At any rate we have every hope
that he will empty the pond as speedily as possible so that we
may watch it fill again.
I must say that he has been a little lucky in his choice of a
year for inaugurating the pond. But, all the same, there are now
45 in. of rain in it, 45 in. of rain have fallen in the last
three weeks, and I think that something ought to be done about
it.
A Seventeenth-Century Story
There is a story in every name in that first column of The Times-
-Births, Marriages, and Deaths--down which we glance each
morning, but, unless the name is known to us, we do not bother
about the stories of other people. They are those not very
interesting people, our contemporaries. But in a country
churchyard a name on an old tombstone will set us wondering a
little. What sort of life came to an end there a hundred years
ago?
In the parish register we shall find the whole history of them;
when they were born, when they were married, how many children
they had, when they died--a skeleton of their lives which we can
clothe with our fancies and make living again. Simple lives, we
make them, in that pleasant countryside; "Man comes and tills the
field and lies beneath"; that is all. Simple work, simple
pleasures, and a simple death.
Of course we are wrong. There were passions and pains in those
lives; tragedies perhaps. The tombstones and the registers say
nothing of them; or, if they say it, it is in a cypher to which
we have not the key.
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