to tell me that the mill-owners lived in the manor, and were old friends of his people: good old local stock, who had lived there for generations and done a lot for the neighbourhood. "It's queer I don't see their village-steeple from this rise. The village is just beyond the house. How the devil could I have missed the turn?"
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