Was it sad or glad? I don't know, but it was the most beautiful sound I had ever heard, yet it seemed familiar and stirred me in the strangest way. "Let me think," I said. "Yes, think!" they all together cried laughingly; and then instantly when I cast my eyes down there was a perfect stillness as if they were all holding their breath and watching me. That sudden strange stillness startled me: I lifted my eyes and they were gone--the radiant beautiful people who had surrounded and interrogated me, and with them their shining golden village, had all vanished. There was no village, no deep green lanes and pink and white clouds of apple blossoms, and it was not May, it was late October and I was lying in bed in Exeter seeing through the window the red and grey roofs and chimneys and pale misty white sky. XV THE VANISHING CURTSEY 'Tis impossible not to regret the dying out of the ancient, quaintly-pretty custom of curtseying in rural England; yet we cannot but see the inevitableness of it, when we consider the earthward drop of the body--the bird-like gesture pretty to see in the cottage child, not so spontaneous nor pretty in the grown girl, and not pretty nor quaint, but rather grotesque (as we think now) in the middle-aged or elderly person--and that there is no longer a corresponding self-abasement and worshipping attitude in the village mind. It is a sign or symbol that has lost, or is losing, its significance. I have been rambling among a group of pretty villages on and near the Somerset Avon, some in that county, others in Wiltshire; and though these small rustic centres, hidden among the wooded hills, had an appearance of antiquity and of having continued unchanged for very many years, the little ones were as modern in their speech and behaviour as town children. Of all those I met and, in many instances, spoke to, in the village street and in the neighbouring woods and lanes, not one little girl curtseyed to me. The only curtsey I had dropped to me in this district was from an old woman in the small hill-hidden village of Englishcombe. It was on a frosty afternoon in February, and she stood near her cottage gate with nothing on her head, looking at the same time very old and very young. Her eyes were as blue and bright as a child's, and her cheeks were rosy-red; but the skin was puckered with innumerable wrinkles as in the very old. Surprised at her curtsey I stopped to speak to her, and finally went into her cottage and had tea and made the acquaintance of her husband, a gaunt old man with a face grey as ashes and dim colourless eyes, whom Time had made almost an imbecile, and who sat all day groaning by the fire. Yet this worn-out old working man was her junior by several years. Her age was eighty-four. She was very good company, certainly the brightest and liveliest of the dozen or twenty octogenarians I am acquainted with. I heard the story of her life,--that long life in the village where she