But let me find them all again
In that eternal day.”
Close by, Ann Farr from Shropshire, a servant for fifty years at the Rectory, had a tablet between her and oblivion.
From Orcheston St. George the road advances three miles with hardly a hedge. On the right rose and spread broad pastures mainly, on the left arable lands, new ploughed, or green with young corn, or cut up into squares of swedes or mustard for the long-horned sheep. There was no flooded river now to shine in the sun. Clouds began to thicken over the sky. The dust whirled. The straw caught in the hawthorns fluttered. A motor car raced by me. Therefore I did not get off my bicycle to visit that crescent beech and fir wood against a concavity of the chalk upon my right. A farm road curves past it, the wood hanging above it as beautifully as if above a river. I hoped to reach Tilshead before it rained, or, better still, the elms and farm buildings at Joan-a-Gore’s at the crossing of the Ridge Way. Tilshead’s trees lay visible before me for a mile or more. Its street of cottages and houses that are more than cottages I entered before the rain. I even stopped at the church—a flint and stone one—to see the tower and the churchyard, and its white mud wall, and the chestnut tree, and the ash that weeps over the box tombs of people named Wilkins and Parham, and the graves of the Husseys and Laweses, and that boast of William Cowper the schoolmaster in 1804,—
“When the Archangel’s trump shall sound,
And slumbering mortals bid to rise,
I shall again my form assume
To meet my Saviour in the skies.”
A man was just stepping out of a motor car into the “Black Horse,” carrying a scarlet-hooded falcon upon his wrist; but I did not stop here, nor at the “Rose and Crown,” or the “Bell.”