had not developed to the point of asking questions, to which they demand replies, about themselves and the things which happened to them.It began in the time of Egbert and Canute, and earlier, in the days of the Druids, when they used peacefully to allow themselves to be burned by the score, enclosed in wicker idols, as natural offerings to placate the gods.The modern acceptance of things is only a somewhat attenuated remnant of the ancient idea.And this is what I have to deal with and understand.When I begin to do the things I am going to do, with the aid of your practical advice, if I have your approval, the people will be at first rather afraid of me.They will privately suspect I am mad.It will, also, not seem at all unlikely that an American should be of unreasoningly extravagant and flighty mind.Stornham, having long slumbered in remote peace through lack of railroad convenience, still regards America as almost of the character of wild rumour.Rosy was their one American, and she disappeared from their view so soon that she had not time to make any lasting impression.
I am asking myself how difficult, or how simple, it will be to quite understand these people, and to make them understand me.I greatly doubt its being simple.Layers and layers and layers of centuries must be far from easy to burrow through.They look simple, they do not know that they are not simple, but really they are not.Their point of view has been the point of view of the English peasant so many hundred years that an American point of view, which has had no more than a trifling century and a half to form itself in, may find its thews and sinews the less powerful of the two.
When I walk down the village street, faces appear at windows, and figures, stolidly, at doors.What I see is that, vaguely and remotely, American though I am, the fact that I am of `her ladyship's blood,' and that her ladyship--American though she is--has the claim on them of being the mother of the son of the owner of the land--stirs in them a feeling that I have a shadowy sort of relationship in the whole thing, and with regard to their bad roofs and bad chimneys, to their broken palings, and damp floors, to their comforts and discomforts,a sort of responsibility.That is the whole thing, and you--just you, father--will understand me when I say that Iactually like it.I might not like it if I were poor Rosy, but, being myself, I love it.There is something patriarchal in it which moves me.