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dear lady! A touch of the eighteenth century about her, I always Said. Her language for
example ... Bluff vigour ...
 She died comparatively poor. These big weeds got into her garden. She was not one of these
gardening women, but she liked her garden in order  things growing where they were
planted and as they were planted  under control ... The way things grew was unexpected 
upset her ideas ... She didn t like the perpetual invasion of this young monster  at last she
began to fancy he was always gaping at her over her wall ... She didn t like his being nearly as
high as her house ... Jarred with her sense of proportion. Poor dear lady! I had hoped she
would last my time. It was the big cockchafers we had for a year or so that decided her. They
came from the giant larvae  nasty things as big as rats  in the valley turf ...
 And the ants no doubt weighed with her also.
 Since everything was upset and there was no peace and quietness anywhere now, she said
she thought she might just as well be at Monte Carlo as anywhere else. And she went.
 She played pretty boldly, I m told. Died in a hotel there. Very sad end... Exile... Not  not
what one considers meet... A natural leader of our English people... Uprooted. So I...
 Yet after all, harped the Vicar,  it comes to very little. A nuisance of course. Children cannot
run about so freely as they used to do, what with ant bites and so forth. Perhaps it s as well ...
There used to be talk  as though this stuff would revolutionise every-thing ... But there is
something that defies all these forces of the New ... I don t know of course. I m not one of your
modern philosophers  explain everything with ether and atoms. Evolution. Rubbish like that.
What I mean is something the  Ologies don t include. Matter of reason  not understanding.
Ripe wisdom. Human nature. Aere perennius. ... Call it what you will.
And so at last it came to the last time.
The Vicar had no intimation of what lay so close upon him. He did his customary walk, over by
Farthing Down, as he had done it for more than a score of years, and so to the place whence
he would watch young Caddies. He did the rise over by the chalk-pit crest a little puffily  he
had long since lost the Muscular Christian stride of early days; but Caddies was not at his work,
and then, as he skirted the thicket of giant bracken that was beginning to obscure and
overshadow the Hanger, he came upon the monster s huge form seated on the hill  brooding
as it were upon the world. Caddies knees were drawn up, his cheek was on his hand, his head
a little aslant. He sat with his shoulder towards the Vicar, so that those perplexed eyes could
not be seen. He must have been thinking very intently  at any rate he was sitting very still ...
He never turned round. He never knew that the Vicar, who had played so large a part in
shaping his life, looked then at him for the very last of innumerable times  did not know even
that he was there. (So it is so many partings happen.) The Vicar was struck at the time by the
fact that, after all, no one on earth had the slightest idea of what this great monster thought
about when he saw fit to rest from his labours. But he was too indolent to follow up that new
theme that day; he fell back from its suggestion into his older grooves of thought.
 Aere-perennius, he whispered, walking slowly homeward by a path that no longer ran straight
athwart the turf after its former fashion, but wound circuitously to avoid new sprung tussocks of
giant grass.  No! nothing is changed. Dimensions are nothing. The simple round, the common
way  
And that night, quite painlessly, and all unknowing, he himself went the common way  out of
this Mystery of Change he had spent his life in denying.
They buried him in the churchyard of Cheasing Eyebright, near to the largest yew, and the
modest tombstone bearing his epitaph  it ended with: Ut in Principio, nunc est et semper 
was almost immediately hidden from the eye of man by a spread of giant, grey tasselled grass
too stout for scythe or sheep, that came sweeping like a fog over the village out of the
germinating moisture of the valley meadows in which the Food of the Gods had been working.
Book III
The Harvest of the Food
Chapter the First.
The Altered World.
I.
Change played in its new fashion with the world for twenty years. To most men the new things
came little by little and day by day, remarkably enough, but not so abruptly as to overwhelm.
But to one man at least the full accumulation of those two decades of the Food s work was to
be revealed suddenly and amazingly in one day. For our purpose it is convenient to take him
for that one day and to tell something of the things he saw. This man was a convict, a prisoner
for life  his crime is no concern of ours  whom the law saw fit to pardon after twenty years.
One summer morning this poor wretch, who had left the world a young man of three-and-
twenty, found himself thrust out again from the grey simplicity of toil and discipline, that had
become his life, into a dazzling freedom. They had put unaccustomed clothes upon him; his
hair had been growing for some weeks, and he had parted it now for some days, and there he [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]