'
'There does seem here and there,' he said, 'some sign of improvement.
I see the paring plough at work on one field and another.'
'Swiftly goes the age, and slowly crawls improvement. The greater
part of that land will be only broken up to be exhausted by corn-crop
after corn-crop, till it can bear no more, and the very manure which
is drawn home from it in the shape of a few turnips will be wasted by
every rain of heaven, and the straw probably used to mend bad places
in the road with; while the land returns to twenty years of worse
sterility than ever; on the ground that -
'"Veather did zo, and gramfer did zo, and why shouldn't Jan do the
zame?"' * * * *
'But here is Morte below us. "The little grey church on the windy
shore," which once belonged to William de Tracy, one of your friend
Thomas a Becket's murderers. If you wish to vent your wrath against
those who cut off your favourite Saxon hero, there is a tomb in the
church which bears De Tracy's name; over which rival Dryasdusts
contend fiercely with paper-arrows: the one party asserting that he
became a priest, and died here in the wilderness; the others that the
tomb is of later date, that he fled hence to Italy, under favour of a
certain easy-going Bishop of Exeter, and died penitent and duly
shriven, according to the attestations of a certain or uncertain
Bishop of Cosenza.
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