Richard Jefferies (continued 2)

Up the blade of grass here a tiny white-shelled snail has crawled, feeling in its dull, dim way that evening is approaching. The coils of the little shell are exquisitely turned—the workmanship is perfect; the creature within, there can be no question, is equally perfect in its way and finds a joy in the plants on which it feeds. On the ground below, hidden among the fibres near the roots of the grass, lies another tiny shell; but it is empty, the life that once animated it has fled—whither? Presently the falling dew will condense upon it, and at the opening one round drop will stand; after awhile to add its mite to the ceaseless flow of the fountain. Could any system of notation ever express the number of these creatures that have existed in the past? If time is measured by the duration of life, reckoned by their short spans eternity upon eternity has gone by. To me the greatest marvel is the countless, the infinite number of the organisms that have existed, each with its senses and feelings, whose bodies now help to build up the solid crust of the earth. These tiny shells have had millions of ancestors: Nature seems never weary of repeating the same model.

In the osier-bed the brook-sparrow chatters; there, too, the first pollard willow stands, or rather leans, hollow and aged, across the water. This tree is the outpost of a thousand others that line the banks of the stream for mile after mile yonder down in the valley. How quickly this little fountain grows into a streamlet and then to a considerable brook!—without apparently receiving the waters of any feeders. In the first half-mile it swells sufficiently, if bayed up properly, to drive a mill—as, indeed, many of the springs issuing from these coombes do just below the mouth. In little more than a mile, measuring by its windings, it becomes broad enough to require some effort to leap it, and then deepens into a fair-sized brook.

The rapidity of the increase is accounted for by the fact that every field it passes whose surface inclines towards it is a watershed from which an unseen but considerable drainage takes place. When no brook passes through the fields the water stands and soaks downwards, or evaporates slowly: directly a ditch is opened it fills, and the effect of a stream is not only to collect water till then unseen, but to preserve it from evaporation or disappearance into the subsoil. Probably, if it were possible to start an artificial stream in many places, after a while it would almost keep itself going at times, provided, of course, that the bottom was not porous. Below the mouth of the coombe the water has worn itself a channel quite six feet deep in the chalk—washing out the flints that now lie at the bottom. Hawthorn bushes bend over it, and great briars uncut since their first shoot was put forth; the elder, too, grows luxuriously, whose white flowers, emitting a rich but sickly odour, the village girls still gather to make elder-water to remove freckles. These bushes hide the deep gully in which the current winds its way—so deep that no cattle can get down to drink.

A cottage stands on the very edge a little further along; the residents do not dip their water from the running stream, but have made a small pool beside it, with which no doubt it communicates, for the pool, or ‘dipping-place,’ is ever full of cool, clear, limpid water. The plan is not without its advantages, because the stream itself, though usually clear, is liable to become foul from various causes—such as a flood, when it is white from suspended chalk, or from cattle higher up above the gully coming to slake their thirst and stirring the sandy grit of the bottom. But the little pool long remains clear, because the water from the stream to enter it has to strain itself through the narrow partition of chalky rubble.

So limpid is the current in general, that the idea of seeing trout presently when it shall widen out naturally arises. But before then the soil changes, and clay and loam spoil the clean, sandy, or gravelly bottom trout delight in. In one such stream hard by, however, the experiment of keeping trout has been tried, and with some success: it could be done without a doubt if it were not that after a short course all the streams upon this side of the downs enter the meadows, and immediately run over a mud bottom. With care, a few young fish were maintained in the upper waters, but it was only as an experiment; left to themselves they would speedily disappear, and of course no angling could be thought of.

On the opposite side of the range of hills, where they decline in height somewhat, but still roll on for a great distance, the contrary is the case. The springs that run in that direction pass over a soil that gives a good clear bottom, and gradually assume the character of rivers; narrow, indeed, and shallow, but clear, sweet, and beautiful. There, as you wander over the down, and push your way through one of those extensive nutwoods which grow on the hills, acres and acres of hazel bushes, suddenly you come to the edge of a steep cliff, falling all but perpendicularly, and lo! at the foot is a winding river, bordered by broad green meads dotted with roan-and-white cattle.

Here in the season the angler may be seen skilfully tempting the speckled trout. Across the meads a grove of elm and oak, and the dull red of old houses dimly seen between, and the low dark crenellated tower of a village church. Behind the downs rise again, their slopes in spring a mass of colour—green corn, squares of bright yellow mustard, bright crimson trifolium, and brown fallows.

Chapter Four.

The Village—The Washpool—Village Industries—The Belfry—Jackdaws—Village Chronicles.

A short distance below the cottagers’ ‘dipping-place’ just mentioned, the same stream, leaving the deep groove or gully, widens suddenly into a large clear pool, shaded by two tall fir trees and an equally tall poplar. The tops of these trees are nearly level with the plain above the verdant valley in which the stream flows, and, being side by side, the difference in the manner of their growth is strongly contrasted. The branches of the fir gracefully depend, as if weighted downwards by the burden of the heavy deep green fringe they carry—a fringe tipped with bullion in the spring, for the young shoots are of so light a green as to shade into a pale yellow. The branches of the poplar, on the contrary, point upwards—growing nearly vertically; so that the outline of the tree resembles the tip of an immensely exaggerated artist’s brush. This formation is ill adapted for nest-building, as it affords little or no surface to build on, and so the poplar is but seldom used by birds.

The pool beneath is approached by a broad track—it cannot be called road—trampled into innumerable small holes by the feet of flocks of sheep, driven down here from the hills for the periodical washing. At that time the roads are full of sheep day after day, all tending in the same direction; and the little wayside inns, and those of the village which closely adjoins the washpool, find a sudden increase of custom from the shepherds. There is no written law regulating the washing, but custom has fixed it as firmly as an Act of Parliament: each shepherd knows his day, and takes his turn, and no one attempts to interfere with the monopoly of the men who throw the sheep in. The right of wash here is upheld as sternly as if it were a bulwark of the Constitution.

Sometimes a landowner or a farmer, anxious to make improvements, tries to enclose the approach or to utilise the water in fertilising meadows, or in one way or another to introduce an innovation. He thinks perhaps that education, the spread of modern ideas, and the fact that labourers travel nowadays, have weakened the influence of tradition. He finds himself entirely mistaken: the men assemble and throw down the fence, or fill up the new channel that has been dug; and, the general sympathy of the parish being with them and the interest of the sheep-farmers behind them to back them up, they always carry the day, and old custom rules supreme.

The sheep greatly dislike water. The difficulty is to get them in; after the dip they get out fast enough. Only if driven by a strange dog, and unable to escape on account of a wall or enclosure, will they ever rush into a pond. If a sheep gets into a brook and cannot get out—his narrow feet sink deep into the mud—should he not be speedily relieved he will die, even though his head be above water, from chill and fright. Cattle, on the other hand, love to stand in water on a warm day.

In rubbing together and struggling with the shepherds and their assistants a good deal of wool is torn from the sheep and floats down the current. This is caught by a net stretched across below, and finally comes into the possession of one or two old women of the village, who seem to have a prescriptive right to it on payment of a small toll for beer-money. These women are also on the look-out during the year for such stray scraps of wool as they can pick up from the bushes beside the roads and lanes much travelled by sheep—also from the tall thistles and briars, where they have got through a gap. This wool is more or less stained by the weather and by particles of dust but it answers the purpose, which is the manufacture of mops.

The old-fashioned wool mop is still a necessary adjunct of the farmhouse, and especially the dairy, which has to be constantly ‘swilled’ out and mopped clean. With the ancient spinning-wheel they work up the wool thus gathered; and so, even at this late day, in odd nooks and corners, the wheel may now and then be found. The peculiar broad-headed nail which fastens the mop to the stout ashen ‘steale,’ or handle, is also made in the village. I spell ‘steale’ by conjecture, and according to pronunciation. It is used also of a rake: instead of a rake-handle they say rake-steale. Having made the mops, the women go round with them to the farmhouses of the district, knowing their regular customers—who prefer to buy of them, not only as a little help to the poor, but because the mops are really very strongly made.

In the meadows of the vale the waters of the same stream irrigate numerous scattered withy-beds, pollard willow trees, and tall willow poles growing thickly in the hedges by the brook. The most suitable of these poles are purchased from the farmers by the willow handicraftsmen of the village up here, to be split into thin flexible strips and plaited or woven into various articles. These strips are made into ladies’ workbaskets and endless knick-knacks. The flexibility of the willow is surprising when reduced to these narrow pieces, scarcely thicker than stout paper. This industry used to keep many hands employed. There were willow-looms in the village, and to show their dexterity the weavers sometimes made a shirt of willow—of course only as a curiosity. The development of straw weaving greatly interfered with this business; and now it is followed by a few only, who are chiefly engaged in preparing the raw material to go elsewhere.

From the ash woods on the slopes, and the copses, of the fields, large ash-poles are brought, which one or two old men in the place spend their time splitting up for ‘flakes’—a ‘flake’ being a frame of light wood, used after the manner of a hurdle to stop a gap, or pitched in a row to part a field into two. Hurdle-making is another industry; but of late years hurdles have been made on a large scale by master carpenters in the market towns, who employ several men, and undersell the village maker.

The wheelwright is perhaps the busiest man in the place; he not only makes and mends waggon and cart wheels, and the body of those vehicles, but does almost every other kind of carpentering. Sometimes he combines the trade of a builder with it—if he has a little capital—and puts up cottages, barns, sheds, etc, and his yard is strewn with timber. There is generally a mason, who goes about from farm to farm mending walls and pigsties, and all such odd jobs, working for his own hand.

The blacksmith of course is there—sometimes more than one—usually with plenty to do; for modern agriculture uses three times as much machinery and ironwork as was formerly the case. At first the blacksmiths did not understand how to mend many of these new-fangled machines, but they have learned a good deal, though some of the pieces still have to be replaced from the implement factories if broken. Horses come trooping in to have new shoes put on. Sometimes a village blacksmith acquires a fame for shoeing horses which extends far beyond his forge, and gentlemen residing in the market towns send out their horses to him to be shod. He still uses a ground-ash sapling to hold the short chisel with which he cuts off the glowing iron on the anvil. He keeps bundles of the young, pliant ground-ash sticks, which twist easily and are peculiarly tough; and, taking one of these, with a few turns of his wrist winds it round the chisel so as to have a long handle. One advantage of the wood is that it ‘gives’ a little and does not jar when struck.

The tinker, notwithstanding his vagrant habits, is sometimes a man of substance, owning two or more small cottages, built out of his savings by the village mason—the materials perhaps carted for him free by a friendly fanner. When sober and steady, he has a capital trade: his hands are never idle. Milk-tins, pots, pans, etc, constantly need mending; he travels from door to door, and may be seen sitting on a stool in the cart-house in the farmyard, tinkering on his small portable anvil, with two or three cottagers’ children—sturdy, yellow-haired youngsters—intently watching the mystery of the craft.

In despite of machine-sewn boots and their cheapness, the village cobbler is still an institution, and has a considerable number of patrons. The labourers working in the fields need a boot that will keep out the damp, and for that purpose it must be hand-sewn: the cobbler, having lived among them all his life, understands what is wanted better than the artisan of the cities, and knows how to stud the soles with nails and cover toe and heel with plates till the huge boot is literally iron-clad. Even the children wear boots which for their size are equally heavy: many of the working farmers also send theirs to be repaired. The only thing to be remembered in dealing with a village cobbler is, if you want a pair of boots, to order them six months beforehand, or you will be disappointed. The business occupies him about as long as it takes a shipwright to build a ship.

Under the trees of the lane that connects one part of the village with another stands a wooden post once stout now decaying; and opposite it at some distance the remnants of a second. This was a rope-walk, but has long since fallen into disuse; the tendency of the age having for a long time been to centralise industry of all kinds. It is true that of late years many manufacturers have found it profitable to remove their workshops from cities into the country, the rent of premises being so much less, water to be got by sinking a well, less rates, and wages a little cheaper. They retain a shop and office in the cities, but have the work done miles away. But even this is distinctly associated with centralisation. The workmen are merely paid human machines; they do not labour for their own hands in their own little shops at home, or as the rope-maker slowly walked backwards here, twisting the hemp under the elms of the lane, afterwards, doubtless, to take the manufactured article himself to market and offer his wares for sale from a stand in the street.

The millwright used to be a busy man here and there in the villages, but the railways take the wheat to the steam mills of cities, and where the water-mills yet run, ironwork has supplanted wood. In some few places still the women and girls are employed making gloves of a coarse kind, doing the work at home in their cottages; but the occupation is now chiefly carried on nearer to the great business centres than this. Another extinct trade is that of the bell foundry. One village situate in the hills hard by was formerly celebrated for the church bells cast there, many of which may be found in far distant towers ringing to this day.

Near the edge of the hill, just above the washpool, stands the village church. Old and grey as it is, yet the usage of the pool by the shepherds dates from still earlier days. Like some of the farmhouses further up among the hills, the tower is built of flints set in cement, which in the passage of time has become almost as hard as the flint itself. The art of chipping flint to a face for the purpose of making lines or patterns in walls used to be carried to great perfection, and even old garden walls may be seen so ornamented.

The tower is large and tall, and the church a great one; or so it appears in comparison with the small population of the place. But it may be that when it was built there were more inhabitants; for some signs remain that here—as in many other such villages—the people have decreased in numbers: the population has shifted elsewhere. An adjacent parish lying just under the downs has now not more than fifty inhabitants; yet in the olden time a church stood there—long since dismantled: the ancient churchyard is an orchard, no one being permitted to dig or plough the ground.

Entering the tower by the narrow nail-studded door, it is not so easy to ascend the winding geometrical stone staircase, in the confined space and the darkness, for the arrow-slits are choked with cobwebs and the dust of years. A faint fluttering sound comes from above, as of wings beating the air in a confined space—it is the jackdaws in the belfry; just as the starlings and swallows in the huge old-fashioned chimneys make a similar murmuring noise before they settle. Passing a slit or two—the only means of marking the height which has been reached—and the dull tick of the old clock becomes audible: slow and accompanied with a peculiar grating vibration, as if the frame of the antique works had grown tremulous with age. The dial-plate outside is square, placed at an angle to the perpendicular lines of the tower: the gilding of the hour-marks has long since tarnished and worn away before the storms, and they are now barely distinguishable; and it is difficult to tell the precise time by the solitary pointer, there being no minute hand.

Past another slit, and the narrow stone steps—you must take care to keep close to the outer wall where they are widest, for they narrow to the central pillar—are scooped out by the passage of feet during the centuries; some, too, are broken, and others are slippery with something that rolls and gives under the foot. It is a number of little sticks and twigs which have fallen down from the jackdaws’ nests above: higher up the steps are literally covered with them, so that you have to kick them aside before you can conveniently ascend. These sticks are nearly all of the same size, brown and black from age and the loss of the sap, the bark remaining on. It is surprising how the birds contrive to find so many suitable to their purpose, searching about under the trees; for they do not break them off, but take those that have fallen.

The best place for finding these sticks—and those the rooks use—is where a tree has been felled or a thick hedge cut some months before. In cutting up the smaller branches into faggots the men necessarily frequently step on them, and so break off innumerable twigs too short to be tied up in the bundle. After they have finished faggoting, the women rake up the fragments for their cottage fires; and later on, as the spring advances, the birds come for the remaining twigs, of which great quantities are left. These they pick up from among the grass; and it is noticeable that they like twigs that are dead but not decayed: they do not care for them when green, and reject them when rotten. Have they discovered that green wood shrinks in drying, and that rotten wood is untrustworthy? Rooks, jackdaws, and pigeons find their building materials in this way, where trees or hedges have been cut; yet even then it must require some patience. They use also a great deal of material rearranged from the nests of last year—that is, rooks and jackdaws.

Stepping out at last into the belfry, be careful how you tread; for the flooring is worm-eaten, and here and there planks are loose: keep your foot, if possible, on the beams, which at least are fixed. It is a giddy height to fall from down to the stone pavement below, where the ringers stand. Their ropes are bound round with list or cloth, or some such thing, for a better grasp for the hand. High as it is to this the first floor, if you should attempt to ring one of these bells, and forget to let the rope slip quickly, it will jerk you almost to the ceiling: thus many a man has broken his bones close to the font where he was christened as a child.

Against the wall up here are iron clamps to strengthen the ancient fabric, settling somewhat in its latter days; and, opening the worm-eaten door of the clock-case—the key stands in it—you may study the works of the old clock for a full hour, if so it please you; for the clerk is away labouring in the field, and his aged wife, who produced the key of the church and pointed the nearest way across the meadow, has gone to the spring. The ancient building, standing lonely on the hill, is utterly deserted; the creak of the boards under foot or the grate of the rusty hinge sounds hollow and gloomy. But a streak of sunlight enters from the arrow-slit, a bee comes in through the larger open windows with a low inquiring buzz; there is a chattering of sparrows, the peculiar shrill screech of the swifts, and a ‘jack-jack-daw-jack-daw’-ing outside. The sweet scent of clover and of mown grass comes upon the light breeze—mayhap the laughter of haymakers passing through the churchyard underneath to their work, and idling by the way as haymakers can idle.

The name of the maker on the clock shows that it was constructed in a little market town a few miles distant a century ago, before industries were centralised and local life began to lose its individuality. There are sparrows’ nests on the wooden case over it, and it is stopped now and then by feathers getting into the works: it matters nothing here; Festina lente is the village motto, and time is little regarded. So, if you wish, take a rubbing, with heelball borrowed from the cobbler, of the inscriptions round the rims of the great bells; but be careful even then, for the ringers have left one carelessly tilted, and if the rope should slip, nineteen hundredweight of brazen metal may jam you against the framework.

The ringers are an independent body, rustics though they be—monopolists, not to be lightly ordered about, as many a vicar has found to his cost, having a silent belfry for his pains, and not a man to be got, either, from adjacent villages. It is about as easy to knock this solid tower over with a walking-stick as to change village customs. But if towards Christmas you should chance to say to the ringers that such and such a chime seemed rung pleasantly, be certain that you will hear it night after night coming with a throbbing joyfulness through the starlit air—every note of the peal rising clear and distinct at the exact moment of time, as if struck by machinery, yet with a quivering undertone that dwells on the ear after the wave of sound has gone. Then go out and walk in the garden or field, for it is a noble music; remember, too, that it is a music that has echoed from the hills hundreds and hundreds of years. Rude men as they are, these bellringers gratefully respond to the least appreciation of their art.

A few more turns about the spiral staircase, and then step out on the roof. The footstep is deadened by the dull coloured lead, oxidised from exposure. The tarnished weathercock above revolves so stiffly as to be heedless of the light air,—only facing a strong breeze. The irreverent jackdaws, now wheeling round at a safe distance, build in every coign of vantage, no matter how incongruous their intrusion may be—on the wings of an angel, behind the flowing robe of Saint Peter, or yonder in the niche, grey and lichen-grown, where stood the Virgin Mary before iconoclastic hands dashed her image to the ground. If a gargoyle be broken or choked so that no water comes through it, they will use it, but not otherwise. And they have nests, too, just on the ledge in the thickness of the wall, outside those belfry windows which are partially boarded up. Anywhere, in short, high up and well sheltered, suits the jackdaw.

When nesting time is over, jackdaws seem to leave the church and roost with the rooks; they use the tower much as the rooks do their hereditary group of trees at a distance from the wood they sleep in at other seasons. How came the jackdaw to make its nest on church towers in the first place? The bird has become so associated with churches that it is difficult to separate the two; yet it is certain that the bird preceded the building. Archaeologists tell us that stone buildings of any elevation, whether for religious purposes or defence, were not erected till a comparatively late date in this island. Now, the low huts of primeval peoples would hardly attract the jackdaw. It is the argument of those who believe in immutable and infallible instinct that the habits of birds, etc, are unchangeable: the bee building a cell to-day exactly as it built one centuries before our era. Have we not here, however, a modification of habit?

The jackdaw could not have originally built in tall stone buildings. Localising the question to this country, may we not almost fix the date when the jackdaw began to use the church, or the battlements of the tower, by marking the time of their first erection? The jackdaw was clever enough, and had reason sufficient to enable him to see how these high, isolated positions suited his peculiar habits; and I am bold enough to think that if the bee could be shown a better mode of building her comb, she would in time come to use it.

In the churchyard, not far from the foot of the tower where the jackdaws are so busy, stands a great square tomb, built of four slabs of stone on edge and a broader one laid on the top. The inscription is barely legible, worn away by the ironshod heels of generations of ploughboys kicking against it in their rude play, and where they have not chipped it, filled with lichen. The sexton says that this tomb in the olden days was used as the pay-table upon which the poor received their weekly dole. His father told him that he had himself stood there hungry, with the rest—not broken-down cripples and widows, but strong, hale men, waiting till the loaves were placed upon the broad slab, so that the living were fed literally over the grave of the dead.

The farmers met every now and then in the vestry and arranged how many men each would find work for—or rather partial work—so that the amount of relief might be apportioned. Men coming from a distance, or even from the next parish, were jealously excluded from settling, lest there should be more mouths to feed; if a family, on the other hand, could by any possibility be got rid of, it was exiled. There were more hands than work; now the case is precisely opposite. A grim witness, this old tomb, to a traditionary fragment in that history of the people which is now placed above a mere list of monarchs.

The oldest person in the village was a woman—as is often the case—reputed to be over a hundred: a tidy cottager, well tended, feeble in body, but brisk of tongue. She reckoned her own age by the thatch of the roof. It had been completely new thatched five times since she could recollect. The first time she was a great girl, grown up: her father had it thatched twice afterwards; her husband had it done the fourth time, and the fifth was three years ago. That made about a hundred years altogether.

The straw had lasted better lately, because there were now no great elm trees to drip, drip on it in wet weather. Cottagers are frequently really squatters, building on the waste land beside the highway close to the hedgerow, and consequently under the trees. This dripping on the roof is very bad for thatch. Straw is remarkably durable, even when exposed to the weather, if good in the first place and well laid on. It may be reckoned to last twenty years on an average, perhaps more. Five thatchings, then, made eighty years; add three years since the last thatching; and the old lady supposed she was seventeen or eighteen at the first—i.e. just a century since. But in all likelihood her recollections of the first thatching were confused and uncertain: she was perhaps eight or ten at that time, which would reduce her real age to a little over ninety. A great part of the village had twice been destroyed by fire since she could remember. These fires are or were singularly destructive in villages—the flames running from thatch to thatch, and, as they express it, ‘wrastling’ across the intervening spaces. A pain is said to ‘wrastle,’ or shoot and burn. Such fires are often caused by wood ashes from the hearth thrown on the dustheap while yet some embers contain sufficient heat to fire straw or rubbish.

The old woman’s memories were wholly of gossipy family history; I have often found that the very aged have not half so much to tell as those of about sixty to seventy years. The next oldest was a man about eighty; all he knew of history was that once on a time some traitor withdrew the flints from the muskets of the English troops, substituting pieces of wood, which, of course, would not ignite the powder, and thus they were beaten. Of date, place, or persons he had no knowledge. He ‘minded’ a great snowfall when he was a boy, and helping to drag the coaches out and making a firm road for them with hurdles. Once while grubbing a hedge near the road he found five shillings’ worth of pennies—the great old ‘coppers’—doubtless hidden by a thief. He could not buy so much with one of the new sort of coppers: liked them as King George made best.

An old lady of about seventy, living at the village inn, a very brisk body, seemed quite unable to understand what was meant by history, but could tell me a story if I liked. The story was a rambling narrative of an amour in some foreign country. The lady, to conceal a meeting with her paramour, which took place in the presence of her son, who was an imbecile (or, in her own words, had ‘no more sense than God gave him,’ a common country expression for a fool), went upstairs and rained raisins on him from the window. The son told the husband what had happened; but, asked to specify the time, could only fix it by, ‘When it rained raisins.’ This was supposed to be merely a fresh proof of his imbecility, and the lady escaped.

In this imperfect narrative is there not a distorted version of a chapter in the ‘Pentameron’? But how did it get into the mind of an illiterate old woman in an out-of-the-way village? Nothing yet of Waterloo, Culloden, Sedgmoor, or the civil war; but in the end an old man declared that King Charles had once slept in an old house just about to be pulled down. But then ‘King Charles’ slept according to local tradition, in most of the old houses in the country. However, I resolved to visit the place.

Tall yew hedges, reaching high overhead, thick and impervious, such as could only be produced in a hundred years of growth and countless clippings, enclosing a green pleasaunce, the grass uncut for many a year, weeds overrunning the smooth surface on which the bowls once rolled true to their bias. In the shelter of these hedges, upon the sunny side, you might walk in early spring when the east wind is harshest, without a breath penetrating to chill the blood, warm as within a cloak of sables, enjoying that peculiar genial feeling which is induced by sunshine at that period only, and which is somewhat akin to the sense of convalescence after a weary illness. Thus, sauntering to and fro, your footstep, returning on itself, passed the thrush sitting on her nest calm and confident.

No modern exotic evergreens ever attract our English birds like the true old English trees and shrubs. In the box and yew they love to build; spindly laurels and rhododendrons, with vacant draughty spaces underneath, they detest, avoiding them as much as possible. The common hawthorn hedge round a country garden shall contain three times as many nests, and be visited by five times as many birds, as the foreign evergreens, so costly to rear and so sure to be killed by the first old-fashioned frost.

The thrushes are singularly fond of the yew berry; it is of a sticky substance, sweet and not unpleasant. Holly berries, too, are eaten; and holly hedges, despite their prickly leaves, are favourites with garden birds. It would be possible, I think, to so plan out a garden as to attract almost every feathered creature.

A fine old filbert walk extends far away towards the orchard: the branches meet overhead. In autumn the fruit hangs thick; and what is more exquisite, when gathered from the bough and eaten, as all fruit should be, on the spot? I cannot understand why filbert walks are not planted by our modern capitalists, who make nothing of spending a thousand pounds in forcing-houses. I cannot help thinking that true taste consists in the selection of what is thoroughly characteristic of soil and climate. Those magnificent yew hedges, the filbert walk—all, in fact are to be levelled to make way for a garish stucco-fronted hunting-box, with staring red stables and every modern convenience. The sun-dial shaft is already heaved up and broken.

The old mansion was used as a grammar school for a great many years, but has been deserted for the last quarter of a century; and melancholy indeed are the silent hollow halls and dormitories. The whitewashed walls are yellow and green from damp, and covered in patches with saltpetre efflorescence; but they still bear the hasty inscriptions scrawled on them by boyish hands—some far back in the eighteenth century. The history of this little kingdom, with its dynasties of tutors and masters, its succeeding generations of joyous youth, might be gathered from these writings on the walls: sketches in burned stick or charcoal of extinct monarchs of the desk; rude doggerel verses; curious jingles of Latin and English words of which every great school has its specimens; dates of day and month when doubtless some daring expedition was carried out; and here and there (originally hidden behind furniture, we may suppose) bitter words of hatred against the injustice of ruling authorities—arbitrary ushers and cruel masters.

The casements, broken and blown in, have permitted all the winds of heaven to wreak their will; and the storms sweeping over from the adjacent downs beat as they choose upon the floor. Within an upper window—now obviously enough a wind-door—two swallows’ nests have been built against the wall close to the ceiling, and their pleasant twitter greets you as you enter; and so does the whistling of the starlings on the roof. But without there, below, the ring of the bricklayer’s trowel as he chips a brick has already given them notice to quit.

Chapter Five.

Village Architecture—The Cottage Preacher—Cottage Society—The Shepherd—Events of the Village Year.

Some few farmhouses, with cow-yards and rickyards attached, are planted in the midst of the village; and these have cottages occupied by the shepherds and carters, or other labourers, who remain at work for the same employer all the year. These cottages are perhaps the best in the place, larger and more commodious, with plenty of space round them, and fair-sized gardens close to the door. The system of hiring for a twelvemonth has been bitterly attacked; but as a matter of fact there can be no doubt that a man with a family is better off when settled in one spot with constant employment, and any number of odd jobs for his wife and children. The cottages not attached to any particular farm—belonging to various small owners—are generally much less convenient; they are huddled together, and the footpaths and rights of way frequently cross, and so lead to endless bickering.

Not the faintest trace of design can be found in the ground-plan of the village. All the odd nooks and corners seem to have been preferred for building sites; and even the steep side of the hill is dotted with cottages, with gardens at an angle of forty-five degrees or more, and therefore difficult to work. Here stands a group of elm trees; there half-a-dozen houses; next a cornfield thrusting a long narrow strip into the centre of the place; more cottages built with the back to the road, and the front door opening just the other way; a small meadow, a well, a deep lane, with banks built up of loose stone to prevent them slipping—only broad enough for one waggon to pass at once—and with cottages high above reached by steps; an open space where three more crooked lanes meet; a turnpike gate, and, of course, a beerhouse hard by it.

Each of these crooked lanes has its group of cottages and its own particular name; but all the lanes and roads passing through the village are known colloquially as ‘the street’. There is an individuality, so to say, in these by-ways, and in the irregular architecture of the houses, which does not exist in the straight rows, each cottage exactly alike, of the modern blocks in the neighbourhood of cities. And the inhabitants correspond with their dwelling in this respect—most of them, especially the elder folk, being ‘characters’ in their way.

Such old-fashioned cottages are practically built around the chimney; the chimney is the firm nucleus of solid masonry or brickwork about which the low walls of rubble are clustered. When such a cottage is burned down the chimney is nearly always the only thing that remains, and against the chimney it is built up again. Next in importance is the roof, which, rising from very low walls, really encloses half of the inhabitable space.

The one great desire of the cottager’s heart—after his garden—is plenty of sheds and outhouses in which to store wood, vegetables, and lumber of all kinds. This trait is quite forgotten as a rule by those who design ‘improved’ cottages for gentlemen anxious to see the labourers on their estates well lodged; and consequently the new buildings do not give so much satisfaction as might be expected. It is only natural that to a man whose possessions are limited, things like potatoes, logs of wood, chips, odds and ends should assume a value beyond the appreciation of the well-to-do. The point should be borne in mind by those who are endeavouring to give the labouring class better accommodation.

A cottage attached to a farmstead, which has been occupied by a steady man who has worked on the tenancy for the best part of his life, and possibly by his father before him, sometimes contains furniture of a superior kind. This has been purchased piece by piece in the course of years, some representing a a little legacy—cottagers who have a trifle of property are very proud of making wills—and some perhaps the last remaining relics of former prosperity. It is not at all uncommon to find men like this, whose forefathers no great while since held farms, and even owned them, but fell by degrees in the social scale, till at last their grandchildren work in the fields for wages. An old chair or cabinet which once stood in the farmhouse generations ago is still preserved.

Upon the shelf may be found a few books—a Bible, of course; hardly a cottager who can read is without his Bible—and among the rest an ancient volume of polemical theology, bound in leather; it dates back to the days of the fierce religious controversies which raged in the period which produced Cromwell. There is a rude engraving of the author for frontispiece, title in red letter, a tedious preface, and the text is plentifully bestrewn with Latin and Greek quotations. These add greatly to its value in the cottager’s eyes, for he still looks upon a knowledge of Latin as the essential of a ‘scholard.’ This book has evidently been handed down for many generations as a kind of heirloom, for on the blank leaves may be seen the names of the owners with the inevitable addition of ‘his’ or ‘her book.’ It is remarkable that literature of this sort should survive so long.

Even yet not a little of that spirit which led to the formation of so many contending sects in the seventeenth century lingers in the cottage. I have known men who seemed to reproduce in themselves the character of the close-cropped soldiers who prayed and fought by turns with such energy. They still read the Bible in its most literal sense, taking every word as addressed to them individually, and seriously trying to shape their lives in accordance with their convictions.

Such a man, who has been labouring in the hay-field all day, in the evening may be found exhorting a small but attentive congregation in a cottage hard by. Though he can but slowly wade through the book, letter by letter, word by word, he has caught the manner of the ancient writer, and expresses himself in an archaic style not without its effect. Narrow as the view must be which is unassisted by education and its broad sympathies, there is no mistaking the thorough earnestness of the cottage preacher. He believes what he says, and no persuasion, rhetoric, or force could move him one jot. His congregation approve his discourse with groans and various ejaculations. Men of this kind won Cromwell’s victories; but to-day they are mainly conspicuous for upright steadiness and irreproachable moral character, mingled with some surly independence. They are not ‘agitators’ in the current sense of the term; the local agents of labour associations seem chosen from quite a different class.

Pausing once to listen to such a man, who was preaching in a roadside cottage in a loud and excited manner, I found he was describing, in graphic if rude language, the procession of a martyr of the Inquisition to the stake. His imagination naturally led him to picture the circumstances as corresponding to the landscape of fields with which he had been from youth familiar. The executioners were dragging the victim bound along a footpath across the meadows to the pile which had been prepared for burning him. When they arrived at the first stile they halted, and held an argument with the prisoner, promising him his life and safety if he would recant, but he held to the faith.

Then they set out again, beating and torturing the sufferer along the path, the crowd hissing and reviling. At the next stile a similar scene took place—promise of pardon, and scornful refusal to recant, followed by more torture. Again, at the third and last stile, the victim was finally interrogated, and, still firmly clinging to his belief, was committed to the flames in the centre of the field. Doubtless there was some historic basis for the story; but the preacher made it quite his own by the vigour and life of the local colouring in which he clothed it, speaking of the green grass, the flowers, the innocent sheep, the faggots, and so on, bringing it home to the minds of his audience to whom faggots and grass and sheep were so well known. They worked themselves into a state of intense excitement as the narrative approached its climax, till a continuous moaning formed a deep undertone to the speaker’s voice. Such men are not paid, trained, or organised; they labour from goodwill in the cause.

Now and then a woman, too, may be found who lectures in the little cottage room where ten or fifteen, perhaps twenty, are packed almost to suffocation; or she prays aloud and the rest respond. Sometimes, no doubt, persons of little sincerity practise these things from pure vanity and the ambition of preaching—for there is ambition in cottage life as elsewhere; but the men and women I speak of are thoroughly in earnest.

Cottagers have their own social creed and customs. In their intercourse, one point which seems to be insisted upon particularly is a previous knowledge or acquaintance. The very people whose morals are known to be none of the strictest—and cottage morality is sometimes very far from severe—will refuse, and especially the women, to admit a strange girl, for instance, to sleep in their house for ample remuneration, even when introduced by really respectable persons. Servant-girls in the country where railways even now are few and far between often walk long distances to see mistresses in want of assistance, by appointment. They get tired; perhaps night approaches and then comes the difficulty, of lodging them if the house happens to be full. Cottagers make the greatest difficulty, unless by some chance it should be discovered that they met the girl’s uncle or cousin years ago.

To their friends and neighbours, on the contrary, they are often very kind, and ready to lend a helping hand. If they seldom sit down to a social gathering among themselves, it is because they see each other so constantly during the day, working in the same fields, and perhaps eating their luncheon a dozen together in the same outhouse. A visitor whom they know from the next village is ever welcome to what fare there is. On Sundays the younger men often set out to call on friends at a distance of several miles, remaining with them all day; they carry with them a few lettuces, or apples from the tree in the garden (according to the season), wrapped up in a coloured handkerchief, as a present.

Some of the older shepherds still wear the ancient blue smock-frock, crossed with white ‘facings’ like coarse lace; but the rising generation use the greatcoat of modern make, at which their forefathers would have laughed as utterly useless in the rain-storms that blow across the open hills. Among the elder men, too, may be found a few of the huge umbrellas of a former age, which when spread give as much shelter as a small tent. It is curious that they rarely use an umbrella in the field, even when simply standing about; but if they go a short journey along the highway, then they take it with them. The aged men sling these great umbrellas over the shoulder with a piece of tar-cord, just as a soldier slings his musket, and so have both hands free—one to stump along with a stout stick and the other to carry a flag basket. The stick is always too lengthy to walk with as men use it in cities, carrying it by the knob or handle; it is a staff rather than a stick, the upper end projecting six or eight inches above the hand.

If any labourers deserve to be paid well, it is the shepherds: upon their knowledge and fidelity the principal profit of a whole season depends on so many farms. On the bleak hills in lambing time the greatest care is necessary; and the fold, situated in a hollow if possible, with the down rising on the east or north, is built as it were of straw walls, thick and warm, which the sheep soon make hollow inside, and thus have a cave in which to nestle.

The shepherd has a distinct individuality, and is generally a much more observant man in his own sphere than the ordinary labourer. He knows every single field in the whole parish, what kind of weather best suits its soil, and can tell you without going within sight of a given farm pretty much what condition it will be found in. Knowledge of this character may seem trivial to those whose days are passed indoors; yet it is something to recollect all the endless fields in several square miles of country. As a student remembers for years the type and paper, the breadth of the margin—can see, as it were, before his eyes the bevel of the binding and hear again the rustle of the stiff leaves of some tall volume which he found in a forgotten corner of a library, and bent over with such delight, heedless of dust and ‘silver-fish’ and the gathered odour of years—so the shepherd recalls his books, the fields; for he, in the nature of things, has to linger over them and study every letter: sheep are slow.

When the hedges are grubbed and the grass grows where the hawthorn flowered, still the shepherd can point out to you where the trees stood—here an oak and here an ash. On the hills he has often little to do but ponder deeply, sitting on the turf of the slope, while the sheep graze in the hollow, waiting for hours as they eat their way. Therefore by degrees a habit of observation grows upon him—always in reference to his charge; and if he walks across the parish off duty he still cannot choose but notice how the crops are coming on, and where there is most ‘keep.’ The shepherd has been the last of all to abandon the old custom of long service. While the labourers are restless, there may still be found not a few instances of shepherds whose whole lives have been spent upon one farm. Thus, from the habit of observation and the lapse of years, they often become local authorities; and when a dispute of boundaries or water rights or right of way arises, the question is frequently finally decided by the evidence of such a man.

Every now and then a difficulty happens in reference to the old green lanes and bridle-tracks which once crossed the country in every direction, but get fewer in number year by year. Sometimes it is desired to enclose a section of such a track to round off an estate: sometimes a path has grown into a valuable thoroughfare through increase of population; and then the question comes, Who is to repair it? There is little or no documentary evidence to be found—nothing can be traced except through the memories of men; and so they come to the old shepherd, who has been stationary all his life, and remembers the condition of the lane fifty years since. He always liked to drive his sheep along it—first, because it saved the turnpike tolls; secondly, because they could graze on the short herbage and rest under the shade of the thick bushes. Even in the helplessness of his old age he is not without his use at the very last, and his word settles the matter.

In the winter twilight, after a fall of snow, it is difficult to find one’s way across the ploughed fields of the open plain, for it melts on the south of every furrow, leaving a white line where it has ledged on the northern side, till the furrows resemble an endless succession of waves of earth tipped with foam-flecks of snow. These are dazzling to the eyes, and there are few hedges or trees visible for guidance. Snow lingers sometimes for weeks on the northern slopes of the downs—where shallow dry dykes, used as landmarks, are filled with it: the dark mass of the hill is streaked like the black hull of a ship with its line of white paint. Field work during what the men call ‘the dark days afore Christmas’ is necessarily much restricted and they are driven to find some amusement for the long evenings—such as blowing out candles at the ale-house with muzzle-loader guns for wagers of liquor, the wind of the cap alone being sufficient for the purpose at a short distance.

The children never forget Saint Thomas’s Day, which ancient custom has consecrated to alms, and they wend their way from farmhouse to farmhouse throughout the parish; it is usual to keep to the parish, for some of the old local feeling still remains even in these cosmopolitan times. At Christmas sometimes the children sing carols, not with much success so far as melody goes, but otherwise successfully enough; for recollections of the past soften the hearts of the crustiest.

The young men for weeks previously have been practising for the mumming—a kind of rude drama requiring, it would seem, as much rehearsal beforehand as the plays at famous theatres. They dress in a fantastic manner, with masks and coloured ribbons; anything grotesque answers, for there is little attempt at dressing in character. They stroll round to each farmhouse in the parish, and enact the play in the kitchen or brewhouse; after which the whole company are refreshed with ale, and, receiving a few coins, go on to the next homestead. Mumming, however, has much deteriorated, even in the last fifteen or twenty years. On nights when the players were known to be coming, in addition to the farmer’s household and visitors at that season, the cottagers residing near used to assemble, so that there was quite an audience. Now it is a chance whether they come round or not.

A more popular pastime with the young men, and perhaps more profitable, is the formation of a brass band. They practise vigorously before Christmas, and sometimes attain considerable proficiency. At the proper season they visit the farms in the evening, and as the houses are far apart, so that only a few can be called at in the hours available after work, it takes them some time to perambulate the parish. So that for two or three weeks about the end of the old and the beginning of the new year, if one chances to be out at night, every now and then comes the unwonted note of a distant trumpet sounding over the fields. The custom has grown frequent of recent years, and these bands collect a good deal of money.

The ringers from the church come too, with their hand-bells and ring pleasant tunes—which, however, on bells are always plaintive—standing on the crisp frozen grass of the green before the window. They are well rewarded, for bells are great favourites with all country people.

What is more pleasant than the jingling of the tiny bells on the harness of the cart-horses? You may hear the team coming with a load of straw on the waggon three furlongs distant; then step out to the road, and watch the massive yet shapely creatures pull the heavy weight up the hill, their glossy quarters scarcely straining, but heads held high showing the noble neck, the hoofs planted with sturdy pride of strength, the polished brass of the harness glittering, and the bells merrily jingling! The carter, the thong of his whip nodding over his shoulder, walks by the shaft, his boy ahead by the leader, as proud of his team as the sailor of his craft: even the whip is not to be lightly come by, but is chosen carefully, bound about with rows of brazen rings; neither could you or I knot the whipcord on to his satisfaction.

For there is a certain art even in so small a thing, not to be learned without time and practice; and his pride in whip, harness, and team is surely preferable to the indifference of a stranger, caring for nothing but his money at the end of the week. The modern system—men coming one day and gone the next—leaves no room for the growth of such feelings, and the art and mystery of the craft loses its charm. The harness bells, too, are disappearing; hardly one team in twenty carries them now.

Those who labour in the fields seem to have far fewer holidays than the workers in towns. The latter issue from factory and warehouse at Easter, and rush gladly into the country: at Whitsuntide, too, they enjoy another recess. But the farmer and the labourer work on much the same, the closing of banks and factories in no way interfering with the tilling of the earth or the tending of cattle. In May the ploughboys still remember King Charles, and on what they call ‘shick-shack day’ search for oak-apples and the young leaves of the oak to place with a spray of ash in their hats or button-holes: the ash spray must have even leaves; an odd number is not correct. To wear these green emblems was thought imperative even within the last twenty years, and scarcely a labourer could be seen without them. The elder men would tell you—as if it had been a grave calamity—that they could recollect a year when the spring was so backward that not an oak leaf or oak-apple could be found by the most careful search for the purpose. The custom has fallen much into disuse lately: the carters, however, still attach the ash and oak leaves to the heads of their horses on this particular day.

Many village clubs or friendly societies meet in the spring, others in autumn. The day is sometimes fixed by the date of the ancient feast. The club and fête threaten, indeed, to supplant the feast altogether: the friendly society having been taken under the patronage of the higher ranks of residents. Here and there the feast-day, however (the day on which the church was dedicated), is still remembered, as in this village, where the elder fanners invite their friends and provide liberally for the occasion. Some of the gipsies still come with their stalls, and a little crowd assembles in the evening; but the glory of the true feast has departed.

The elder men, nevertheless, yet reckon by the feast-day; it is a fixed point in their calendar, which they construct every year, of local events. Such and such a fair is calculated to fall so many days after the first full moon in a particular month; and another fair falls so long after that. An old man will thus tell you the dates of every fair and feast in all the villages and little towns ten or fifteen miles round about. He quite ignores the modern system of reckoning time, going by the ancient ecclesiastical calendar and the moon. How deeply the ancient method must have impressed itself into the life of these people to still remain a kind of instinct at this late day!

The feasts are in some cases identified with certain well-recognised events in the calendar of nature; such as the ripening of cherries. It may be noticed that these, chancing thus to correspond pretty accurately on the average with the state of fruit, are kept up more vigorously than those which have no such aid to the memory. The Lady-Day fair and Michaelmas fair at the adjacent market town are the two best recognised holidays of the year. The fair is sometimes called ‘the mop,’ and stalwart girls will walk eight or nine miles rather than miss it. Maidservants in farmhouses always bargain for a holiday on fair day. These two main fairs are the Bank Holidays of rural life. It is curious to observe that the developments of the age, railroads and manufactories, have not touched the traditional prestige of these gatherings.

For instance, you may find a town which, by the incidence of the railroad and the springing up of great industries, has shot far ahead of the other sleepy little places; its population may treble itself, its trade be ten times as large, its attractions one would imagine incalculably greater. Nothing of the kind: its annual fair is not nearly so important an event to the village mind as that of an old-world slumberous place removed from the current of civilisation. This place, which is perhaps eight or nine miles by road, with no facilities of communication, has from time immemorial had a reputation for its fair. There, accordingly, the scattered rural population wends, making no account of distance and very little of weather: it is a country maxim that it always rains on fair day, and mostly thunders. There they assemble and enjoy themselves in the old-fashioned way, which consists in standing in the streets, buying ‘fairings’ for the girls, shooting for nuts, visiting all the shows, and so on.

To push one’s way through such a crowd is no simple matter; the countryman does not mean to be rude, but he has not the faintest conception that politeness demands a little yielding. He has to be shoved, and makes no objection. A city crowd is to a certain extent mobile—each recognises that he must give way. A country crowd stand stock still.

The thumping of drums, the blaring of trumpets, the tootling of pan-pipes in front of the shows, fill the air with a din which may be heard miles away, and seem to give the crowd intense pleasure—far more than the crack band of the Coldstream Guards could impart. Nor are they ever weary of gazing at the ‘pelican of the wilderness’ as the showman describes it—a mournful bird with draggled feathers standing by the entrance, a traditional part of his stock-in-trade. One attraction—perhaps the strongest—may be found in the fact that all the countryside is sure to be there. Each labourer or labouring woman will meet acquaintances from distant villages they have not seen or heard of for months. The rural gossip of half a county will be exchanged.

In the autumn after the harvest the gleaning is still an important time to the cottager, though nothing like it used to be. Reaping by machinery has made rapid inroads, and there is not nearly so much left behind as in former days. Yet half the women and children of the place go out and glean, but very few now bake at home; they have their bread from the baker, who comes round in the smallest hamlets. Possibly they had a more wholesome article in the olden time, when the wheat from their gleanings was ground at the village mill, and the flour made into bread at home. But the cunning of the mechanician has invaded the ancient customs; the very sheaves are now to be bound with wire by the same machine that reaps the corn. The next generation of country folk will hardly be able to understand the story of Ruth.

Chapter Six.

The Hamlet—Cottage Astrology—Ghost Lore—Herbs—The Waggon and its Crew—Stiles—The Trysting-Place—The Thatcher—Smugglers—Ague.

In most large rural parishes there is at least one small hamlet a mile or two distant from the main village. A few houses and cottages stand loosely scattered about the fields, no two of them together; so separated, indeed, by hedges, meadows, and copses as hardly to be called even a hamlet. The communication with the village is maintained by a long, winding narrow lane; but foot-passengers follow a shorter path across the fields, which in winter is sure to be ankle-deep in mud, by the gateways and stiles. The lane, at the same time, is crossed by a torrent, which may spread out to thirty yards wide in the hollow, shallow at the edges, but swift and deep in the middle.

If you wait a couple of hours it will subside, as the farmers lower down the brook pull up the hatches to let the flood pass. If you are in a hurry, you must climb up into the double mound beside the lane, and force your way along it between thorns and stoles, till you reach the channel through which the current is rushing. Across that an old tree trunk will probably lie, and by grasping a bough as a handrail it is possible to get over. But either way, by lane or footpath, you are sure to get what the country folk call ‘watchet’ i.e. wet. So that in winter the hamlet is practically isolated; for even in moderately good weather the lane is an inch or two deep in finely puddled adhesive mud. It is so shaded by elms and thick hedges that the dirt requires a length of time to dry, while the passage of hundreds of sheep tread and puddle it as only sheep can.

In summer the place is lovely; but then the inhabitants are one and all busy in the fields, and have little time for social intercourse or for travel into the next parish. It is ten to one if you knock at a cottage door you will find it locked, if indeed, you get so fax as that, a padlock being often on the garden gate. Being so isolated and apart from the current of modern life and manners, the hamlet folk retain something of the old-fashioned way of thinking. They do not believe their own superstitions with the implicit credence of yore, but they have not yet forgotten them. I have known women, for instance, who seriously asserted that such-and-such an aged person possessed a magic book which contained spells, and enabled her to foresee some kinds of coming events. The influence of the moon, so firm an article of faith among their forefathers, is not altogether overlooked; and they watch for the new moon carefully. If the crescent slopes, it will be wet weather. But if the horns of the crescent touch, or nearly, a vertical line, if it stands upright, then it will be fine. Something, too, must be allowed for the degree of sharpness of definition of the crescent, which reveals the state of the atmosphere. And the cottage astrologer has a whole table of the quarters, aspects, and so on, and lays much stress upon the day and hour of the change: indeed, it is a very complicated business to understand the moon.

The belief in the power of certain persons to ‘rule the planets’ is profound; so profound that neither ridicule, argument, nor authority will shake it in the minds of the hamlet girls, and it abides with them even when they are placed amidst the disenchanting realities of town life. When ‘in service,’ they buy dream-books, and consult fortune-tellers. The gipsies, in passing through the country, choose the by-ways and lanes; they thus avoid the tolls, have a chance of poaching, and find waste places to camp in, though possibly something of the true nomadic instinct may urge them to leave the beaten tracks and wander over lonely regions. They camp near the hamlet as they travel to and from the great sheep fairs which are held upon the hills, and perhaps stay a few days; and by them, to some extent, the belief in astrology and palmistry is strengthened.

The carters, who have to spend some considerable time every day with their horses in the stable, still retain a large repertory of legendary ghost lore. They know the exact spot in the lane where, at a certain hour of the night, the white spectre of a headless horse, rushing past with incredible swiftness and without the sound of a hoof, brushes the very coat of the traveller, and immediately disappears in the darkness. Another lane is haunted by a white woman, whose spectre crosses it in front of the spectator and then appears behind him. If he turns his head or looks on one side in order to escape the sight of the apparition, it instantly crosses to that side. Indeed, no matter in which direction he glances, the flickering figure floats before him, till, making a run for it, he passes beyond the limits of the haunted ground.

Near by the hollow, where the stream crosses the lane, is another spirit, but of an indefinite kind, that does not seem to take shape, but causes those who go past at the time when it has power to feel a mortal horror. A black dog may be seen in at least two different places: the wayfarer is suddenly surprised to find a gigantic animal of the deepest jet trotting by his side, or he sees a dark shadow detach itself from the bushes and take the form of a dog. The black dog has perhaps more vitality, and survives in more localities, than all the apparitions that in the olden times were sworn to by persons of the highest veracity. They may still be heard of in many a nook and corner. I have known people of the present day who were positive that there really was ‘something’ weird in the places where the dog was said to appear.

It is supposed that horses are peculiarly liable to take fright and run away, to shy, or stumble, and break their knees, at a certain spot in the road. They go very well till just on passing the fatal spot a sudden fear seizes them as if they could see something invisible to men; sometimes they bolt headlong, sometimes stand stock still and shiver; or throw the rider by a rapid side movement. In the daytime—for this supernatural effect is felt in broad day as well as at night—the horse more frequently falls or stumbles, as if checked by an invisible force in the midst of his career. This, too, is a living superstition, and some persons will recount a whole string of accidents that have happened within a few yards; till at last, such is the force of iteration, the most incredulous admit it to be a series of remarkable coincidences. These last two, the black dog and the dangerous place in the road, are believed in by people of a much higher grade than carters. Altogether, the vitality of superstition in the country is very much greater than is commonly suspected. It is now confined, as it were, to the inner life of the people: no one talks of such things openly, but only to their friends, and thus a stranger might remark on the total extinction of the belief in the supernatural. But much really remains.

The carters have a story about horses which had spent the night in a meadow being found the next morning in a state of exhaustion, as if they had been ridden furiously during the hours of darkness. They were totally unfit for work next day. Instances are even given where men have hidden in a tree with a gun, and when the horses began to gallop fired at something indistinct sitting on their haunches, which something at once disappeared, and the excitement ceased. But these things are said to have happened a long time ago.

So, also, there is a memory of a man digging stone in a quarry and distinctly hearing the strokes of a pick beneath him. When he wheeled his barrow the subterranean quarryman wheeled his, and shortly after he had shot the stones out there came a rumbling from below as if the other barrow had been emptied. The very quarry is pointed out where this extraordinary phenomenon took place. It is curious how a story of this kind, something like which is, I think, told of the Hartz Mountains, should have got localised in a limestone quarry so far apart in distance and character. How well I remember the ancient labourer who told me this legend as a boy! It is easy to philosophise on it now, and speculate upon the genesis of the tale, which may have originated in a cavernous hollow resounding to the tools; but then it was a reality, and I recollect always giving a wide berth to that quarry at night. As the old man told it, it was indeed hardly a legend; for he could disclose every detail, and what has here occupied a few sentences took him the best part of an hour to relate.

Now and then the western clouds after the sunset assume a shape resembling that of a vast extended wing, as of a gigantic bird in full flight—the extreme tip nearly reaching the zenith, the body of the bird just below the horizon. The resemblance is sometimes so perfect that the layers of feathers are traceable by an imaginative eye. This, the old folk say, is the wing of the Archangel Michael, and it bodes no good to the evil ones among the nations, for he is on his way to execute a dread command.

Herbs are still believed in implicitly by some. Not long since I met a labourer, one of the better class too, whom I had known previously, and now found deeply depressed because of the death of a son. The poor fellow had had every attention; the clergyman had exerted himself, and wine and nourishing luxuries had not been spared, nor the best of medical advice. That he admitted, but still regretted one thing. There was a herb, which grew beside rivers, and was known to but a few, that was a certain cure for the kind of wasting disease which had baffled educated skill. There was an old man living somewhere by a river fifty miles away, who possessed the secret of this herb, and by it had accomplished marvellous cures. He had heard of him, but could not by any inquiry ascertain his exact whereabouts; and so his child died. Everything possible had been done, but still he regretted that this herb had not been applied.

Nothing is done right now, according to the old men of the hamlet; even the hayricks are built badly and ‘scamped.’ The ‘rickmaker’ used to be an important person, generally a veteran, who had to be conciliated with an extra drop of good liquor before he could be got to set to work in earnest. Then he spread the hay here, and worked it in there, and had it trodden down at the edge, and then in the middle, and, like the centurion, sent men hither and thither. His rick, when complete, did not rise perpendicularly, but each face or square side sloped a little outwards—including the ends—a method that certainly does give the rick a very shapely look.

But now the new-fangled ‘elevator’ carries up the hay by machinery from the waggon to the top, and two ricks are run up while they would formerly have just been carefully laying the foundation for one of faggots to keep off the damp. The poles put up to support the rick-cloth interfere with the mathematically correct outward slope at the ends, upon which the old fellow prided himself; so they are carried up straight like the end wall of a cottage, and are a constant source of contempt to the ancient invalid. However, he consoles himself with the reflection that most of the men employed with the ‘elevator’ will ultimately go to a very unpleasant place, since they are continuously swearing at the horse that works it, to make him go round the faster.

After an old cart or waggon has done its work and is broken up, the wooden axletree, which is very solid, is frequently used for the top bar of a stile. It answers very well, and, being of seasoned wood that has received a good many coats of red paint, will last a long time. The life of a waggon is not unlike that of a ship. On the cradle it is the pride of the craftsman who builds it, and who is careful to reproduce the exact ‘lines’ which he learned from his master as an apprentice, and which have been handed down these hundred years and more. The builders of the Chinese junks are said never to saw a piece of timber into the shape required, nor to bend it by softening the fibres by hot steam, but always use a beam that has grown crooked naturally. This plan gives great strength, but it must take years to accumulate the necessary curved trees. The waggon-builder, in like manner, has a whole yard full of timber selected for much the same reason—because it naturally curves in the way he desires, or is specially fitted for his purpose.

For, like a ship, the true old-fashioned waggon is full of curves, and there is scarcely a straight piece of wood about it. Nothing is angular or square; and each piece of timber, too, is carved in some degree, bevelled at the edges, the sharp outline relieved in one way or another, and the whole structure like a ship, seeming buoyant, and floating as it were, easily on the wheels. Then the painting takes several weeks, and after that the lettering of the name; and when at last completed it is placed outside by the road, that every farmer and labourer who goes by may pause and admire. In about twelve months, if the builder be expeditious (for him), the new vessel may reach her port under the open shed at the farm, and then her life of voyages begins.

Her cargoes are hay and wheat and huge mountainous loads of straw, and occasionally hurdles for the shepherd. Nor are her voyages confined to the narrow seas of the fields adjoining home; now and then she goes on adventurous expeditions to distant market towns, carrying mayhap a cargo of oak-bark, stripped from fallen trees, to the tan-yard. Then she is well victualled for the voyage, and her course mapped out on the chart in order to avoid the Scylla of steep hills and stony ways and the Charybdis of tollgates, besides being duly cautioned against the sirens that chant so sweetly from the taps of the roadside inns. Or she sails down to the far-away railway station after coal—possibly two or more vessels in the same convoy—if the steam plough be at work and requires the constant services of these tenders.

She has her own special crew—her captain the carter—and for forecastle men a lad or two, and often a couple of able-bodied seamen in the shape of labourers, to help to load up. When on the more distant voyages to unknown shores, she takes a supercargo—the farmer’s son—to check the bills of lading; for on those strange coasts who knows what treachery there may be brewing? There are arms aboard, in the form of forks or prongs; and commonly one or more passengers go out in her—women with vast bundles and children—not to mention the merchandise of sugars and of teas from Cathay, which are shipped for delivery at half the cottages and farmsteads en route homewards. Wherefore, you see, the captain had needs be a sober and godly man, having all these and manifold other responsibilities upon his mind.

Besides which he has to make a report upon the state of the crops on every farm he passes, and what everybody is doing, and if they have begun reaping; also to hail every vessel he passes outward or homeward bound, and enter her answers in his log, and to keep his weather-eye open and a sharp watch to windward, lest storms should arise and awake the deep, and if the gale increases to batten down his hatches and make all snug with the tarpaulin. He must bear in mind the longitude of those ports where there are docks, lest his team should cast a shoe or any of the running rigging want splicing, or the hull spring a leak—for the blacksmith’s forges are often leagues apart, and he may lose his certificate if he strands his ship or founders on the open ocean of the downs. Sometimes, if the currents run unexpectedly strong, and he is deeply laden, he has to borrow or hire a tug from the nearest farm, getting an extra horse to pull up the hill.

When he reaches harbour, and has leave ashore, a jollier seaman never cracked a whip. Perhaps the happiest time with the ploughboys is when they are out with the waggon, having a little change, no harder work than walking, sips at the ‘pots’ handed to the captain by his mates, and nothing to think about. Nor was there ever a more popular song in the country than—

We’ll jump into the waggon, And we’ll all take a ride!

Though in winter, when the horses’ shoes have to be roughed for the frost, or, worse, when the wheels sink deep into the spongy turf, and rain and sleet and snow make the decks slippery, it is not quite so jolly. Yet even then, so strong is the love of motion, a run with the waggon is preferred to stationary work.

The captain, when bound on a voyage, generally slips his cable or weighs anchor with the rising sun. His crew are first-rate helmsmen; and to see them sweep into the rickyard through the narrow gateway, with a heavy deck cargo piled to the skies, all sail set, a stiff breeze, and the timbers creaking, is a glorious sight! Not a scrape against the jetty, though ‘touch and go’ is the sign of a good pilot. His greatest trouble is when his cargo shifts out of sight of land: sometimes the vessel turns on her beam-ends with a too ponderous and ill-built load of straw, and then the wreck lies right in the fairway of all the ships coming up the channel. To load a waggon successfully is indeed a work of art: on the hills where the waggons have to run ‘sidelong’ to pick up the crops, one side higher than the other, no one but an experienced hand can make the stuff stay on. Then there is often a tremendous bumping and scraping of the keel on the rocks of the newly-mended roads, and the nasty chopping seas of the deep ruts, besides the long regular Atlantic swells of the furrows and ‘lands.’ So that the cargo had need to be firmly placed in the hold.

Every now and then she goes into dock and gets a new streak of paint and a thorough overhauling. The running rigging of the harness has to be polished and kept in good condition, and the crew are rarely idle if the captain knows his business. You should never let your ‘fo’castle’ hands loll about; the proverb about the devil and the idle hands is notoriously true aboard ship, and in the stables.

How many a man’s life has centred about the waggon! As a child he rides in it as a treat to the hay-field with his father; as a lad he walks beside the leader, and gets his first ideas of the great world when they visit the market town. As a man he takes command and pilots the ship for many a long, long year. When he marries, the waggon, lent for his own use, brings home his furniture. After a while his own children go for a ride in it, and play in it when stationary in the shed. In the painful ending the waggon carries the weak-kneed old man in pity to and from the old town for his weekly store of goods, or mayhap for his weekly dole of that staff of life his aged teeth can hardly grind. And many a plain coffin has the old waggon carried to the distant churchyard on the side of the hill. It is a cold spot—as life, too, was cold and hard; yet in the spring the daisies will come, and the thrushes will sing on the bough.

Built at first of seasoned wood, kept out of the weather under cover, repainted, and taken care of, the waggon lasts a lifetime. Many times repaired, the old ship outlasts its owner—his name on it is painted out. But that step is not taken for years: there seems to be a superstitious dislike to obliterating the old name, as if the dead would resent it, and there it often remains till it becomes illegible. Sometimes the second owner, too, goes, and the name fresh painted is that of the third. When at last it becomes too shaky for farm use, it is perhaps bought by some poor working haulier, who has a hole cut in the bottom with moveable cover, and uses it to bring down flints from the hills to mend the roads. But if any of the old folk live, they will not sell the ancient vessel: it stands behind the rickyard under the elms till the rain rots the upper work, and it is then broken up, and the axletree becomes the top bar of a stile.

Each field has its characteristic stile—or rather two, one each side (at the entrance and exit of the footpath), and these are never alike. Walking across the fields for a couple of miles or more, of all the stiles that must of necessity be surmounted no two are similar. Here is one well put together—not too high, the rail not too large, and apparently an ideal piece of workmanship; but on approaching, the ground on the opposite side drops suddenly three or four feet—at the bottom is a marshy spot crossed by a narrow bridge of a single stone, on which you have to be careful to alight, or else plunge ankle-deep in water. If clever enough to drop on the stone, it immediately tilts up slightly, for, like the rocking-stones of Wales, it is balanced somewhere, and has a see-saw motion well calculated to land the timid in the ditch.

The next is approached by a line of stepping-stones—to avoid the mud and water—whose surfaces are so irregular as barely to afford a footing. The stile itself is nothing—very low and easy to pass: but just beyond it a stiff, stout pole has been placed across to prevent horses straying, and below that a couple of hurdles are pitched to confine the sheep. This is almost too much; however, by patience and exertion, it is managed.

Then comes a double mound with two stiles—one for each ditch—made very high and intended for steps; but the steps are worn away, and it is something like climbing a perpendicular ladder. Another has a toprail of a whole tree, so broad and thick no one can possibly straddle it, so some friend of humanity has broken the second rail, and you creep under. Finally comes a steep bank, six or seven feet high, with rude steps formed of the roots of trees worn bare by iron-tipped boots, and of mere holes in which to put the toe. At the top the stile leans forward over the precipice, so that you have to suspend yourself in mid-air. Fortunately, almost every other one has a gap worn at the side just large enough to squeeze through after coaxing the briars to yield a trifle. For it is intensely characteristic of human nature to make gaps and short cuts.

All the lads of the hamlet have a trysting-place at the cross-roads, or rather cross-lanes, where there is often an open waste space and a small clump of trees. If there is any mischief in the wind, there the council of war is sure to be held. There is a great rickyard not far distant, where in one of the open sheds is the thatcher’s workshop.

He is a very pronounced character in his way, with his leathern pads for the knees that he may be able to bear lengthened contact against the wooden rungs of the ladder, his little club to drive in the stakes, his shears to snip off the edges of the straw round the eaves, his iron needle of gigantic size with which to pass the tar-cord through when thatching a shed, and his small sharp billhook to split out his thatching stakes. These are of willow, cut from the pollard trees by the brook, and he sits on a stool in the shed and splits them into three or four with the greatest dexterity, giving his billhook a twist this way and then that, and so guiding the split in the direction required. Then holding it across his knee, he cuts the point with a couple of blows and casts the finished stake aside upon the heap.

A man of no little consequence is the thatcher the most important perhaps of the hamlet craftsmen. He ornaments the wheat ricks with curious twisted tufts of straw, standing up not unlike the fantastic ways in which savages are represented doing their hair. But he does not put the thatch on the wheat half so substantially as formerly because now only a few remain the winter—the thatch is often hardly on before it is off again for the threshing machine—for the ‘sheening,’ as they call it. On the hayricks, which stand longer, he puts better work, especially on the southern and western sides or angles, binding it down with a crosswork of bonds to prevent the gales which blow from those quarters unroofing the rick.

It is said to be an ill wind that blows nobody any good: now the wind never blew that was strong enough to please the thatcher. If the hurricane roughs up the straw on all the ricks, in the parish, unroofs half-a-dozen sheds, and does not spare the gables of the dwelling-houses, why he has work for the next two months. He is attended by a man to carry up the ‘yelms,’ and two or three women are busy ‘yelming’—i.e., separating the straw, selecting the longest and laying it level and parallel, damping it with water, and preparing it for the yokes. These yokes must be cut from boughs that have grown naturally in the shape wanted, else they are not tough enough. A tough old chap, too, is the thatcher, a man of infinite gossip, well acquainted with the genealogy of every farmer, and, indeed, of everybody from Dan to Beersheba, of the parish.

The memory of the smugglers is not yet quite extinct. The old men will point out the route they used to follow, and some of the places where they are said to have stored their contraband goods. Smuggling suggests the sea, but the goods landed on the beach had afterwards to be conveyed inland for sale, so that the hamlet, though far distant from the shore, has its traditions of illicit trade. The route followed was a wild and unfrequented one, and the smugglers appear to have kept to the downs as much as possible. More than one family—well-to-do for the hamlet or village where a small capital goes a long way—are said to have originally derived their prosperity from assisting the storage or disposal of smuggled goods; and the sympathies of the hamlet would be with the smugglers still.

The old folk, too, talk of having the ague, and say that it was quite common in their early days; but it is rare to hear of a case now. Possibly the better drainage of the fields and the better food and lodging enjoyed by the labourers have something to do with this. There are, of course, no scientific or precise data for exact comparison; but, judging from the traditions transmitted down, the hamlet is much more healthy at the present day than it was in the olden times.

Chapter Seven.

The Farmhouse—Traditions—Hunting Pictures—The Farmer’s Year—Sport—The Auction Festival—A Summer’s Day—Beauty of Wheat.

The stream, after leaving the village and the washpool, rushes swiftly down the descending slope, and then entering the meadows, quickly loses its original impetuous character. Not much more than a mile from the village it flows placidly through meads and pastures, a broad, deep brook, thickly fringed with green flags bearing here and there large yellow flowers. By some old thatched cattle-sheds and rickyards, overshadowed with elm trees, a strong bay or dam crosses it, forcing the water into a pond for the cattle, and answering the occasional purpose of a ford; for the labourers in their heavy boots walk over the bay, though the current rises to the instep. They call these sheds, some few hundred yards from the farmhouse, the ‘Lower Pen.’ Wick Farm—almost every village has its outlying ‘wick’—stands alone in the fields. It is an ancient rambling building, the present form of which is the result of successive additions at different dates, and in various styles.

When a homestead, like this, has been owned and occupied by the same family for six or seven generations, it seems to possess a distinct personality of its own. A history grows up round about it; memories of the past accumulate, and are handed down fresh and green, linking to-day and seventy years ago as if hardly any lapse of time had intervened. The inmates talk familiarly of the ‘comet year,’ as if it were but just over; of the days when a load of wheat was worth a little fortune; of the great snows and floods of the previous century. They date events from the year when the Foremeads were purchased and added to the patrimony, as if that transaction, which took place ninety years before, was of such importance that it must necessarily be still known to all the world.

The house has somehow shaped and fitted itself to the character of the dwellers within it: hidden and retired among trees, fresh and green with cherry and pear against the wall, yet the brown thatch and the old bricks subdued in tone by the weather. This individuality extends to the furniture; it is a little stiff and angular, but solid, and there are nooks and corners—as the window-seat—suggestive of placid repose: a strange opposite mixture throughout of flowery peace and silence, with an almost total lack of modern conveniences and appliances of comfort—as though the sinewy vigour of the residents disdained artificial ease.