had seen in his countenance a little while ago--the light that
shone and brightened behind the dark eye and the little play
about the corners of the mouth as of dimpling motions on the
surface of a pool.

And in that new guise, or disguise, I left him, the austere
priest with nothing to suggest the whimsical or grotesque in
his cold ascetic face. Recrossing the bridge I stood a little
time and looked once more at the noble church tower standing
dark against the clear amber-coloured sky, and said to myself:
"Why, this is one of the oddest incidents of my life! Not
that I have seen or heard anything very wonderful--just a
small rustic village, one of a thousand in the land; a big new
church in which some person was playing rather madly on the
organ, a set of unruly choir-boys; a handsome stained-glass
west window, and, finally, a nice little chat with the vicar."
It was not in these things; it was a sense of something
strange in the mind, of something in some way unlike all other
places and people and experiences. The sensation was like
that of the reader who becomes absorbed in Henry Newbolt's
romance of The Old Country, who identifies himself with the
hero and unconsciously, or without quite knowing how, slips
back out of this modern world into that of half a thousand
years ago. It is the same familiar green land in which he
finds himself--the same old country and the same sort of
people with feelings and habits of life and thought
unchangeable as the colour of grass and flowers, the songs
of birds and the smell of the earth, yet with a difference.
I recognized it chiefly in the parish priest I had been
conversing with; for one thing, his mediaeval mind evidently