church.  Dreamthorp can boast of a respectable antiquity, and in it the trade of the builder is unknown.  Ever since I remember, not a single stone has been laid on the top of another.  The castle, inhabited now by jackdaws and starlings, is old; the chapel which adjoins it is older still; and the lake behind both, and in which their shadows sleep, is, I suppose, as old as Adam.  A fountain in the market-place, all mouths and faces and curious arabesques,—­as dry, however, as the castle moat,—­has a tradition connected with it; and a great noble riding through the street one day several hundred years ago, was shot from a window by a man whom he had injured.  The death of this noble is the chief link which connects the place with authentic history.  The houses are old, and remote dates may yet be deciphered on the stones above the doors; the apple-trees are mossed and ancient; countless generations of sparrows have bred in the thatched roofs, and thereon have chirped out their lives.  In every room of the place men have been born, men have died.  On Dreamthorp centuries have fallen, and have left no more trace than have last winter’s snowflakes.  This commonplace sequence and flowing on of life is immeasurably affecting.  That winter morning when Charles lost his head in front of the banqueting-hall of his own palace, the icicles hung from the eaves of the houses here, and the clown kicked the snowballs from his clouted shoon, and thought but of his supper when, at three o’clock, the red sun set in the purple mist.  On that Sunday in June while Waterloo was going on, the gossips, after morning service, stood on the country roads discussing agricultural prospects, without the slightest suspicion that the day passing over their heads would be a famous one in the calendar.  Battles have been fought, kings have died, history has transacted itself; but, all unheeding and untouched, Dreamthorp has watched apple-trees redden, and wheat ripen, and smoked its pipe, and quaffed its mug of beer, and rejoiced over its new-born children, and with proper solemnity carried its dead to the churchyard.  As I gaze on the village of my adoption I think of many things very far removed, and seem to get closer to them.  The last setting sun that Shakspeare saw reddened the windows here, and struck warmly on the faces of the hinds coming home from the fields.  The mighty storm that raged while Cromwell lay a-dying made all the oak-woods groan round about here, and tore the thatch from the very roofs I gaze upon.  When I think of this, I can almost, so to speak, lay my hand on Shakspeare and on Cromwell.  These poor walls were contemporaries of both, and I find something affecting in the thought.  The mere soil is, of course, far older than either, but it does not touch one in the same way.  A wall is the creation of a human hand, the soil is not.