The noise of conversation was high. Two notable divines. The Reverend John Evans and the Reverend Northrop Frye, were hard at it; Dr. Evans defending the doctrine of salvation through works—the works one could grind out of others—while Dr. Frye was urging salvation through the refiner’s fire of an exacting criticism of Holy Writ. A conversation on the fine points of agriculture was in progress between two obviously successful farmers across the table. Farmer Wells, who looked and dressed so much like John Bull that he might have stepped out of a drawing by Rowlandson, was arguing intently with Farmer Bissell—Capability Bissell he was called, because of his proven power of making two blades of grass grow where only one had grown before. Farmer Hume was fast asleep, his napkin covering his face. From beneath the table appeared a pair of glittering top boots, the property of Beau Baines who seemed to be resting there. Everybody was talking, except von Hohenheim, who glanced in every direction in an ecstasy of malicious pleasure, and Abu Ben Adhem, who was wrapped in his Mussulman’s robes and, being debarred by the Koran from drinking any port, was doing his best to eat all the dates on the table.

Everybody was talking, and everybody was behaving in a manner which I felt certain was characteristic of the eighteenth century. It wasn’t bad, except that several people scratched themselves more often than is usual in modern society, and those who wore wigs were apt to remove them from time to time in order to mop the perspiration from their close-cropped heads. There were quite a few gouty feet, and one or two wore spectacles of the Ben Franklin sort. Finch, needless to say, had a quizzing-glass. And of course there was the spitting.

Everybody spat, more or less, and now and then some of them—those from the Eastern parts of Europe—blew their noses in a fashion rarely seen nowadays except in lumber-camps. They had handkerchiefs, but their purpose appeared to be ornamental. It was the spitting which took my eye, figuratively and once or twice in actuality. The two American gentlemen, Stacey and Careless, were the great proficients in this art, and they spat, as was the polite custom of the day, over their left shoulders, rapidly and with a truly American force and efficiency.

It is hard to see someone spit without wishing to spit oneself. So I spat. And that was when my own great revelation struck me.

The Americans, as I said, spat briskly, with a positively musical brio. But when I spat I let my head fall forward, spread my feet, opened my mouth and allowed gravity to take its course. Then I ground the result into the carpet, slowly and, as it were, compassionately. And as I did this I knew what I was; what the eighteenth century meant to me; what 1774 revealed of me.

I had been aware, as I gazed about the table, of a heaviness in the atmosphere. The air seemed infected with a wooly greasiness; I had assumed that it was Dr. Abu Ben Adhem who, like so many Arabs, was said to rejoice in oil; but I now perceived it to be the smell of lanolin. Not lanolin as you buy it for medical use, but as it exists on the unwashed wool of sheep. Now I knew that this smell came from myself. I was clothed from neck to knee in a homespun smockfrock, and about my shoulders was a sheepskin of venerable age, presumably as a defence against rain, and mist, and the damp of the Welsh hills. Because, you see, I was a simple Welsh shepherd, marked and ingrained with the consequences of his calling. Upon my head was a hat of incalculable antiquity—such a hat as Adam may have worn after the Fall—and my feet were warmly but untidily cased in more wool and gigantic greased boots. My hands were covered in tar—the tar shepherds use against that ovine disease, the foot-rot. And I had just spat as Welsh shepherds always do spit, with minimal effort, but with a primordial splendour that had something religious about it. It was thus, doubtless, that the shepherds spat on that notable occasion which we celebrate here, when they abode in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks by night.

I was roused from these reflections by a voice I knew, in the very marrow of my bones, to be a voice of authority—the voice of my betters. It was Dr. John Evans, and to any Welshman of the rank in which I found myself, the voice of an Evans of Usbutty Ustwit is like the music of the harp.

“Pass the wine,” said he. But the words fell upon an uncomprehending ear, and he saw what the trouble was, pointed at the bottle, and spoke again. “Brennin y pen Bilyaid,” said he, and the cruel words of abuse had an age-old familiarity. I passed the drink at once, bowing, cringing and rubbing the mouth of the bottle with my greasy sleeve as I served the gentry.

But inwardly I was stricken. Though I seemed to comprehend through my vision what others were saying, or were likely to be saying, in English, not one English word could I utter. “Arunwaith, iechyd da, mae Rhaglaw” said I to Dr. Evans, bowing obsequiously. But he waved me aside, as he had every right to do—him a great man of education, and me the humble shepherd of the flocks. But I glared across the table at that villain von Hohenheim, and muttered a curse in Welsh that made him wriggle in his chair, mighty magician though he was.

But mine was not the worst case. What of the poor girl who had held such high hopes of the eighteenth century; who had talked so innocently of its “graciousness”; who had been certain that in that bygone time she would have been a mistress—and a scented, pampered mistress of royalty, no less.

She was padding about the table in her bare feet, a single ragged garment tied around her waist with a dirty string, her hair in filthy disarray and in her hand a bunch of what I took to be weeds. But it wasn’t weeds. “Won’t you buy my pretty lavender: two bunches a penny?” she sang in a voice coarsened with gin. But there was a glance in her eye that made it clear that lavender was not everything she sold. Some of the men waved her away; others gave her extremely small coins which they found in the depths of their pockets. Swinton of Swinton pinched her behind, but perfunctorily, as if it were a social duty rather than a pleasure. Nobody seemed to want to buy anything at all. My heart wept for her. But yet, I thought, even from Gin Lane in the eighteenth century the modern Ph.D. may arise. I took a deep breath of hope, and immediately wished I hadn’t, for the warmth of the room was working powerfully on my sheepskin.

At no time did the girl approach me, but as she passed my heart yearned toward her in pity; I hooked her to me with my crook and blessed her. “Bendith yr Arglwdd, putain-ferch” I cried, as tears started from my eyes. But she utterly mistook my words and my intention. “Not for twenty golden guineas,” she said, drawing her poor garment about her with pathetic pride.

I had little time to grieve over this misunderstanding, for I heard a familiar voice at my elbow. It was the College steward, putting his usual question at this time of the evening. “May I blow out the candles?” he asked, and I nodded assent. I knew that it would do nothing to untangle the complexities of the evening to address Miroslav Stojanovich in Welsh.

Slowly, ceremoniously he extinguished each candle; in that brief moment when all the candles are out, and the electric lights have not yet been put on I heard von Hohenheim’s chiming watch and, you must believe me, it was playing the same tune as before, but playing it backward, as Bach sometimes reversed a subject in counterpoint. And as it played I recovered myself, and the English tongue, completely. In the clean new light I turned to the girl beside me and said: “Will you have some coffee? Or perhaps a little cognac?” She too was quite herself—her 1974 self,—now. “Cognac every time,” said she.

As I went to fetch it for her, I found myself next to the unspeakable Dr. Theophrastus von Hohenheim. He smiled darkly at me, and flung me a quotation from Scripture: “Hearken to me, ye that follow after righteousness, ye that seek the Lord: look unto the rock whence ye are hewn, and to the hole of the pit whence ye are digged.”