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The maypole is not used as a maypole now, of course. There is nothing arty about the place, which is still agricultural. The pole, which is only a pole, has a weathercock on top of it, and at its foot, where one waits for the bus, grow two may-trees, one red and one white, which the Old Doctor and Mrs. Graves put there forty years ago when they were uncrowned kings of the village.

Behind the maypole there is Norry's forge, which has not been altered in the last hundred years at least and which looks like one of those very neat and restrained advertisement plates in big American magazines, the kind beneath which the copy begins "In olden days fine craftsmen worked under difficulties..." You never saw such ordered clutteredness, and when the fire is in full blast and he and his second eldest brother Jack (the Mycroft of the family) are at work there in their goatskin aprons, clinking and clanking on the largest anvil, which rings like a firebell all over the village, the effect, if they will forgive me for saying so, is quite extraordinarily reminiscent of the diamond mine scene in Snow White. This is especially true on a dark and windy autumn day, when the black clouds pile up over the low roof of red pantiles and there seems to be no horizon.