Naturally, After Quitting The Spot, I Looked At The First Opportunity Into A Guide-Book Of The District, Only To Find That It Contained Not One Word About Those Wonderful Illusive Sounds!

The book-makers had not done their work well, since it is a pleasure after having discovered something delightful for ourselves to know how others have been affected by it and how they describe it.

Of many other incidents of the kind I will, in this chapter, relate one more, which has a historical or legendary interest. I was staying with the companion of my walks at a village in Southern England in a district new to us. We arrived on a Saturday, and next morning after breakfast went out for a long walk. Turning into the first path across the fields on leaving the village, we came eventually to an oak wood, which was like an open forest, very wild and solitary. In half an hour's walk among the old oaks and underwood we saw no sign of human occupancy, and heard nothing but the woodland birds. We heard, and then saw, the cuckoo for the first time that season, though it was but April the fourth. But the cuckoo was early that spring and had been heard by some from the middle of March. At length, about half-past ten o'clock, we caught sight of a number of people walking in a kind of straggling procession by a path which crossed ours at right angles, headed by a stout old man in a black smock frock and brown leggings, who carried a big book in one hand. One of the processionists we spoke to told us they came from a hamlet a mile away on the borders of the wood and were on their way to church. We elected to follow them, thinking that the church was at some neighbouring village; to our surprise we found it was in the wood, with no other building in sight - a small ancient-looking church built on a raised mound, surrounded by a wide shallow grass-grown trench, on the border of a marshy stream. The people went in and took their seats, while we remained standing just by the door. Then the priest came from the vestry, and seizing the rope vigorously, pulled at it for five minutes, after which he showed us where to sit and the service began. It was very pleasant there, with the door open to the sunlit forest and the little green churchyard without, with a willow wren, the first I had heard, singing his delicate little strain at intervals.

The service over, we rambled an hour longer in the wood, then returned to our village, which had a church of its own, and our landlady, hearing where we had been, told us the story, or tradition, of the little church in the wood. Its origin goes very far back to early Norman times, when all the land in this part was owned by one of William's followers on whom it had been bestowed.

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