In a Quiet Village

by S. Baring-Gould

The ramp was not hideous, as new ramps are. It was so ancient that it was overgrown with trees, and moss, and fern. The crane’s-bill loved to ramble about it, and the wild strawberry covered it in June with a network of rubies.

The cottage was so closed about that every wind was shut out, but the sun flowed over it, frost rarely smote and killed the vegetables in the garden, and flowers came there earlier than elsewhere.

A great monthly rose was trained over the front of the house, and I believe that there were flowers on it all the year round.

Near the cottage stood a very ancient and wide-spreading oak, stunted and contorted, because growing in a minimum of soil and a maximum of slate rock. But in spite of disadvantages, the oak was very aged and bore innumerable acorns. Under the shade of the tree, rained over with shed acorns at the fall of the year, was a slab of rock, and it went by the name of the Conjuring Table. There was a certain Lady who was fondly believed, though dead for over a century, to haunt the parish. The story went that Seven Parsons met at this natural table to lay the Lady’s ghost. They would have succeeded but that one of the party was so tipsy that he said the wrong words and forgot the right.

But that which haunted the ramp was not a ghost, it was vipers, locally called “Long Cripples.” These creatures loved to lie in the sun on the hot slates, and they became so comatose in the heat, or perhaps with repletion from the number of flies and beetles they ate, that they were easily killed there by the village lads.

Now, although the cottage was in a lonely place, and was shut in from wind and from the sight of men, unless these latter came there purposely to see it, yet there was that in it which precluded its being out of mind, however much out of sight, and that was—an uncommonly pretty girl who lived in it with her father and mother.

Their name was Worden, and her Christian name was Prue, that is to say, Prudence.

Not only was she vastly pretty, but she was one of the happiest, brightest dispositioned girls in the place. The sun that loved the cottage seems to have been drunk in by her heart and to brim at her eyes.

Prue managed the beehives, of which there was a row in the garden, and she moved among the winged creatures without their attempting to sting her. “Talk to them, sing to them, and they become your friends,” she said.