when I cast my eyes down there was a perfect stillness as if they were
all holding their breath and watching me.

That sudden strange stillness startled me: I lifted my eyes and they
were gone--the radiant beautiful people who had surrounded and
interrogated me, and with them their shining golden village, had all
vanished. There was no village, no deep green lanes and pink and white
clouds of apple blossoms, and it was not May, it was late October and I
was lying in bed in Exeter seeing through the window the red and grey
roofs and chimneys and pale misty white sky.




XV

THE VANISHING CURTSEY


'Tis impossible not to regret the dying out of the ancient, quaintly-
pretty custom of curtseying in rural England; yet we cannot but see the
inevitableness of it, when we consider the earthward drop of the body--
the bird-like gesture pretty to see in the cottage child, not so
spontaneous nor pretty in the grown girl, and not pretty nor quaint,
but rather grotesque (as we think now) in the middle-aged or elderly
person--and that there is no longer a corresponding self-abasement and
worshipping attitude in the village mind. It is a sign or symbol that
has lost, or is losing, its significance.

I have been rambling among a group of pretty villages on and near the