The Great Return

tray, seeking, but yet not knowing at all what I sought; bewildered now and again by circumstances which seemed to me wholly inexplicable; devoid, not

ght; though his manner on this and on all other occasions was highly offensive. This is enough of the personal process, as I

ment, and as soon as she had taken up her usual place on the pavement by the churchyard, with her ducks and eggs and a few very early potatoes, she began to tell her neighbours about her having heard the sound of a great bell. The good women on each side smiled at one another behind Mrs. Parry’s back, for one had to b

o the amazement of the two women. “I can hear a bell as well

n all but stone deaf for twenty years — the defect had always been in her family — could suddenly hear on this June morning as well as anybody el

e music coming out of the earth,” and then something seemed to break in her head, and all the birds began to sing and make melody together, and the leaves of the poplars round the garden fluttered in the breeze that rose from the sea, a

” asked one. “It came sailing across the sea,” answered Mrs. Parry qui

a ship’s bell then, though I can’t make

n any ship, Mrs. Morg

o you think i

t queer.” And this explanation would no doubt have stood its ground, if it had not been for other experiences. Indeed, the local doctor who had treated Mrs. Parry for a dozen years, not for her deafness, which he took to be hopeless and beyond cure, but for a

an old obstruction in the aural passage, and I should quite expect this proc

another, men and women came and told the story of how they had listened in the early morning with thrilling hearts to the thrilling music of a bell that was like no bell ever heard before. And it seemed that many people in the town had be

had heard in the mist and one of them said he had seen something go by at a little distance from his boat. “It was all golden and

est him profoundly, but I found that he heard me with a good deal of indifference. And at this very point of the sailors’ stories I remember saying: “Now what do you make of that? Don’t you think it’s extremely c

een perpetrated on London during this autumn there was an instance of a great block of workmen’s dwellings in which the only person who heard the crash of a particular bomb falling was an old deaf woman, who had been fast asleep till the moment of the explosion. This

unded like “Clychau fawr, clychau fawr”— the great bells, the great bells — and his mother wondered what he was talking about. Of the crews of half a dozen trawlers that were swinging from side to side in the mist, not more than four men had any tale to tell. And so it was that for an hour or two the man who had heard nothing suspected his neighbour who had heard marvels of lyi

s them with laughter as very poor and fantastic inventions; fishermen, they will say, do not speak of “a song like heaven” or of “a glory about it.” And I dare say this would be a just enough criticism if I were reporting Eng

s, their consciousness that the things that were reported were of their ancient right and former custom. The comparison is not quite fair; but conceive Hardy’s old Durbe

hearth of winter nights, fifty, sixty, seventy years; ago; stories of the wonderful bell of Teilo Sant, that had sailed across the gl

eep lanes that climbed far hills. The sun went down to the mountain red with fire like a burnt offering, the sky t