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.

226

The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth