And lads who were taking their sweethearts for a row on the Dapple would look at them with unseeing eyes, while the maidens gazed into the distance and trailed their hands absently in the water. Even the smithy, with its group of loungers at its open door, watching the swing and fall of the smith’s hammer and the lurid red light illuminating his face, might have been no more than a tent at a fair where holiday makers were watching a lion tamer or the feats of a professional strong man; for at that desultory hour the play of muscles, the bending of resisting things to a human will, the taming
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