To
them pain and mishap present a far wider range of possibilities than
gladness and enjoyment: their imagination is almost barren of the
images that feed desire and hope, but is all overgrown by
recollections that are a perpetual pasture to fear. 'Is there anything
you can fancy that you would like to eat?' I once said to an old
labouring man, who was in his last illness, and who had refused all
the food his wife had offered him. 'No,' he answered, 'I've never been
used to nothing but common victual, and I can't eat that.'
Experience had bred no fancies in him that could raise the phantasm of
appetite.
And Raveloe was a village where many of the old echoes lingered,
undrowned by new voices. Not that it was one of those barren
parishes lying on the outskirts of civilization- inhabited by meagre
sheep and thinly-scattered shepherds: on the contrary, it lay in the
rich central plain of what we are pleased to call Merry England, and
held farms which, speaking from a spiritual point of view, paid
highly-desirable tithes. But it was nestled in a snug well-wooded
hollow, quite an hour's journey on horseback from any turnpike,
where it was never reached by the vibrations of the coach-horn, or
of public opinion. It was an important-looking village, with a fine
old church and large churchyard in the heart of it, and two or three
large brick-and-stone homesteads, with well-walled orchards and
ornamental weathercocks, standing close upon the road, and lifting
more imposing fronts than the rectory, which peeped from among the
trees on the other side of the churchyard; a village which showed at
once the summits of its social life, and told the practised eye that
there was no great park and manor house in the vicinity, but that
there were several chiefs in Raveloe who could farm badly quite at
their ease, drawing enough money from their bad farming, in those
war times, to live in a rollicking fashion, and keep a jolly
Christmas, Whitsun, and Easter tide.
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