* Tacitus.


I remember one beautiful evening an accident to my carriage occasioned
my sojourn for a whole afternoon in a small village. The Cure honoured
me with a visit; and we strolled, after a slight repast, into the
hamlet. The priest was complaisant, quiet in manner, and not ill
informed for his obscure station and scanty opportunities of knowledge;
he did not seem, however, to possess the vivacity of his countrymen, but
was rather melancholy and pensive, not only in his expression of
countenance, but his cast of thought.

"You have a charming scene here: I almost feel as if it were a sin to
leave it so soon."

We were, indeed, in a pleasant and alluring spot at the time I addressed
this observation to the good Cure. A little rivulet emerged from the
copse to the left, and ran sparkling and dimpling beneath our feet, to
deck with a more living verdure the village green, which it intersected
with a winding nor unmelodious stream. We had paused, and I was leaning
against an old and solitary chestnut-tree, which commanded the whole
scene. The village was a little in the rear, and the smoke from its few
chimneys rose slowly to the silent and deep skies, not wholly unlike the
human wishes, which, though they spring from the grossness and the fumes
of earth, purify themselves as they ascend to heaven. And from the
village (when other sounds, which I shall note presently, were for an
instant still) came the whoop of children, mellowed by distance into a
confused yet thrilling sound, which fell upon the heart like the voice
of our gone childhood itself. Before, in the far expanse, stretched a
chain of hills on which the autumn sun sank slowly, pouring its yellow