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… I found hidden villages where bees, the only things awake, boomed in eighty-foot lindens that overhung grey Norman churches; miraculous brooks diving under stone bridges built for heavier traffic than would ever vex them again; tithe barns larger than their churches, and an old smithy that cried out aloud how it had once been a hall of the Knights of the Temple… |
This is from ‘They’ in Traffics and Discoveries. The narrator describes a journey westwards across Sussex, in a passage full of Kipling’s delight in the idyllic countryside of old England. Later he happens on an ancient house, the home of a beautiful blind lady, where some can see and hear the ghosts of dead children. As he talks with her, his heart is rent by the memory of his own lost little daughter. |
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