Eastthorpe was a malting town, and down by the water were two or three
large malthouses. The view from the bridge was not particularly
picturesque, but it was pleasant, especially in summer, when the wind was
south-west. The malthouses and their cowls, the wharves and the gaily
painted sailing barges alongside, the fringe of slanting willows turning
the silver-gray sides of their foliage towards the breeze, the island in
the middle of the river with bigger willows, the large expanse of sky,
the soft clouds distinct in form almost to the far distant horizon, and,
looking eastwards, the illimitable distance towards the fens and the
sea--all this made up a landscape, more suitable perhaps to some persons
than rock or waterfall, although no picture had ever been painted of it,
and nobody had ever come to see it.

Such was Eastthorpe. For hundreds of years had the shadow of St. Mary's
swept slowly over the roofs underneath it, and, of all those years,
scarcely a line of its history survived, save what was written in the
churchyard or in the church registers. The town had stood for the
Parliament in the days of the Civil War, and there had been a skirmish in
the place; but who fought in it, who were killed in it, and what the
result was, nobody knew. Half a dozen old skulls of much earlier date
and of great size were once found in a gravel pit two miles away, and
were the subject of much talk, some taking them for Romans, some for
Britons, some for Saxons, and some for Danes. As it was impossible to be
sure if they were Christian, they could not be put in consecrated ground;
they were therefore included in an auction of dead and live stock, and
were bought by the doctor. Surnames survived in Eastthorpe with singular
pertinacity, for it was remote from the world, but what was the
relationship between the scores of Thaxtons, for example, whose deaths
were inscribed on the tombstones, some of them all awry and weather-worn,
and the Thaxtons of 1840, no living Thaxton could tell, every spiritual