By A Happy Chance We Found A
Pleasant Cottage On The Common To Stay At And Pleasant People
In It,
So that we were glad to sit down for a week there, to
loiter about the furzy waste, or prowl
In the forest and haunt
the old walls; but it was pleasant even indoors with that wide
prospect before the window, the wooded country stretching many
miles away to the hills of Kingsclere, blue in the distance
and crowned with their beechen rings and groves. Of Roman
Calleva itself and the thoughts I had there I will write in
the following chapter; here I will only relate how on Easter
Sunday, two days after arriving, we went to morning service in
the old church standing on a mound inside the walls, a mile
from the village and common.
It came to pass that during the service the sun began to shine
very brightly after several days of cloud and misty windy wet
weather, and that brilliance and the warmth in it served to
bring a butterfly out of hiding; then another; then a third;
red admirals all; and they were seen through all the prayers,
and psalms, and hymns, and lessons, and the sermon preached by
the white-haired Rector, fluttering against the translucent
glass, wanting to be out in that splendour and renew their
life after so long a period of suspension. But the glass was
between them and their world of blue heavens and woods and
meadow flowers; then I thought that after the service I would
make an attempt to get them out; but soon reflected that to
release them it would be necessary to capture them first, and
that that could not be done without a ladder and butterfly
net.
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