“I never had peaches enough off the tree before,” said Fanny.
“No more have I,” said Severne. “This must be the Elysian fields, and I shall spoil my dinner.”
“Who cares?” said Fanny, recklessly. “Dinner comes every day, and always at the only time when one has no appetite. But this eating of peaches—Oh, what a beauty!”
“Children,” said Zoe, gravely, “I advise you not to eat above a dozen. Do not enter on a fatal course, which in one brief year will reduce you to a hapless condition. There—I was let loose among them at sixteen, and ever since they pall. But I do like to see you eat them, and your eyes sparkle.”
“That is too bad of you,” said Fanny, driving her white teeth deep into a peach. “The idea! Now, Mr. Severne, do my eyes sparkle?”
“Like diamonds. But that proves nothing: it is their normal condition.”
“There, make him a courtesy,” said Zoe, “and come along.”
She took them into the village. It was one of the old sort; little detached houses with little gardens in front, in all of which were a few humble flowers, and often a dark rose of surpassing beauty. Behind each cottage was a large garden, with various vegetables, and sometimes a few square yards of wheat. There was one little row of new brick houses standing together; their number five, their name Newtown. This town of five houses was tiled; the detached houses were thatched, and the walls plastered and whitewashed like snow. Such whitewash seems never to be made in towns, or to lose its whiteness in a day. This broad surface of vivid white was a background, against which the clinging roses, the clustering, creeping honeysuckles, and the deep young ivy with its tender green and polished leaves, shone lovely; wood smoke mounted, thin and silvery, from a cottage or two, that were cooking, and embroidered the air, not fouled it. The little windows had diamond panes, as in the Middle Ages, and every cottage door was open, suggesting hospitality and dearth of thieves. There was also that old essential, a village green—a broad strip of sacred turf, that was everybody's by custom, though in strict law Vizard's. Here a village cow and a donkey went about grazing the edges, for the turf in general was smooth as a lawn. By the side of the green was the village ale-house. After the green other cottages; two of them
“Quite overcanopied with lush woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine.”
One of these was called Marks's cottage, and the other Allen's. The rustic church stood in the middle of a hill nearly half a mile from the village. They strolled up to it. It had a tower built of flint, and clad on two sides with ivy three feet deep, and the body of the church was as snowy as the cottages, and on the south side a dozen swallows and martins had lodged their mortar nests under the eaves; they looked, against the white, like rugged gray stone bosses. Swallows and martins innumerable wheeled, swift as arrows, round the tower, chirping, and in and out of the church through an open window, and added their music and their motion to the beauty of the place.