He wandered about the neighborhood with insatiable
interest; sometimes, and often, lying on a hill-side and gazing at the
gray tower of the church; sometimes coming into the village clustered
round that same church, and looking at the old timber and plaster houses,
the same, except that the thatch had probably been often renewed, that
they used to be in his ancestor's days. In those old cottages still
dwelt the families, the ------s, the Prices, the Hopnorts, the Copleys,
that had dwelt there when America was a scattered progeny of infant
colonies; and in the churchyard were the graves of all the generations
since--including the dust of those who had seen his ancestor's face
before his departure.
The graves, outside the church walls indeed, bore no marks of this
antiquity; for it seems not to have been an early practice in England to
put stones over such graves; and where it has been done, the climate
causes the inscriptions soon to become obliterated and unintelligible.
But, within the church, there were rich words of the personages and times
with whom Middleton's musings held so much converse.
But one of his greatest employments and pastimes was to ramble through
the grounds of Smithell's, making himself as well acquainted with its
wood paths, its glens, its woods, its venerable trees, as if he had been
bred up there from infancy.
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