Le serpent de l'Essex

It is how they'd have us, said Martha. It's not the function of the wage-slave to think. The girls at Bryant and May, the boys down in the quarries : d'you think they've time to think, to plot, to revolutionise ? That's the great crime : that no-one need be put in chains when their own minds are shackles enough. Once, I thought we were no better than horses tied to the plough, but it's so much worse - we're only moving parts in their machinery - just the bolts on the wheel, the axle turning round and round !

I've always said there are no mysteries, only things we don't yet know, but lately, I've thought not even knowledge takes all strangeness from the world.

You know, I always thought that was the great benefit of being religious : get the guilt over and done with, and move on to another sin.

- Well then, he said.
- What are you doing here ?
- I am not sure. Liberty, I suppose. I lived so long under constraints. You wonder why I grub about in the mud - it's what I remember from childhood. Barely ever wearing shoes - picking gorsefor cordial, watching the ponds boiling with frogs. And then, there was Mickael, and he was - civilised. He would pave over every bit of woodland, have every sparrow mounted on a plinth. And he had me mounted on a plinth. My waist pinched, my hair burned into curls, the colour on my face painted out, then painted in again. And now, I'm free to sink back into the earth if I like - to let myself grow over with moss and lichen. Perhaps you're appalled to think we're no higher than the animals - or at least, if we are, only one rung further up the ladder. But no, no - it has given me liberty. No other animal abides by rules - why then must we ?

- I think it's a shame, that's all.
- A shame !
- Yes - a shame. That in the modern age a man could impoverish his intellect enough to satisfy himself with myth and legend - could be content to turn his back to the world and bury himself in ideas which even your father must have thought outdated ! Nothing is more important than to use your mind to its last degree !
- I've turned my back on nothing - I have done the reverse. Do you think everything can be accounted for by equations and soil deposits ? I am looking up, not down.
There again was another of those little alterations in the air, as if the pressure had dropped, and a storm was coming : each was aware of having grown angry with the other, uncertain why.
- You certainly don't seem to be looking outward - I know that at least !
Cora found herself braced against the arms of her chair, wanting to be a little unkind :
- What do you know of England now, of how the roads are laid, and where they're going - of places in the city where children have never seen the Thames - never seen a patch of grass. How content you must be, reciting your psalms to the air, and coming home to a pretty wife and books that left the press three hundred years ago !
It was unjust, she knew; she faltered a little, warning neither to retreat nor press on.

Sometimes I think I sold my soul, so that I could live as I must. Oh, I don't mean without morals or conscience - I only mean with freedom to think the thoughts that come, to send them where I want them to go, not to let them run along tracks someone else set, leading only this way or that ...

Sometimes I think I sold my soul, so that I could live as I must. Oh, I don't mean without morals or conscience - I only mean with freedom to think the thoughts that come, to send them where I want them to go, not to let them run along tracks someone else set, leading only this way or that ...

The point is not what I see, but what I feel; I cannot see the ether, yet I feel it enter and depart, and depend upon it. I feel that something is coming; sooner or later, my words be marked. It has been before, as weel you know, and it will come again, if not in my lifetime in yours, or in your children's, or in your children's children's, and so I will gird my loins up, Parson, and if I might make bold a moment, I would recommend that you do similar.