AN OLD PAGAN BELIEF
She bobbed low, and scuttled away. “Won’t you have a cup of tea?” I called after her. But she shook her head, and cried out, “Nay, nay, I have my widdies (ducks) to feed;” and as I stood and looked, the little brown figure disappeared up the drive. When I went back to the east garden, I thought over my conversation with Mrs. Eccles, and I recollected having read somewhere, that the Romans believed that a phœnix’s feather, if it could be obtained and worn in the bosom, would avert disaster; and a learned friend once told me that the Emperor Tiberius was much alarmed by thunder, and always wore a wreath of laurel round his neck if the weather was stormy, because he believed that laurels were never blasted by lightning. So I reflected that my old friend, bred amidst the wilds of Shropshire, held, after all, unconsciously an old pagan belief, of which the plume from the big hawk was only another version of the phœnix’s feather, whilst the laurel and the bays sprang, likely enough, from the same legend. Whilst revolving the old beliefs of past empires in my mind, I was called back to the present by Bess rushing up to me, and calling out—
“Where have you been Mum, Mum? We shall be late, I know we shall be late. And if Hals didn’t find some one to meet him, what would he say?”
“I’m sure I don’t know,” I said penitently.
“Nor me,” retorted Bess, indignantly.
So without more ado, my daughter, Prince Charming and I walked up a golden field of glittering buttercups to the station. We waited on the platform. The train was late—when isn’t the train late in the country?—and Bess and I sat down on the long bench that faced the line.
Bess seemed lost in a brown study. “A penny for your thoughts, miss,” I said.
“Mum,” replied Bess, dreamily, “I am thinking and thinking——”
“Yes, dear?”
“What is the use of London?”