VIII
On our way back we stopped at a little country church, so
peaceful, so very peaceful, in the evening light, where it stood,
withdrawn from the highway, Norman and Gothic without, and within
all so sweet and bare and clean, that we could not believe in the
old ecclesiasticism which persecuted the Puritans into the exile
whither they carried the persecuting spirit with them. A pretty
child, a little girl, opened the churchyard gate and held it for
us to pass, and her gentleness made me the more question the
history of those dreadful days in the past. When I saw a young
lady, in the modern dress which I had so often lost my heart to
at the Church Parade in Hyde Park, going up a leafy lane, toward
the vicarage, from having been for tennis and afternoon tea at
some pleasant home in the neighborhood, I denied the atrocious
facts altogether. She had such a very charming hat on.
The suburbs of Great Grimsby, after you reach them through that
zone of bad smell, are rather attractive, and you get into long
clean streets of small stone houses, like those of Plymouth or
Southampton, and presently you reach the Humber, which is full of
the steamers and sail, both fishing and deep sea, of the
prosperous port, with great booms of sawlogs from Norway, half
filling the channel, and with a fringe of tall chimneys from the
sawmills along the shores.
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