I am not quite sure that they do, though, for these ancient hamlets have strange ways of pulling the wool--a true golden fleece, to be sure--over American eyes. Once at twilight I heard a knot of strolling country men and women crooning a tune which was so strangely familiar that I immediately set it down as a village version of one of the noble melodies of that golden age when English feeling found its natural vent in song. As it drew nearer, I suddenly recognized it. It was a far-away version of "Mammy's Little Alabama Coon." I have still faith, though, in a certain mediæval barmaid I chanced upon in the backwaters. The circumstances of our meeting were peculiar. As I drifted along one Sunday, perched on an after-thwart of the canoe, the current swept me toward a willow that leaned over the water, and I put up my hand to fend off. I chanced to be laughing to myself at the time at the thought of a fellow who, only the day before at the lasher, had tried to do the same thing. The lasher was forcing his punt against the willow on the opposite bank, whereupon, to my heart's delight, he lazily tried to fend it off with his arms. The punt refused to be fended off, and he stooped with an amusing effect of deliberation plump into the water. He was hauled out by the O.U.H.S. man hard by. I was interrupted in these pleasant reminiscences by the roaring of waters about my ears, mingled with a boorish guffaw from one of the fellows behind me.... But I started to tell about the mediæval barmaid. Making my way to a bakehouse up the stream, I hung my coat and trousers before the fire on a long baker's pole, and put my shoes inside the oven on a dough tray. My companion of the horse-laugh hung my shirt on a blossoming almond-tree, and then left for the lunch hamper. He had scarcely gone when I heard the rustle of skirts at the door. "What do you want?" I cried. "I want my dinner," was the friendly reply. It was the barmaid of a neighboring public house, in her Sunday frock. When she saw me she smiled, but maintained a dignity of port that--I insist upon it--was instinct with the simple and primitive modesty of the Middle Ages. It was the modesty of the people before whom Adam in the Chester mystery play was required by the stage directions to "stand nakyd and not be ashamyd." My barmaid advised me to take off my stockings and hang them up before the fire. The advice I admit came as a shock, but on reflection I saw that it was capital. For one happy moment I lived in the broad, wholesome atmosphere of the Middle Ages. It was like a breath from Chaucer's England.