The murmur of the Indian village was likewise there, but it did not come athwart; it travelled equably with the other sounds. They had come to have a fondness for the dwindling village, an affection for this remnant of a remnant of a people. They were poor savages, they had flaws and vices, but save that they were less complex, less intertwined with later offshoots, more plain stalk and plain word, their flaws and vices differed in no great wise from those that might be viewed in France or England. At times the village seemed like a village of children, and then again it might seem very old and somewhat wise. Once or twice they had seen it waver toward a village of beasts, heavily swaying toward the animal only. But Aderhold had seen that happen in France and Italy—they might both think that they had seen it happen in England. On the very morrow it was something more than animal. At times it was something much more—something much higher. And they knew that flaws and vices lurked in themselves also—unplucked-out weeds yet living a slow dark life in the backward-reaching abyss. They understood the village, and they tried to help. They did help, and by slow degrees the village came to change affection with them. As for the old chief, every other day he came to see them. He was of an enquiring and speculative turn of mind, and it was his wont to bring unsolved questions to the vine-shaded strip of bare earth before the hut, and there, seated on a mat with a few followers squatted around, propound them to the two. To most of the islanders all things, outside the narrowest range, were supernatural. The old man’s scope was wider, and the daring of his scepticism, proportioned to his environment, would have qualified him for a dungeon in most countries that Aderhold knew.... Here upon this island all was as a sketch, a faint model and portent only of what, in seventeenth-century Europe, had become enlarged, filled in and solid. Generically it was the same; it was but a question of degree of intensity and of accretions. These Indians also held for an external deity, so extruded, so external that steps—that intermediaries—must be extruded to cover the extruded space between, to reach the extruded Ear and Mind. Moreover, they did not maintain this a flowing process, but continually let the extrusions of remote ancestors dam the stream. They had idols whom certainly not even the old chief might with impunity criticize. They had “Thou shalts” and “Thou shalt nots” which were wise and might long remain so, and those which had been wise and were now meaningless, colourless, making neither for much good nor much harm, and those which might once have been wise but were now hurtful, and those which never had been wise and grew in folly. They had notions, dim, not as yet fearfully positive, of a future life of reward or punishment, where they would do without limit or term—throughout eternity, indeed—that which, Indians upon this island, they most liked to do