She Was A Good Fluent Talker; Moreover, She Studied Her
Listener, And Finding That My Interest In Her Own Interminable
Story was becoming exhausted she sought for other subjects,
chiefly the strange events in the lives of men and women
Who
had lived in the village and who had long been turned to dust.
They were all more or less tragical in character, and it
astonished me to think that I had stayed in a dozen or twenty,
perhaps forty, villages in Wiltshire, and had heard stories
equally strange and moving in pretty well every one of them.
If each of these small centres possessed a scribe of genius,
or at any rate one with a capacity for taking pains, who would
collect and print in proper form these remembered events,
every village would in time have its own little library of
local history, the volumes labelled respectively, "A Village
Tragedy", "The Fields of Dulditch", "Life's Little Ironies",
"Children's Children", and various others whose titles every
reader will be able to supply.
The effect of a long spell of listening to these unwritten
tragedies was sometimes strong enough to cloud my reason, for
on going directly forth into the bright sunshine and listening
to the glad sounds which filled the air, it would seem that
this earth was a paradise and that all creation rejoiced in
everlasting happiness excepting man alone who - mysterious
being! - was born to trouble and disaster as the sparks fly
upwards. A pure delusion, due to our universal and
ineradicable passion for romance and tragedy.
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