If each of these small centres possessed a scribe of genius, or at any rate one with a capacity for taking pains, who would collect and print in proper form these remembered events, every village would in time have its own little library of local history, the volumes labelled respectively, "A Village Tragedy", "The Fields of Dulditch", "Life's Little Ironies", "Children's Children", and various others whose titles every reader will be able to supply. The effect of a long spell of listening to these unwritten tragedies was sometimes strong enough to cloud my reason, for on going directly forth into the bright sunshine and listening to the glad sounds which filled the air, it would seem that this earth was a paradise and that all creation rejoiced in everlasting happiness excepting man alone who--mysterious being!--was born to trouble and disaster as the sparks fly upwards. A pure delusion, due to our universal and ineradicable passion for romance and tragedy. Tell a man of a hundred humdrum lives which run their quiet contented course in this village, and the monotonous unmoving story, or hundred stories, will go in at one ear and out at the other. Therefore such stories are not told and not remembered. But that which stirs our pity and terror--the frustrate life, the glorious promise which was not fulfilled, the broken hearts and broken fortunes, and passion, crime, remorse, retribution--all this prints itself on the mind, and every such life is remembered for ever and passed on from generation to generation. But it would really form only one brief chapter in the long, long history of the village life with its thousand chapters. The truth is, if we live in fairly natural healthy condition, we are just as happy as the lower animals. Some philosopher has said that the chief pleasure in a man's life, as in that of a cow, consists in the processes of mastication, deglutition, and digestion, and I am very much inclined to agree with him. The thought of death troubles us very little--we do not believe in it. A familiar instance is that of the consumptive, whose doctor and friends have given him up and wait but to see the end, while he, deluded man, still sees life, an illimitable, green, sunlit prospect, stretching away to an infinite distance before him. Death is a reality only when it is very near, so close on us that we can actually hear its swift stoaty feet rustling over the dead leaves, and for a brief bitter space we actually know that his sharp teeth will presently be in our throat.