Bill Nighy

The dogs are asleep and the saddle horses, Dombey and Trey, can be heard in their stalls across the dirt road beyond the orchard.

The rain is gentle and needed, but not needed with any desperation.

The water tables are equitable, the nearby river is plentiful, the gardens and orchards, it is at the turning of the season, are irrigated ideally.

Almost all the lights are out in the little village by the waterfall where the mill, so many years ago, used to produce gingham.

The granite walls of the mill still stand on the banks of the broad river, and the mill owner's house with its four Corinthian columns still crowns the only hill in town.

You might think of it as a sleepy village out of touch with a changing world,

But in the weekly newspaper, unidentified flying objects are reported with great frequency.

They are reported not only by housewives hanging out their clothes and by sportsmen hunting squirrels, but they have been seen by substantial members of the population such as the vice president of the bank and the wife of the chief of police.

Walking through the village from north to south, you were bound to notice the number of dogs, and that they were all high-spirited, and that they were, without exception, mongrels.

But mongrels with the marked characteristics of their mixed parentage and breeding.

You might see a smooth-haired poodle, an airedale with very short legs, or a dog that seemed to begin as a collie and ended as a Great Dane.

These mixtures of blood, this newness of blood, you might say, had made them a highly spirited pack and they hurried through the empty streets late, it seemed, for some important meal, assignation or meeting.

Quite unfamiliar with the loneliness from which some of the population seemed to suffer, the town was named Janice after the mill owner's first wife.

One of the most extraordinary things about the village and its place in history was that it presented no fast food franchises of any sort.

This was very unusual at the time and would lead one to imagine that the village suffered from some sort of affliction, such as a great poverty or a lack of adventure among its people.

But it was simply an error on the part of those computers on whose authority the sites to fast food franchises are chosen.

Another historical peculiarity of the place was the fact that its large mansions, those relics of another time, had not been reconstructed to serve as nursing homes for that vast population of the comatose and the dying who were kept alive unconscionably through trailblazing medical invention.

At the north end of the town was Beazley's Pond, a deep body of water shaped like a bent arm with heavily forested shores.

Here were water and greenery, and if one were a 19th century painter, one would put into the foreground a lovely woman on a mule, bent a little over the child she held and accompanied by a man with a staff.

This would enable the artist to label the painting Flight into Egypt, although all he had meant to commemorate was his bewildering pleasure in a fine landscape on a summer's day.