His house, dark with panelling and heavy furniture of every generation since it was built, would be gloomy were it not for his blithe sentiment about the past. He speaks of the long-dead generations not as if they were names, but so that they are known certainly to have lived and worked and enjoyed. That one planted the spreading oak, that globed green world of nightingale and willow-wren and dove; that added the knolled pasture and cut the deep, stony lane that leads to it through the brook; another built the fruit wall and bought the copy of _Tristram Shandy_ that stands with a hundred other books in the dining-room. The books themselves are good to look at, all of them original or early editions. There is _The Whole Duty of Man_ and many sermons, Prior, _The Spectator_, Thomson’s _Seasons_, Fielding, _The Rambler_, _The Task_, _The Deserted Village_, _The Waverley Novels_, Dickens, and nothing later than _In Memoriam_; at that the family seems to have stopped buying books. He knows them shrewdly enough, but it is as what the family has approved and lived on that he values them. Never was a man who seemed to take his mortality so happily and naturally. One day, showing me a small board of ancient things, he brought out a tray of coins, none earlier than Charles II., but each connected with one or another of the family. Amongst them was a modern sixpence. That was his third deposit, after the guinea and the groat, and he was too much pleased with these slender memorials not to do his own part in continuing them. “What,” he said carelessly, “would they think of me in a hundred years’ time if I had not put a sixpence in?” And he smiled lightly as if he had been on a hill and seen the long tracts of time ahead and his farm and strangers of his own blood working in its fields.
The earliest mower had not risen yet; the only sign of human life was the light that burned all night in a cottage bedroom, here and there; and from garden to garden went the white owl with that indolent flight which seems ever about to cease, and he seemed to be the disembodied soul of a sleeper, vague, homeless, wandering, softly taking a dim joy in all the misty, dense forget-me-not, pansy, cornflower, Jacob’s ladder, wallflower, love-in-a-mist and rose of the borders, before the day of work once more began.