On one of a milliard spinning spheres, and perhaps on one alone, a small bright cone of consciousness thrusts its few inches above the vast rubble of Dark and Void. It has endured for but a moment in the cosmic scale, but that moment is the history of life, and for ourselves it is as full of matter, and as unimaginably long, as for a sentient atom would be a moment of ours, who, standing midway between these immensities, and compounding them, stars and atoms, into one metaphysical brew, make our small doomed selves the measure of all things. In Marden Fee the clock of our century records a new quarter; and Time, in that fraction of a moment, has been busy at his work: graving new lines on the faces of men and women, writing his story beat by beat in their hearts, and bringing to birth, for an extension of the chronicle, new souls, new worlds, a living palimpsest. Man too, in whom the wolf ravings and the peacock struts, is more of darkness than of light; but in his apprehension of time he cannot but excel his brother beasts; and his memories, though brief, are at least more enduring than theirs. In this, and perhaps in a certain cunning, Cowman Shellett, for example, differs from the cattle he has care of. A jest will make him slowly grin, if it be broad and gross enough; a bit of horseplay may even make him laugh aloud; and the proximity of his wife, Tisha, may rouse his appetite at any season, and will unless another appetite happen to distract him. In these activities he differs conspicuously from the beasts of the field. He is now in his fifty-eighth year: cadaverous, hungry-eyed, and habitually stooping. No greater contrast to him can be imagined than his host at this moment, for Mr Bailey is now a hale old man, white-haired, genially self-important, comfortably rotund, yet with a look, sometimes, of wistful expectancy in his eye. He has never thought very highly of his son-in-law, and often wishes he could be fonder of his numerous grandchildren; but neighbourly is neighbourly, as they say in Marden Fee, and Shellett is an honest fellow and has made an honest woman of Tisha: an honest woman and a very weary woman, hard put to it to keep a vestige of her handsomeness and a spark of her former good temper. Seth Shellett, her eldest, is here now, taking his mug of ale with the rest. (He is Squire Marden’s gamekeeper, and though Tisha rejoices in his good fortune, she often wishes he were back at home in her overcrowded cottage instead of at Maiden Holt.) Old Mykelborne is here, a venerable white-bearded figure still ready to invoke the authority of Postle Paul. But brisk Farmer Broome is dead these many years; Roger Peakod was taken by the press gang on his nineteenth birthday and has not been seen since; and Gipsy Noke, now a substantial patriarch, comes to this tavern no more, having, with his flocks and herds, his sons and daughter, and his wife Jenny, established himself firmly in the valley region called Nightingale Roughs, which lies on the further side of Glatting Wood and well beyond the parish border. Noke of Roughs, indeed, is so prosperous, so remote in spirit from his former neighbours, that he has become already something of a legend; and the story of how he was once rough-handled for taking Jenny Mykelborne to bed before he had taken her to church, is one that gets little credit from the younger men. And it makes the improbable boast no easier to swallow that Cowman Shellett, when loquacious in drink, will vouch for the truth of it, and add how he himself, with more impunity, got his mistus with young Seth a full fi’ month afore the wedden. In his younger days he formed the habit of talking about it. ‘Ay neighbours,’ he would say, ‘I tuk un to the rutten-plain a full fi’ month afore, and got my Seth.’ ‘Ah,’ say the youngsters, ‘you was a countable good wencher them times, Tahm.’ ‘So I was,’ says Tom, grinning bashfully into his beer-mug. ‘And naun so slow these days, tellee.’ In such talk, less by Tom Shellett’s design than by happy chance, was born years ago a myth highly congenial to his self-esteem. And today that myth flourishes.