the selborne atmosphere—unhealthy faces—selborne common—character of scenery—wheatham hill—hampshire village churches—gilbert white's strictures—churches big and little—the peasants' religious feeling—charm of old village churches—seeking priors dean—privett church—blackmoor church—churchyards—change in gravestones—beauty of old gravestones—red alga on gravestones—yew trees in churchyards—british dragon-tree—farringdon village and yew—crowhurst yew—hurstbourne priors yew—how yew trees are injured.
it is a pleasure to be at selborne; nevertheless i find i always like selborne best when i am out of it, especially when i am rambling about that bit of beautiful country on the border of which it lies. the memory of gilbert white; the old church with its low, square tower and its famous yew tree; above all, the constant sight of the hanger clothed in its beechen woods—green, or bronze and red-gold, or purple-brown in leafless winter—all these things do not prevent a sense of lassitude, of ill-being, which i experience in the village when i am too long in it, and which vanishes when i quit it, and seem to breathe a better air. this is no mere fancy, nor something peculiar to myself; the natives, too, are subject to this secret trouble, and are, some of them, conscious of it. round about selborne you will find those who were born and bred in the village, who say they were never well until they quitted it; and some {182} of these declare that they would not return even if some generous person were to offer them a cottage rent free. the appearance of the people, too, may be considered in this connection. mary russell mitford exclaims in one of her village sketches that there was not a pretty face in the country-side. the want of comeliness which is so noticeable in the southern parts of berkshire is not confined to that county. the people of berkshire and hampshire, of the blonde type, are very much alike. but there are degrees; and if you want to see, i will not say a handsome, nor a pretty, but a passably fresh and pleasant face among the cottagers, you must go out of selborne to some neighbouring village to look for it.
selborne common
but this question does not now concern us. the best of selborne is the common on the hill—all the better for the steep hill which must be climbed to get to it, since that difficult way prevents the people from making too free use of it, and regarding it as a sort of back-yard or waste place to throw their rubbish on. it is a perpetual joy to the children. one morning in october i met there some youngsters gathering kindling-wood, and feasting at the same time on wild fruits—the sloes were just then at their best. they told me that they had only recently come to live in selborne from farringdon, their native village. "and which place do you like best?" i asked. "selborne!" they shouted in a breath, and indeed appeared surprised that i had asked such a question. no wonder. this hill-top common is the {183} most forest-like, the wildest in england, and the most beautiful as well, both in its trees and tangles of all kinds of wild plants that flourish in waste places, and in the prospects which one gets of the surrounding country. here, seeing the happiness of the boys, i have wished to be a boy again. but one does not think so much of this spot when one comes to know the country round, and finds that selborne hill is but one of many hills of the same singular and beautiful type, sloping away gently on one side, and presenting a bold, almost precipitous front on the other, in most cases clothed on the steep side with dense beech woods. it is now eight years since i began to form an acquaintance with this east corner of hampshire, but not until last october (1902) did i know how beautiful it was. from selborne hill one sees something of it; a better sight is obtained from noire hill, where one is able to get some idea of the peculiar character of the scenery. it is all wildly irregular, high and low grounds thrown together in a pretty confusion, and the soil everywhere fertile, so that the general effect is of extreme richness. one sees, too, that the human population is sparse, and that it has always been as it is now, and man's work—his old irregular fields, and the unkept hedges which, like the thickets on the waste places, are self-planted, and have been self-planted for centuries, and the old deep-winding lanes and by-roads—have come at last to seem one with nature's work. out of this broken, variegated, richly green surface, here and there, in a sort of range, but {184} irregular like all else, the hills, or hangers, lift their steep, bank-like fronts—splendid masses of red and russet gold against the soft grey-blue autumnal sky. it is delightful to walk through this bit of country from nore hill, and from hill to hill, across green fields, for the farms here are like wild lands that all are free to use, to wheatham hill, the highest point, which rises 800 feet above the sea-level. from this elevation one looks over a great part of that green variegated country of the hangers, and sees on one hand where it fades close by into the sand and pine district beginning at wolmer forest, and on another side, beyond the little town of petersfield, the region of great rolling downs stretching far away into sussex.
village churches
in my rambles about this corner of hampshire, during which i visited all the villages nearest to selborne—empshott, hawkley, greatham, east and west tisted, worldham, priors dean, colemore, privett, froxfield, hartley maudit, blackmore, oakhanger, kingsley, farringdon and newton valence—i could not help thinking a good deal about hampshire village churches generally. it was a subject which had often enough been in my mind before in other parts of the county, but it now came back to me in connection with gilbert white's strictures on these sacred buildings. their "meanness" produced a feeling in him which is the nearest approach to indignation discoverable in his pages. he is speaking of jackdaws breeding in rabbit holes, and shrewdly conjectures that this habit has arisen on account of {185} the absence of steeples and towers suitable as nesting-places. "many hampshire places of worship," he remarks, "make no better appearance than dovecotes." he envied northamptonshire, cambridgeshire, the fens of lincolnshire, and other districts, the number of spires which presented themselves in every point of view, and concludes: "as an admirer of prospects i have reason to lament this want in my own county, for such objects are very necessary ingredients in an elegant landscape."
the honoured historian of the parish of selborne makes me shudder in this passage. but i am, perhaps, giving too much importance to his words, since one may judge, from his mention of norfolk in this connection as being even worse off than his own county, that he was not well informed on the subject. norfolk, like somerset, abounds in grand old churches of the perpendicular period. that smallness, or "meanness" as he expresses it, of the hampshire churches, is, to my mind, one of their greatest merits. the hampshire village would not possess that charm which we find in it—its sweet rusticity and homeliness, and its harmonious appearance in the midst of a nature green and soft and beautiful—but for that essential feature and part of it, the church which does not tower vast and conspicuous as a gigantic asylum or manufactory from among lowly cottages dwarfed by its proximity to the appearance of pigmy-built huts in the aruwhimi forest. these immense churches which in recent years have lifted their tall spires and towers amidst lowly surroundings in many {186} rural places, are, as a rule, the work of some zealot who has seared his sense of beauty with a hot iron, or else of a new over-rich lord of the manor, who must have all things new, including a big new church to worship a new god in—his own peculiar stock exchange god, who is a respecter of wealthy persons. here in hampshire we have seen the old but well preserved village church pulled down—doubtless with the consent of the ecclesiastical authorities—its ancient monuments broken up and carted away, its brasses made into fire ornaments by cottagers or sold as old metal, and the very gravestones used in paving the scullery and offices of the grand new parsonage built to match the grand new church.
peasants' religious feeling
when coming upon one of these "necessary ingredients in an elegant landscape" in some rural spot i have sometimes wondered what the feeling of the people who have spent their lives there can be about it. what effect has the new vast building, with its highly decorated yet cold and vacant interior, on their dim minds—on their religion, let us say? it may be a poor unspiritual sort of religion, based on old traditions and associations, mostly local; but shall we scorn it on that account? if we look a little closely into the matter, we see that all men, even the most intellectual, the most spiritual, are subject to this feeling in some degree, that it is in all religions. that which from use, from association, becomes symbolic of faith is in itself sacred. at the present time the church is torn with dissensions because of this very question. certain bodily {187} positions and signs and gestures, and woven fabrics and garments of many patterns and colours, and wood and stone and metal objects, and lighted candles and perfumes—mere hay and stubble to others who have different symbols—are things essential to worship in some. touch these things and you hurt their souls; you deprive them of their means of communication with another world. so the poor peasant who was born and lives in a thatched cottage, with his limited intelligence, his animism, associates the idea of the unseen world with the sacred objects he has seen and known and handled—the small ancient building, the red-barked, dark-leafed yew, the green mounds and lichened gravestones among which he played as a child, and the dim, low-roofed interior of what was to him god's house. whatever there is in his mind that is least earthly, whatever thoughts he may have of the unseen world and a life beyond this life, were inseparably bound up with these visible things.
we need not follow this line any farther; those who believe with me that the sense of the beautiful is god's best gift to the human soul will see that i have put the matter on other and higher grounds. the small village church with its low tower or grey-shingled spire among the shade trees, is beautiful chiefly because man and nature with its softening processes have combined to make it a fit part of the scene, a building which looks as natural and harmonious as an old hedge which man planted once and nature replanted many times, and as many an old thatched {188} timbered cottage, and many an old grey ruin, ivy-grown, with red valerian blooming on its walls.
to pull down one of these churches to put in its place a gigantic gothic structure in brick or stone, better suited in size (and ugliness) for a london or liverpool church than for a small rustic village in hampshire, is nothing less than a crime.
seeking priors dean
when calling to mind the churches known to me in this part of hampshire, i always think with peculiar pleasure of the smaller ones, and perhaps with the most pleasure of the smallest of all—priors dean.
it happened that the maps which i use in my hampshire rambles and which i always considered the best—bartholomew's two miles to the inch—did not mark priors dean, so that i had to go and find it for myself. i went with a friend one excessively hot day in july, by empshott and hawkley through deep by-roads so deep and narrow and roofed over with branches as to seem in places like tunnels. on that hot day in the silent time of year it was strangely still, and gave one the feeling of being in a country long deserted by man. its only inhabitants now appeared to be the bullfinches. in these deep shaded lanes one constantly hears the faint plaintive little piping sound, the almost inaudible alarm note of the concealed bird; and at intervals, following the sound, he suddenly dashes out, showing his sharp-winged shape and clear grey and black upper plumage marked with white for a moment or two before vanishing once more in the overhanging foliage.
we went a long way round, but at last coming to {189} an open spot we saw two cottages and two women and a boy standing talking by a gate, and of these people we asked the way to priors dean. they could not tell us. they knew it was not far away—a mile perhaps; but they had never been to it, nor seen it, and didn't well know the direction. the boy when asked shook his head. a aged" target="_blank">middle-aged man was digging about thirty yards away, and to him one of the women now called, "can you tell them the way to priors dean?"
the man left off digging, straightened himself, and gazed steadily at us for some moments. he was one of the usual type—nine in every ten farm labourers in this corner of hampshire are of it—thinnish, of medium height, a pale, parchment face, rather large straightish nose, pale eyes with little speculation in them, shaved mouth and chin, and small side whiskers as our fathers wore them. the moustache has not yet been adopted by these conservatives. the one change they have made is, alas! in their dress—the rusty black coat for the smock frock.
when he had had his long gaze, he said, "priors dean?"
"yes, priors dean," repeated the woman, raising her voice.
he turned up two spadefuls of earth, then asked again, "priors dean?"
"priors dean!" shouted the woman. "can't you tell 'em how to get to it?" then she laughed. she had perhaps come from some other part of the country where minds are not quite so slow, and where the {190} slow-minded person is treated as being deaf and shouted at.
then, at last, he stuck his spade into the soil, and leaving it, slowly advanced to the gate and told us to follow a path which he pointed out, and when we got on the hill we would see priors dean before us.
churches old and new
and that was how we found it. there is a satirical saying in the other villages that if you want to find the church at priors dean you must first cut down the nettles. there were no nettles nor weeds of any kind, only the small ancient church with its little shingled spire standing in the middle of a large green graveyard with about a dozen or fifteen gravestones scattered about, three old tombs, and, close to the building, an ancient yew tree. this is a big, and has been a bigger, tree, as a large part of the trunk has perished on one side, but as it stands it measures nearly twenty-four feet round a yard from the earth. this, with a small farmhouse, in old times a manor house, and its outbuildings and a cottage or two, make the village. so quiet a spot is it that to see a human form or hear a human voice comes almost as a surprise. the little antique church, the few stones, the dark ancient tree—these are everything, and the effect on the mind is strangely grateful—a sense of enduring peace, with something of that solitariness and desolation which we find in unspoilt wildernesses.
from these smallest churches, which appear like a natural growth where they are seen, i turn to the large and new, and the largest of all at this place—that of privett. from its gorgeous yet vacant and {191} cold interior, and from the whole vast structure, including that necessary ingredient in an elegant landscape, the soaring spire visible for many miles around, i turn away as from a jarring and discordant thing—the feeling one experiences at the sight of those brand-new big houses built by over-rich stock-jobbers on many hills and open heaths in surrey and, alas! in hampshire.
i do not, however, say that all new and large churches raised in small rustic centres appear as discordant things. even in the group of villages which i have named there is a new and comparatively large one which moves one to admiration the church of blackmoor. here the vegetation and surroundings are unlike those which accord best with the small typical structures, the low tower and shingled spire. the tall, square tower of blackmoor, of white stone roofed with red tiles, rises amid the pines of wolmer forest, simple and beautiful in shape, and gives a touch of grace and grateful colour to that darker, austere nature. from every point of view it is a pleasure to the eye, and because of its enduring beauty the memory of the man who raised it is like a perfume in the wilderness.
it is, however, time that bestows the best grace, the indescribable charm to the village church—long centuries of time, which gives the feeling, the expression, of immemorial peace to the weathered and ivied building itself and the surrounding space, the churchyard, with its green heaps, and scattered stones, and funeral yew.
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change in gravestones
the associated feeling, the expression, is undoubtedly the chief thing in the general effect, but the constituents or objects which compose the scene are in themselves pleasing; and one scarcely less important than the building itself, the universal grass, the dark, red-barked tree, is the gravestone. i mean the gravestone that is attractive in shape, which may be seen in every old village churchyard in hampshire; for not all the stones are of this character. the stone that is beautiful dates back half a century at least, but very few are as old as a century and a half. when we get that far and farther back the inscription is obliterated or indecipherable. only here and there we may by chance find some stone, half buried in the soil, of an exceptional hardness, marking the spot where lieth one who departed this life in the seventeenth or early in the eighteenth century. there are many old stones, it is true, with nothing legible on them, but one does not know how old they are. it is not that these gravestones are beautiful only because they are old, and have had their hard surface softened and embroidered with green moss and lichen of many shades from pale-grey to orange and red and brown. the form of the stone, the stone-cutter's work, was beautiful before nature began to work on it with her sunshine, her rain, her invisible seed. i cannot think why this old fashion, or rather, let us say, this tender, sacred custom, of marking the last resting-place of the dead with a memorial satisfying to the ?sthetic sense, should have gone or died out. the gravestones {193} used at the present time are, as a rule, twice as big as the old ones, and are perfectly plain—immense stone slabs, inscribed with big, fat, black letters differing in size, the whole inscription curiously resembling the local auctioneer's bills to be seen pasted up on barn-doors, fences, and other suitable places. so big and hard, and bold, and ugly—i try not to see them!
look from these at the old stone which the earthworms have been busy trying to bury for a century, until the lower half of the inscription is underground; the stone which the lichen has embossed and richly coloured; round which the grass grows so close and lovingly, and the small creeping ivy tries to cover. this which has been added to it is but a part of its beauty: you see that its lines are graceful, that they were made so; that the inscription—"here lyeth the body," etc.—is not cut in letters in use in newspapers and advertising placards, and have therefore no common nor degrading associations, but are letters of other forms, graceful, too, in their lines; and that above the inscription there are sculptured and symbolic figures and lines—emblems of mortality, eternal hope, and a future life—heads of cherubs, winged and blowing on horns, and the sun and wings; skulls and crossbones, and hour-glass and scythe; the funeral urn and weeping-willow; the lighted torch; the heart in flames, or bleeding, or transfixed with arrows; the angel's trumpet, the crown of glory, the palm and the lily, the laurel leaf, and many more.
{194}
did we think this art, or this custom, too little a thing to cherish any longer? i cannot find any person with a word to say about it. i have tried and the result was curious. i have invited persons of my acquaintance into an old churchyard and begged them to look on this stone and on this—the hard ugliness of one, an insult to the dead, and the beauty, the pathos, of the other. and they have immediately fallen into a melancholy silence, or else they have suddenly become angry, apparently for no cause. but the reason probably was that they had never given a thought to the subject, that when they had buried someone dear to them—a mother or wife or daughter—they simply went to the stonemason and ordered a gravestone, leaving him to fashion it in his own way. the reason of the reason—the full explanation of the singular fact that they, in these house-beautiful and generally art-worshipping times, had given no thought to the matter until it was unexpectedly sprung upon them; and that if they had lived, say, a hundred years ago, they would have given it some thought—this the reader will easily find out for himself.
beauty of old gravestones
it is comforting to reflect that gravestones do not last for ever, nor for very long; and in the meantime nature is doing what she can with our ugly modern memorials, touching, softening, and tingeing them with her mosses, lichens, and with alg?—her beautiful iolithus. in most churchyards in southern england we see many stones stained a {195} peculiar colour, a bright rust-red, darkest in dry weather, and brightest in wet summers, often varying to pink and purple and orange; but whatever the hue or shade the effect on the grey stone, lichened or not, is always beautiful. it is not a lichen; when the staining is looked closely at nothing is seen but a roughness, a powdery appearance, on the stone's surface. it is an aerial alga of the genus cro?leptus, confined to the southern half of england, and most common in hampshire, where its beautifying blush may sometimes be seen on old stone walls of churches, and old houses and ruins; but it flourishes most on gravestones, especially in moist situations. the stone must not be too hard, and must, moreover, be acted on by the weather for well-nigh half a century before the alga begins to show on it; but you will sometimes see it on an exceptionally soft stone dating no more than thirty or forty years back. on old stones it is very common, and peculiarly beautiful in wet summers. in june 1902, after many days of rain, i stood one evening at the little gate at brockenhurst churchyard, and counted between me and the church twenty gravestones stained with the red alga, showing a richness and variety of colouring never seen before, the result of so much wet weather. for this alga, which plays so important a part in nature's softening and beautifying effect on man's work—which is mentioned in no book unless it be some purely technical treatise dealing with the lower vegetable forms—this alga, despite its aerial habit, is still in essence a water-plant: the sun and dry {196} wind burn its life out and darken it to the colour of ironstone, so that to anyone who may notice the dark stain it seems a colour of the stone itself; but when rain falls the colour freshens and brightens as if the old grey stone had miraculously been made to live.
churchyard yews
if never a word has been written about that red colour with which nature touches the old stones to make them beautiful, a thousand or ten thousand things have been said about the yew, the chief feature and ornament of the village churchyard, and many conjectures have we seen as to the reason of the very ancient custom of planting this tree where the dead are laid. the tree itself gives a better reason than any contained in books. it says something to the soul in man which the talking or chattering yew omitted to tell the modern poet; but very long ago someone said, in the death of fergus, "patriarch of long-lasting woods is the yew; sacred to forests as is well known." that ancient sacred character, which survived the introduction of christianity, lives still in every mind that has kept any vestige of animism, the root and essence of all that is wonderful and sacred in nature. that red and purple bark is the very colour of life, and this tree's life, compared with other things, is everlasting. the stones we set up as memorials grow worn and seamed and hoary with age, even like men, and crumble to dust at last; in time new stones are put in their place, and these, too, grow old and perish, and {197} are succeeded by others; and through all changes, through the ages, the tree lives on unchanged. with its huge, tough, red trunk; its vast, knotted arms outstretched; its rich, dark mantle of undying foliage, it stands like a protecting god on the earth, patriarch and monarch of woods; and indeed it seems but right and natural that not to oak nor holly, nor any other reverenced tree, but to the yew it was given to keep guard over the bodies and souls of those who have been laid in the earth.
the yew is sometimes called the "hampshire weed," on account of its abundance in the county; if it must have a second name, i suggest that the hampshire or british dragon-tree would be a better and more worthy one. it would admirably fit some ancient churchyard yews in the neighbourhood of selborne, especially that of farringdon.
in the great mass of literature concerning gilbert white, there is curiously little said about this village; yet it has one of the most interesting old churches in the county—the church in which white officiated for over a quarter of a century, during all the best years of his life, in fact; for when he resigned the curacy at farringdon to take that of selborne, for which he had waited so long, he was within two years of bidding a formal farewell to natural history, and within eight of his death. the church register from 1760 to 1785 is written in his clear, beautiful hand, and in the rectory garden there is a large spanish chestnut-tree planted by him. although not so fortunate in its surroundings as selborne, with {198} its lyth and flowery bourne and wooded hanger, farringdon village, with its noble church and fine old farm-buildings and old cottages, is the better village of the two. at the side of the churchyard there is an old oast-house, now used as a barn, which for quaintness and beauty has hardly its match in england. the churchyard itself is a pretty, peaceful wilderness, deep in grass, with ivy and bramble hanging to the trees, and spreading over tombs and mounds. long may it be kept sacred from the gardener, with his abhorred pruning-hook, his basket of geranium cuttings—inharmonious flower!—and his brushwood broom to make it all tidy. finally, there is the wonderful old yew.
farringdon yew
a great deal has been written first and last about the selborne yew, which appears to rank as one of the half-dozen biggest yew trees in the country. its age is doubtless very great, and may greatly exceed the "thousand years" usually given to a very large churchyard yew. the yews planted two hundred years ago by gilbert white's grandfather in the parsonage garden close by, are but saplings in comparison. a black poplar would grow a bigger trunk in less than ten years. the selborne yew was indeed one of the antiquities of the village when white described it a century and a quarter ago. it is, moreover, the best-grown, healthiest, and most vigorous-looking yew of its size in britain. the farringdon yew, the bigger tree, has a far more aged aspect—the appearance of a tree which has been decaying for an exceedingly long period.
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trees, like men, have their middle period, when their increase slowly lessens until it ceases altogether; their long stationary period, and their long decline: each of these periods may, in the case of the yew, extend to centuries; and we know that behind them all there may have been centuries of slow growth. the selborne yew has added something to its girth since it was measured by white, and is now twenty-seven feet round in its biggest part, and exceeds by at least three feet the big yew at priors dean, and the biggest of the three churchyard yews at hawkley. the farringdon yew in its biggest part, about five feet from the ground, measures thirty feet, and to judge by its ruinous condition it must have ceased adding to its bulk more than a century ago. one regrets that white gave no account of its size and appearance in his day. it has, in the usual manner, decayed above and below, the upper branches dying down while the trunk rots away beneath, the tree meanwhile keeping itself alive and renewing its youth, as it were, by means of that power which the yew possesses of saving portions of its trunk from complete decay by covering them inside and out with new bark.
in the churchyard yew at crowhurst, surrey, we see that the upper part of the tree has decayed until nothing but the low trunk, crowned with a poor fringe of late branches, has been left; in this case the trunk remains outwardly almost entire—an empty shell or cylinder, large enough to accommodate fourteen persons on the circular bench placed within the cavity. in other cases we see that the trunk has {200} been eaten through and through, and split up into strips; that the strips, covered inside with new bark, have become separate trunks, in some instances united above, as in that of the yew in south hayling churchyard. the farringdon tree has decayed below in this way; long strips from the top to the roots have rotted and turned to dust; and the sound portions, covered in and out with bark, form a group of half a dozen flattened boles, placed in a circle, all but one, which springs from the middle, and forms a fantastically twisted column in the centre of the edifice. between this central strangely shaped bole, now dead, and the surrounding ring there is space for a man to walk round in.
it is a wonderful tree, which white looked at every day for five-and-twenty years, yet never mentioned, and which loe says nothing about in his yew trees of great britain and ireland. the title of this work is misleading: famous yew trees it should have been, since it is nothing but a collection of facts as to size, supposed age, etc., of trees that have often been measured and described, and are accordingly well known. it is well, to my way of thinking, that he attempted nothing more. it is always a depressing thought, when one has discovered a wonderful or a beautiful thing, that a very full and very exact account of it is and must be contained in some musty monograph by some industrious, dreary person. at all events, i can say that the yew trees which have most attracted me, which come up when i think of the yew as a wonderful and a sacred tree, are not {201} in the book. of my hampshire favourites i will, for a special reason, speak of but one more—the yew in the churchyard of hurstbourne priors, a small village on the upper test, near andover.
hurstbourne priors yew
this tree, which is doubtless very aged, has not grown an enormous trunk, nor is it high for an old yew, but its appearance is nevertheless strangely impressive, owing to the length of its lower horizontal branches, which extend to a distance of thirty to thirty-five feet from the trunk, and would lie on the ground if not kept up by props. another thing which make one wonder is the number of graves that are crowded together beneath these vast sheltering arms. one may count over thirty stones, some very old; many more have probably perished, and there are besides many green mounds. i have watched in a churchyard in the midlands a grave being dug under a yew, at about three yards' distance from the trunk: a barrowful of roots was taken out during the process. it seemed to me that a very serious injury was being inflicted on the tree, and it is probable that many of our very old churchyard yews have been dwarfed in their growth by such cutting of the roots. but what shall we say of the hurstbourne priors yew, from which not one but thirty or forty barrow-loads of living roots must have been taken at various times to make room for so many coffins! and what is the secret of the custom in this, and probably other villages, of putting the dead so close to or under the shelter of the tree?
compare this hurstbourne priors yew, and many {202} other ancient churchyard yews in hampshire, with that of selborne, which albeit probably no older is double their size: is it not probable that the selborne tree is the largest, best grown, and most vigorous of the old yews because it has not been mutilated at its roots as the others have been?
there is but one grave beneath or near this tree; not the grave of any important person, but a nameless green mound of some obscure peasant. i had often looked with a feeling almost of astonishment at that solitary conspicuous mound in such a place, midway between the trunk of the tree and the church door, wondering who it was whose poor remains had been so honoured, and why it was. then by chance i found out the whole story; but it came to me in scraps, at different times and places, and that is how i will give it to the reader, in fragments, in the course of the following chapter.
