He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy,

that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a

morning like this, and would never draw there any more. "I've seen

him look down into it, when he was tired with his drawing, just as I

do now, and when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home!

But he was too clever to bide here any longer--a small sleepy place

like this!"

A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well. The morning

was a little foggy, and the boy's breathing unfurled itself as

a thicker fog upon the still and heavy air. His thoughts were

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interrupted by a sudden outcry: "Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!"

It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the

garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far off. The boy quickly

waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a great effort

for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket into his

own pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started

with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well

stood--nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather hamlet

of Marygreen.

It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of

an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs. Old as it

was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local

history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched

and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and

many trees felled on the green. Above all, the original church,

hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken

down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or

utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and

rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it

a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English

eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain

obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back

in a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to

the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level

grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated

graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast-iron crosses

warranted to last five years.

II

Slender as was Jude Fawley's frame he bore the two brimming

house-buckets of water to the cottage without resting. Over the door

was a little rectangular piece of blue board, on which was painted

in yellow letters, "Drusilla Fawley, Baker." Within the little lead

panes of the window--this being one of the few old houses left--were

five bottles of sweets, and three buns on a plate of the willow

pattern.




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