him again. This promise I was never able to fulfil; but when
afterwards, on my return to the neighbourhood, I heard of that
unhappy scandal, my memory of this meeting and our talk enabled
me to form a theory as to what had really happened.

It seemed plain to me that the change had been too violent for
this elderly scholar, taken from his books and college rooms and
set down in the solitude of this remote valley, amid the
richness and living sap of Nature. The gay spectacle, right
under his old eyes, of growing shoots and budding foliage, of
blossoming and flowering, and the ripening of fruits and crops,
had little by little (such was my theory) unhinged his brains.
More and more his thoughts had come to dwell, not on the
doctrines of the Church in which he had long ago taken orders,
but on the pagan rites which had formed his life-long study,
and which had been the expression of a life not unlike the
agricultural life amid which he now found himself living. So as
his derangement grew upon him in his solitude, he had gradually
transformed, with a maniac's cunning, the Christian services,
and led his little congregation, all unknown to themselves, back
toward their ancestral worship of the Corn-Goddess. At last he
had thrown away all disguise, and had appeared as a hierophant
of Demeter, dressed in a fawn skin, with a crown of poplar
leaves, and pedantically carrying the mystic basket and the
winnowing fan appropriate to these mysteries. The wheaten posset
he offered the shocked communicants belonged to these also, and
the figure of a woman on the altar was of course the holy
Wheatsheaf, whose unveiling was the culminating point in that
famous ritual.