green fields lay a village, and on this village the eyes of the King
and his armies were turned as they came down the slope. It lay beneath
them, grave with seared antiquity, with old-world gables stained and
bent by the lapse of frequent years, with all its chimneys awry. Its
roofs were tiled with antique stones covered over deep with moss, each
little window looked with a myriad strange cut panes on the gardens
shaped with quaint devices and overrun with weeds. On rusted hinges the
doors sung to and fro and were fashioned of planks of immemorial oak
with black knots gaping from their sockets. Against it all there beat
the thistle-down, about it clambered the ivy or swayed the weeds; tall
and straight out of the twisted chimneys arose blue columns of smoke,
and blades of grass peeped upward between the huge cobbles of the
unmolested street. Between the gardens and the cobbled streets stood
hedges higher than a horseman might look, of stalwart thorn, and upward
through it clambered the convolvulus to peer into the garden from the
top. Before each house there was cut a gap in the hedge, and in it
swung a wicket gate of timber soft with the rain and years, and green
like the moss. Over all of it there brooded age and the full hush of
things bygone and forgotten. Upon this derelict that the years had cast
up out of antiquity the King and his armies gazed long. Then on the
hill slope the King made his armies halt, and went down alone with one
of his chiefs into the village.

Presently there was a stir in one of the houses, and a bat flew out of
the door into the daylight, and three mice came running out of the
doorway down the step, an old stone cracked in two and held together by
moss; and there followed an old man bending on a stick with a white
beard coming to the ground, wearing clothes that were glossed with use,
and presently there came others out of the other houses, all of them as
old, and all hobbling on sticks. These were the oldest people that the