‘Winter coming,’ he went on; ‘the winter we all need once a year to knit us closer together. Listen to Saint Barnabas practising his Christmas carillons!—forging his link in the chain of bell-ringing that in a week or two will stretch all round the world. It is my time coming, my own time. For did you ever think how little eyesight matters at Christmas? Blindness is nothing to a man then. Christmas is all glad sound; warm heart-beats; faithful words. And, please God, when the day dawns, there shall not be a cottage-nest in Windlecombe that does not overflow with these.’ To see him so deeply moved, and hear him run on presently about his many schemes of comfort and relief, the furtherance of joy and merriment, good-will and good cheer, to be sown broadcast throughout his little domain, was yourself to take the infection irresistibly. Whatever Christmas has become in the great outer world, in Windlecombe he held us year by year to all the old ideals and traditions. As I harkened to him, the black sky, the sullen, miasmic air, lost their significance. I found myself thinking only of the golden light and undimmed azure that must eternally lie beyond and above it all. And now—though I might have heard it long ago, if I had had but the heart to look up and listen—there, high against the drab heaven, a lark soared and sang. II The dirty weather has come indeed. For many days I have not seen the tops of the hills. They have been hidden in the rain-clouds that have been dragging ceaselessly over the combe. The rain has not seemed to fall, but to flow horizontally from west to east, a gliding white curtain of water-drops, hiding all but the nearest houses from the view. And yet, for all the deluge and the sobbing wind, the gloom, the cold, the miry ways, I would not change this solitary, inaccessible spot in England for the best of foreign sunshine, ease, and gaiety to be found by the Tideless Sea. Perhaps, if winter is to be given a place at all in the calendar, it must come in these few weeks leading on to Christmas. It is true that, so far as the natural outdoor world is concerned, there is no winter, in the human conception of a season of decay and death. In an hour, when the sky lightened a little and the rain ceased its rattle on the window, I went out and found next year’s corn greening the hill-side; and in all the bare dark woodland there was not a twig without its new buds ripe and ready for another spring. The year’s miracle-play was beginning all over again before its last lines were said. Yet because, as the old vicar maintains, winter is a human necessity by reason of its heart-welding, neighbour-making qualities, winter we must all have; and so at this time I am glad to hoodwink myself into the belief that the rough-voiced, harrying weather is the very negation of life, bringing us all together for mutual comfort, like children in the dark.