So the children went down across the fields to the “George,” and the bean-flowers smelt as sweet, and the skylarks sang as clearly, and the sun and the sky were just as golden and blue as they had been last week. And last week was really a hundred years on in the future. And yet it was last week too—from where they were. Time is a very confusing thing, as the children remarked to each other more than once.
They found the “George” half-way up Arden village, a stately, great house shaped like an E, with many windows and a great porch with a balcony over it. They gave their letter to a lady in a round cap who sat sewing in a pleasant room where there were many bottles and kegs, and rows of bright pewter ale-pots, and little fat mugs to measure other things with, and pewter plates on a brown dresser. There were greyhounds, too, all sprawling, legs and shoulders and tails entangled together like a bunch of dead eels, before the widest hearth the children had ever seen. They hurried away the moment they had given the letter. A coach, top-heavy with luggage, had drawn up in front of the porch, and as they went out they saw the ostlers leading away the six smoking horses. Edred felt that he must see the stables, so they followed, and the stables were as big as the house, and there were horses going in and horses going out, and hay and straw, and ostlers with buckets and ostlers with harness, and stalls and loose-boxes beyond counting, and bustle and hurry beyond words.
“How ever many horses have you got?” said Elfrida, addressing a man who had not joined in the kindly chorus of “Hulloa, little ’uns!” that greeted the children. So she judged him to be a new-comer. As he was.
“Two-and-fifty,” said the man.
“What for?” Elfrida asked.
“Why, for the coaches, and the post-shays, and the King’s messengers, for sure,” the man answered. “How else’d us all get about the country, and get to hear the newses, if it wasn’t for the stable the ‘George’ keeps?”
And then the children remembered that this was the time before railways and telegrams and telephones.
It is always difficult to remember exactly where one is when one happens to get into a century that is not one’s own.
Edred would have liked to stay all day watching the busyness of every one and the beautifulness of the horses, but Elfrida dragged him away.
They had to find the witch, she reminded him; and in a dreadful tumble-down cottage, with big holes in its roof of rotten thatch, they did find her.