“Isn’t she a beauty?”

“Who? your grandmamma?” I returned.

She gave me a little push, her face glowing with fun.  But I did not expect she would take her revenge as she did.  “Yes, of course,” she answered, quite gravely.  “Isn’t she a beauty?”

And then, seeing that she had put me hors de combat, she burst into loud laughter, and, opening the hall-door for me, let me go without another word.

I went home very quietly, and, as I said, stepping with curious care—­of which, of course, I did not think at the time—­over the yellow and brown leaves that lay in the middle of the road.

CHAPTER VII.

The bishop’s basin.

I went home very quietly, as I say, thinking about the strange elements that not only combine to make life, but must be combined in our idea of life, before we can form a true theory about it.  Now-a-days, the vulgar notion of what is life-like in any annals is to be realised by sternly excluding everything but the commonplace; and the means, at least, are often attained, with this much of the end as well—­that the appearance life bears to vulgar minds is represented with a wonderful degree of success.  But I believe that this is, at least, quite as unreal a mode of representing life as the other extreme, wherein the unlikely, the romantic, and the uncommon predominate.  I doubt whether there is a single history—­if one could only get at the whole of it—­in which there is not a considerable admixture of the unlikely become fact, including a few strange coincidences; of the uncommon, which, although striking at first, has grown common from familiarity with its presence as our own; with even, at least, some one more or less rosy touch of what we call the romantic.  My own conviction is, that the poetry is far the deepest in us, and that the prose is only broken-down poetry; and likewise that to this our lives correspond.  The poetic region is the true one, and just, therefore, the incredible one to the lower order of mind; for although every mind is capable of the truth, or rather capable of becoming capable of the truth, there may lie ages between its capacity and the truth.  As you will hear some people read poetry so that no mortal could tell it was poetry, so do some people read their own lives and those of others.

I fell into these reflections from comparing in my own mind my former experiences in visiting my parishioners with those of that day.  True, I had never sat down to talk with one of them without finding that that man or that woman had actually a history, the most marvellous and important fact to a human being; nay, I had found something more or less remarkable in every one of their histories, so that I was more than barely interested in each of them.  And as I made more acquaintance with them, (for I had not been in the position, or the disposition either, before