The intruder looked in some astonishment at the spare figure of Raymond's uncle and perceived that there was no danger of discovery for the attitude was that of a man completely absorbed. He was listening intently. At this distance the general hubbub was softened and there was a rather wistful quality in the childish voices rising and falling with the lilting old refrain:
"Thus the farmer sows his seeds.
Thus he stands and takes his ease,
Stamps his foot (bang!) and claps his hand (smack!)
And looks around to view the land."
After the lapse of a good many years it is this picture of Raymond's Uncle Horace that is the most vivid. There was some implication in the listening figure, with head slightly bowed, one hand resting on the casing of the doorway, that carried, even to a childish mind, a suggestion of hitherto unsuspected aspects of the rather lonely widower's personality. At the time it was all very vague and unformulated and later speculation has hesitated somewhat before the privacy thus unwittingly invaded. Yet afterward one could not help at least wondering what visions of his own childhood he saw as he listened to the silly old lines of the ancient folk game, handed down through so many generations and bearing their little testimony to the continuity of experience.
A tardy sense of eavesdropping awoke at last in the youthful visitor's mind—an understanding that he did not belong there. He slipped out as quietly as he had entered, but he took with him a dawning appreciation of a new incarnation of Raymond's Uncle Horace.
XIII: The Fabric of a Dream
"And that night . . . . a dream of that place came to Florian, a dream which did for him the office of a finer sort of memory, bringing its object to mind with a great clearness, yet, as sometimes happens in dreams, raised a little above itself, and above ordinary retrospect. The true aspect of the place . . . . the fashion of its doors, its hearths, its windows, the very scent upon the air of it, was with him in sleep for a season. . . ."
—The Child in the House.