Richard Osmund and his white horse approached Great Meadow. The year was at autumn, the year 1654. A considerable village, Great Meadow spread over the ancient meadow and a short way up the hill. Meadow and hill had for a border a still, complacent river. The hill was crested by an old wood, and along the roadside stood huge, bronzing trees. A mile from town a stream turned a mill wheel. From the tall stone mill might be seen clustering houses with small bright dooryards, and the village green and an ancient church and churchyard.
Richard Osmund rode slowly, a steadfast man in a plain dress of brown. Dress and his short-cut hair, and his uncocked hat, general demeanour as well, marked him for some shade of inhabitant of the Puritan and Parliamentary hemisphere. But within this general part of the globe it was hard to class him. He did not look mere Church Reform, nor yet Presbyterian, nor precisely Independent, not yet Anabaptist nor Leveller. Certainly he must be a dissident of some sort, but of what sort?
He possessed strength and erectness, with a clean accuracy of bodily movement. Perhaps he had been a soldier—Ironside. But even thus he was not wholly classed. There seemed to shine from him a kind of wisdom; he looked a thinker. Perhaps he was a member of that Parliament sitting in London Town, busy with English destinies. Yet even in this time of the Commonwealth, there should be about him some little pomp and circumstance to mark him so important. There was not. So perhaps he was not important. He seemed about thirty.
It was a still autumn morning, of a vision-like lift and clearness. The white horse went at a walk, Richard Osmund thinking as he rode. He came by the stone mill. The mill stream gave forth a crystal sound, the water flashed over the wheel. A couple of men, two or three boys, busied themselves before the great door.
“Good-day, friends!” said Richard Osmund, passing.
“Good-day,” answered the men; then, straightening themselves from the grain sacks, looked at horse and rider more closely. Said the miller, “That one, too, rides a white horse!”
Osmund had passed the door. The miller’s helper called after him, “Be Richard Osmund your name?”
The rider turned his head. “Yes, friend! It is my name.”
The miller and the miller’s helper broke into laughter—not kindly laughter. “Osmund on his white horse!” The laughter had in it a jeer, anger increased in it. The miller was a choleric man. He doubled his fists, he shouted to Osmund: “Throw you in the race! Come here, and I’ll throw you in the race!”
The man to whom he cried regarded him and the mill wheel and the mill race with a certain patient whimsicalness. “Flow race—turn wheel—fight with your sins, miller! Not with me who bring them to your mind!”