He went on, still gloomy, but his gloom was no longer an angry and sullen one. Through his eyes and ears came sensations that gradually gladdened his heart, and relieved the oppression on his brain: he began to notice the bloom on the hedges and in the fields; and the singing of the larks high in air, though he hardly attended to it, made part of the joyousness of nature which was beginning to steal into his weary being. Presently he came to a little hamlet, hardly more than a cottage or two, but with a little church standing at right angles to the road. The churchyard looked inviting, for rose-bushes were blooming among the graves, and it was shut out from the road by a high wall, so that he would be unobserved there. He walked in and sat down on a tombstone to rest. He had not been there long, and was beginning to feel calmed and quieted, when there broke out on him from the ivied wall the very same shrill wren’s song that had so wounded his feelings in the morning. It sent a momentary pang through him. There started up before his eyes the broken ink-bottle, the smeared page, the bitter vexation and worry, and the song not even yet begun. But the battle of body and brain was no longer being waged, and as the tiny brown bird sang again and again, and always the same strain, he began to wonder how such cheerful music could ever have so maddened him. It brought to his mind a brilliant bit of _Scarlatti_, in which a certain lively passage comes up and up again, always the same, like a clear, strong spring of water bubbling up with unflagging energy, and with a never-failing supply of joyousness. And the wren and _Scarlatti_ getting the better of him, he passed out of the churchyard, and actually began to feel that he was hungry. Just across the road was a thatched cottage, standing in a little garden gay with early summer flowers; beehives stood on each side of the entrance, and a vine hung on the walls. It looked inviting, and the musician stepped over the little stile, and tapped at the door, which was open. A woman of middle age came forward. “Can you tell me,” said he, “whether there is an inn anywhere near where I could get some bread and cheese?” She answered that there was no inn nearer than the next village, two miles away. “But you look tired and pale, sir. Come in and have a morsel before you go on; and a cup of tea will be like to do you good. Sit you down in the porch and rest a bit, and I’ll bring you something in a moment.”