“It hath ever been understood,” said a
burly man, who carried his head humorously and obstinately
a little on one side—I think he was Ben
Jonson—“It hath ever been understood,
consule Jacobo, under our King James and her late
Majesty, that such good and hearty customs were fallen
sick, and like to pass from the world. This grey
beard most surely was no lustier when I knew him than
now.”
And I also thought I heard a green-clad man, like
Robin Hood, say in some mixed Norman French, “But
I saw the man dying.”
“I have felt like this a long time,” said
Father Christmas, in his feeble way again.
Mr. Charles Dickens suddenly leant across to him.
“Since when?” he asked. “Since
you were born?”
“Yes,” said the old man, and sank shaking
into a chair.
“I have been always dying.”
Mr. Dickens took off his hat with a flourish like
a man calling a mob to rise.
“I understand it now,” he cried, “you
will never die.”
The Ballade of a Strange Town
My friend and I, in fooling about Flanders, fell into
a fixed affection for the town of Mechlin or Malines.
Our rest there was so restful that we almost felt
it as a home, and hardly strayed out of it.
We sat day after day in the market-place, under little
trees growing in wooden tubs, and looked up at the
noble converging lines of the Cathedral tower, from
which the three riders from Ghent, in the poem, heard
the bell which told them they were not too late.
But we took as much pleasure in the people, in the
little boys with open, flat Flemish faces and fur
collars round their necks, making them look like burgomasters;
or the women, whose prim, oval faces, hair strained
tightly off the temples, and mouths at once hard,
meek, and humorous, exactly reproduced the late mediaeval
faces in Memling and Van Eyck.
But one afternoon, as it happened, my friend rose
from under his little tree, and pointing to a sort
of toy train that was puffing smoke in one corner
of the clear square, suggested that we should go by
it. We got into the little train, which was meant
really to take the peasants and their vegetables to
and fro from their fields beyond the town, and the
official came round to give us tickets. We asked
him what place we should get to if we paid fivepence.
The Belgians are not a romantic people, and he asked
us (with a lamentable mixture of Flemish coarseness
and French rationalism) where we wanted to go.
We explained that we wanted to go to fairyland, and
the only question was whether we could get there for
fivepence. At last, after a great deal of international
misunderstanding (for he spoke French in the Flemish
and we in the English manner), he told us that fivepence
would take us to a place which I have never seen written
down, but which when spoken sounded like the word
“Waterloo” pronounced by an intoxicated
patriot; I think it was Waerlowe.
