I saw at one place—the end of one of these streets and where the country began—an old gray man in a shabby black coat bending to adjust a yoke to his shoulders to the ends of which were attached two buckets filled with water. He had been into a low, gray, one-story inn entitled, “Ye Bank of England,” before which was set a bench and also a stone hitching post. For all the world he looked like some old man in Hardy, wending his fading, reflective way homeward. I said to myself here—England is old; it is evening in England and they are tired.
I went back toward the heart of things along another street, but I found after a time it was merely taking me to another outer corner of the town. It was gray now, and I was saying to my young companions that they must be hurrying on home—that I did not intend to go back so soon. “Say I will not be home for dinner,” I told them, and they left after a time, blessed with some modern chocolate which they craved very much.
Before they left, however, we reconnoitered another street and this led me past low, one-story houses, the like of which, I insist, can rarely be duplicated in America. Do you recall the log cabin? In England it is preserved in stone, block after block of it. It originated there. The people, as I went along, seemed so thick and stolid and silent to me. They were healthy enough, I thought, but they were raw, uncouth, mirthless. There was not a suggestion of gaiety anywhere—not a single burst of song. I heard no one whistling. A man came up behind us, driving some cattle, and the oxen were quite upon me before I heard them. But there were no loud cries. He was so ultra serious. I met a man pushing a dilapidated baby carriage. He was a grinder of knives and mender of tinware and this was his method of perambulating his equipment. I met another man pushing a hand cart with some attenuated remnants of furniture in it. “What is that?” I asked. “What is he?”
“Oh, he’s somebody who’s moving. He hasn’t a van, you know.”
Moving! Here was food for pathetic reflection.
I looked into low, dark doors where humble little tin and glass-bodied lamps were beginning to flicker.
“Thank God, my life is different from this,” I said, and yet the pathos and the beauty of this town was gripping me firmly. It was as sweet as a lay out of Horace—as sad as Keats.
Before a butcher shop I saw a man trying to round up a small drove of sheep. The grayish-yellow of their round wooly backs blended with the twilight. They seemed to sense their impending doom, for they ran here and there, poking their queer thin noses along the ground or in the air and refusing to enter the low, gray entry way which gave into a cobbled yard at the back where were located the deadly shambles they feared. The farmer who was driving them wore a long black coat and he made no sound, or scarcely any.
“Sooey!” he called softly—“Ssh,” as he ran here and there—this way and that.
The butcher or his assistant came out and caught one sheep, possibly the bell-wether, by the leg and hauled him backward into the yard. Seeing this, the silly sheep, not recognizing the enforced leadership, followed after. Could there be a more convincing commentary on the probable manner in which the customs and forms of life have originated?