Then suddenly I remembered the right word. It was an enchanted place.
It had been put to sleep. In a flash I remembered all the fairy-tales
about princes turned to marble and princesses changed to snow. We were in
a land where none could strive or cry out; a white nightmare. The moon
looked at me across the valley like the enormous eye of a hypnotist; the
one white eye of the world.

There was never a better play than POT LUCK; for it tells a tale with a
point and a tale that might happen any day among English peasants. There
were never better actors than the local Buckinghamshire Players: for they
were acting their own life with just that rise into exaggeration which is
the transition from life to art. But all the time I was mesmerised by the
moon; I saw all these men and women as enchanted things. The poacher shot
pheasants; the policeman tracked pheasants; the wife hid pheasants; they
were all (especially the policeman) as true as death. But there was
something more true to death than true to life about it all: the figures
were frozen with a magic frost of sleep or fear or custom such as does not
cramp the movements of the poor men of other lands. I looked at the
poacher and the policeman and the gun; then at the gun and the policeman
and the poacher; and I could find no name for the fancy that haunted and
escaped me. The poacher believed in the Game Laws as much as the
policeman. The poacher's wife not only believed in the Game Laws, but
protected them as well as him. She got a promise from her husband that he
would never shoot another pheasant. Whether he kept it I doubt; I fancy
he sometimes shot a pheasant even after that. But I am sure he never shot
a policeman. For we live in an enchanted land.