likes. Then the clear, swift current begins to diminish, and scarcely
have you had time to notice the change than it is altogether gone! The
women must go back to the well and let the bucket down, and laboriously
turn and turn the handle of the windlass till it mounts to the top
again. The pretty moist, green herbage, the graceful grasses, quickly
wither away; dust and straws and rubbish from the road lie in the dry
channel, and by and by it is filled with a summer growth of dock and
loveless nettles which no child may touch with impunity.

No, I cannot think that any person for whom it had no association, no
secret interest, would, after looking at this village with its dried-up
winterbourne, care to make his home in it. And no person, I imagine,
wants to see it; for it has no special attraction and is away from any
road, at a distance from everywhere. I knew a great many villages in
Salisbury Plain, and was always adding to their number, but there was no
intention of visiting this one. Perhaps there is not a village on the
Plain, or anywhere in Wiltshire for that matter, which sees fewer
strangers. Then I fell in with the old shepherd whose life will be
related in the succeeding chapters, and who, away from his native place,
had no story about his past life and the lives of those he had known--no
thought in his mind, I might almost say, which was not connected with
the village of Winterbourne Bishop. And many of his anecdotes and
reflections proved so interesting that I fell into the habit of putting
them down in my notebook; until in the end the place itself, where he
had followed his "homely trade" so long, seeing and feeling so much,
drew me to it. I knew there was "nothing to see" in it, that it was
without the usual attractions; that there was, in fact, nothing but the
human interest, but that was enough. So I came to it to satisfy an idle
curiosity--just to see how it would accord with the mental picture
produced by his description of it. I came, I may say, prepared to like