Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/263

242 wind is rain-cold. I heard a heron 'squark' just now, and saw two of them sailings overhead. I have seen the kingfishers twice: one sat three yards from me for two or three minutes and talked to himself before he saw me: he was a beauty."

And again soon after Christmas:

"Bossom told me that the hard winter had killed a huge number of the moor-hens. He said that when the frost was on they would come down to the open water by his barge and drink a drop or two and then die, poor things."

The creek, with its wooden bridge and boat-house, has now been cut off from the house by an earthwork and deep ditch formed to keep out the winter floods from the village, and the weir and gate-house across the meadow have been rebuilt; otherwise there is scarcely a change from thirty years ago in the manor-house and its immediate surroundings.

"The house was then kept," Mr. Ellis says, "by an old couple, Philip Comely and his wife, who were the ideal English villagers, capable, careful, frugal, and industrious. But Morris was much embarrassed by the apparently mechanical arrangement, 'as though it were a trick of machinery,' by which Philip's hand rose to the brim of his hat, or lacking that to his forelock, with every word he uttered. Philip's cottage served as a sort of lodge to the manor-house, rented for a shilling a week, with a good-sized and fruitful garden."

Kelmscott was at first taken by Morris in joint-tenancy with Rossetti. The breakdown in Rossetti's health, which had begun two or three years earlier, was now very marked, and it was hoped that quiet life in a remote country house might do much to restore him to bodily health and relieve his morbid imaginations.