II.

Cheasing Eyebright had of course a Vicar. There are vicars and vicars,
and of all sorts I love an innovating vicar--a piebald progressive
professional reactionary--the least. But the Vicar of Cheasing Eyebright
was one of the least innovating of vicars, a most worthy, plump, ripe,
and conservative-minded little man. It is becoming to go back a little
in our story to tell of him. He matched his village, and one may figure
them best together as they used to be, on the sunset evening when Mrs.
Skinner--you will remember her flight!--brought the Food with her all
unsuspected into these rustic serenities.

The village was looking its very best just then, under that western
light. It lay down along the valley beneath the beechwoods of the
Hanger, a beading of thatched and red-tiled cottages--cottages with
trellised porches and pyracanthus-lined faces, that clustered closer and
closer as the road dropped from the yew trees by the church towards the
bridge. The vicarage peeped not too ostentatiously between the trees
beyond the inn, an early Georgian front ripened by time, and the spire
of the church rose happily in the depression made by the valley in the
outline of the hills. A winding stream, a thin intermittency of sky blue
and foam, glittered amidst a thick margin of reeds and loosestrife and
overhanging willows, along the centre of a sinuous pennant of meadow.
The whole prospect had that curiously English quality of ripened
cultivation--that look of still completeness--that apes perfection,
under the sunset warmth.

And the Vicar too looked mellow. He looked habitually and essentially