XVII
BELLWATTLE AND THE DIGNITY OF MEN
XVII
BELLWATTLE AND THE DIGNITY OF MEN
We were all sitting out in the garden having tea under the nut trees—Bellwattle, Cruikshank and I. They use the old Spode tea-service—apple green and gold and black—whenever tea is taken out of doors, and I would give anything to describe to you the pictures that rise in my mind with the sight of that quaint old tea-service, the smell of the sweetbriars and the scent of the stocks. They are indescribable, those pictures. No one will ever paint them to my satisfaction, neither with colours nor with words. They are composed with such historical accuracy, are so redolent of their time, that it would need somebody with a memory reaching over one hundred and fifty years to trace them as they appear to me. Now, if my memory reaches over five minutes it is doing well—and many there are the same as I.
The characters I see are arrayed in costumes so befitting to their period, they speak of things so faithful to their day, that no man, unless he had lived in the eighteenth century, could possibly reproduce them. I see their dainty costumes—I hear their quaint speech, but not one jot or one tittle of it all could I put down upon paper. Yet I know those pictures are true as true can be.
Why is this? Is there a memory within us which harks back to lives we have lived before? Is it by the same reason we feel that certain incidents have come to us again out of the far-off past? I was pondering over it all that afternoon, when suddenly Bellwattle broke the silence which surrounded us.
“Why were elephants called elephants?” she asked.