thought or emotion which would seem strange to the others. The temper,
the mood, the outlook, of the individual and the village would be the
same.

I remember that something once occurred in a village where I was
staying, which was in a way important to the villagers, although it
gave them nothing and took nothing from them: it excited them without
being a question of politics, or of "morality," to use the word in its
narrow popular sense. I spoke first to a woman of the village about it,
and was not a little surprised at the view she took of the matter, for
to me this seemed unreasonable; but I soon found that all the villagers
took this same unreasonable view, their indignation, pity and other
emotions excited being all expended as it seemed to me in the wrong
direction. The woman had, in fact, merely spoken the mind of the
village.

Owing to this close intimacy and family character of the village which
continues from generation to generation, there must be under all
differences on the surface a close mental likeness hardly to be
realised by those who live in populous centres; a union between mind
and mind corresponding to that reticulation as it appeared to me, of
plot with plot and with all they contained. It is perhaps equally hard
to realise that this one mind of a particular village is individual,
wholly its own, unlike that of any other village, near or far. For one
village differs from another; and the village is in a sense a body, and
this body and the mind that inhabits it, act and react on one another,
and there is between them a correspondence and harmony, although it may
be but a rude harmony.

It is probable that we that are country born and bred are affected in