Page:The Heart of England.djvu/25

 forcing himself to cry; in the windowless houses it made a merrier sound like a horn. It drove workmen and passers-by to spend as much time as possible in "The King's Head," and there the medley of the land was repeated. Irish and Cockney accents mingled with Kentish; Americans would have been out of place. No one seemed to dislike the best room in the inn, where there was a piano, a coloured picture of Lord Roberts and of the landlord as a youth, an old print of snipe-shooting, some gaudy and fanciful advertisements of spirits, and no fire to warm the wall-paper which had once had a pattern characteristic of poor bathrooms.

I felt a kind of exalted and almost cheerful gloom as I stepped out and saw that it was raining and would go on raining. O exultation of the sorrowful heart when Nature also seems to be sorrowing! What strange merriment is this which the dejected mind and the wind in the trees are making together! What high lavolt of the shuffling heels of despair! As two lovers wounded and derided will make of their complainings one true joy that triumphs, so will the concealing rain and the painful mind.

The workmen had gone; faint lights began to appear through the blinds of the finished houses. There was no sunset, no change from day to night. The end of the day was like what is called a natural death in bed; an ill-laid fire dies thus. With the darkness a strange spirit of quiet joy appeared in the air. Old melodies floating about it on that mourning wind. The rain formed a mist and a veil over the skeletons round about, but it revealed more than it took away; Nature gained courage