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Title: Afoot in England

Author: W.H. Hudson

Release Date: April, 2004 [EBook #5406]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on July 8, 2002]

Edition: 10

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AFOOT IN ENGLAND ***










AFOOT IN ENGLAND

BY W.H. HUDSON


Contents

     I. Guide Books: An Introduction,
    II. On Going Back,
   III. Walking and Cycling,
    IV. Seeking a Shelter,
     V. Wind, Wave, and Spirit,
    VI. By Swallowfield,
   VII. Roman Calleva,
  VIII. A Cold Day at Silchester,
    IX. Rural Rides,
     X. The Last of his Name,
    XI. Salisbury and its Doves,
   XII. Whitesheet Hill,
  XIII. Bath and Wells Revisited,
   XIV. The Return of the Native,
    XV. Summer Days on the Otter,
   XVI. In Praise of the Cow,
  XVII. An Old Road Leading Nowhere,
 XVIII. Branscombe,
   XIX. A Abbotsbury,
    XX. Salisbury Revisited,
   XXI. Stonehenge,
  XXII. The Tillage and "The Stones,"
 XXIII. Following a River,
  XXIV. Troston,
   XXV. My Friend Jack,




Chapter One: Guide-Books: An Introduction

Guide-books are so many that it seems probable we have more
than any other country--possibly more than all the rest of the
universe together.  Every county has a little library of its
own--guides to its towns, churches, abbeys, castles, rivers,
mountains; finally, to the county as a whole.  They are of all
prices and all sizes, from the diminutive paper-covered
booklet, worth a penny, to the stout cloth-bound octavo volume
which costs eight or ten or twelve shillings, or to the
gigantic folio county history, the huge repository from which
the guide-book maker gets his materials.  For these great
works are also guide-books, containing everything we want to
learn, only made on so huge a scale as to be suited to the
coat pockets of Brobdingnagians rather than of little ordinary
men.  The wonder of it all comes in when we find that these
books, however old and comparatively worthless they may be,
are practically never wholly out of date.  When a new work is
brought out (dozens appear annually) and, say, five thousand
copies sold, it does not throw as many, or indeed any, copies
of the old book out of circulation: it supersedes nothing.  If
any man can indulge in the luxury of a new up-to-date guide to
any place, and gets rid of his old one (a rare thing to do),
this will be snapped up by poorer men, who will treasure it
and hand it down or on to others.  Editions of 1860-50-40, and
older, are still prized, not merely as keepsakes but for study
or reference.  Any one can prove this by going the round of a
dozen second-hand booksellers in his own district in London.
There will be tons of literary rubbish, and good stuff old and
new, but few guidebooks--in some cases not one.  If you ask
your man at a venture for, say, a guide to Hampshire, he will
most probably tell you that he has not one in stock; then, in
his anxiety to do business, he will, perhaps, fish out a guide
to Derbyshire, dated 1854--a shabby old book--and offer it
for four or five shillings, the price of a Crabbe in eight
volumes, or of Gibbon's Decline and Fall in six volumes, bound
in calf.  Talk to this man, and to the other eleven, and they
will tell you that there is always a sale for guide-books
--that the supply does not keep pace with the demand.  It may be
taken as a fact that most of the books of this kind published
during the last half-century--many millions of copies in the
aggregate--are still in existence and are valued possessions.

There is nothing to quarrel with in all this.  As a people we
run about a great deal; and having curious minds we naturally
wish to know all there is to be known, or all that is
interesting to know, about the places we visit.  Then, again,
our time as a rule being limited, we want the whole matter
--history, antiquities, places of interest in the neighbourhood,
etc. in a nutshell.  The brief book serves its purpose well
enough; but it is not thrown away like the newspaper and the
magazines; however cheap and badly got up it may be, it is
taken home to serve another purpose, to be a help to memory,
and nobody can have it until its owner removes himself (but
not his possessions) from this planet; or until the broker
seizes his belongings, and guide-books, together with other
books, are disposed of in packages by the auctioneer.

In all this we see that guide-books are very important to us,
and that there is little or no fault to be found with them,
since even the worst give some guidance and enable us in
after times mentally to revisit distant places.  It may then
be said that there are really no bad guide-books, and that
those that are good in the highest sense are beyond praise.  A
reverential sentiment, which is almost religious in character,
connects itself in our minds with the very name of Murray.  It
is, however, possible to make an injudicious use of these
books, and by so doing to miss the fine point of many a
pleasure.  The very fact that these books are guides to us and
invaluable, and that we readily acquire the habit of taking
them about with us and consulting them at frequent intervals,
comes between us and that rarest and most exquisite enjoyment
to be experienced amidst novel scenes.  He that visits a place
new to him for some special object rightly informs himself of
all that the book can tell him.  The knowledge may be useful;
pleasure is with him a secondary object.  But if pleasure be
the main object, it will only be experienced in the highest
degree by him who goes without book and discovers what old
Fuller called the "observables" for himself.  There will
be no mental pictures previously formed; consequently what is
found will not disappoint.  When the mind has been permitted
to dwell beforehand on any scene, then, however beautiful or
grand it may be, the element of surprise is wanting and
admiration is weak.  The delight has been discounted.

My own plan, which may be recommended only to those who go out
for pleasure--who value happiness above useless (otherwise
useful) knowledge, and the pictures that live and glow in
memory above albums and collections of photographs--is not to
look at a guide-book until the place it treats of has been
explored and left behind.

The practical person, to whom this may come as a new idea
and who wishes not to waste any time in experiments, would
doubtless like to hear how the plan works.  He will say that
he certainly wants all the happiness to be got out of his
rambles, but it is clear that without the book in his pocket
he would miss many interesting things:  Would the greater
degree of pleasure experienced in the others be a sufficient
compensation?  I should say that he would gain more than he
would lose; that vivid interest and pleasure in a few things
is preferable to that fainter, more diffused feeling
experienced in the other case.  Again, we have to take into
account the value to us of the mental pictures gathered in our
wanderings.  For we know that only when a scene is viewed
emotionally, when it produces in us a shock of pleasure, does
it become a permanent possession of the mind; in other words,
it registers an image which, when called up before the inner
eye, is capable of reproducing a measure of the original
delight.

In recalling those scenes which have given me the greatest
happiness, the images of which are most vivid and lasting, I
find that most of them are of scenes or objects which were
discovered, as it were, by chance, which I had not heard
of, or else had heard of and forgotten, or which I had not
expected to see.  They came as a surprise, and in the following
instance one may see that it makes a vast difference whether
we do or do not experience such a sensation.

In the course of a ramble on foot in a remote district I came
to a small ancient town, set in a cuplike depression amidst
high wood-grown hills.  The woods were of oak in spring
foliage, and against that vivid green I saw the many-gabled
tiled roofs and tall chimneys of the old timbered houses,
glowing red and warm brown in the brilliant sunshine--a scene
of rare beauty, and yet it produced no shock of pleasure;
never, in fact, had I looked on a lovely scene for the first
time so unemotionally.  It seemed to be no new scene, but
an old familiar one; and that it had certain degrading
associations which took away all delight.

The reason of this was that a great railway company had
long been "booming" this romantic spot, and large photographs,
plain and coloured, of the town and its quaint buildings had
for years been staring at me in every station and every
railway carriage which I had entered on that line.  Photography
degrades most things, especially open-air things; and in this
case, not only had its poor presentments made the scene too
familiar, but something of the degradation in the advertising
pictures seemed to attach itself to the very scene.  Yet even
here, after some pleasureless days spent in vain endeavours to
shake off these vulgar associations, I was to experience one
of the sweetest surprises and delights of my life.

The church of this village-like town is one of its chief
attractions; it is a very old and stately building, and its
perpendicular tower, nearly a hundred feet high, is one of the
noblest in England.  It has a magnificent peal of bells, and
on a Sunday afternoon they were ringing, filling and flooding
that hollow in the hills, seeming to make the houses and trees
and the very earth to tremble with the glorious storm of
sound.  Walking past the church, I followed the streamlet that
runs through the town and out by a cleft between the hills to
a narrow marshy valley, on the other side of which are
precipitous hills, clothed from base to summit in oak woods.
As I walked through the cleft the musical roar of the bells
followed, and was like a mighty current flowing through and
over me; but as I came out the sound from behind ceased
suddenly and was now in front, coming back from the hills
before me.  A sound, but not the same--not a mere echo; and
yet an echo it was, the most wonderful I had ever heard.
For now that great tempest of musical noise, composed of a
multitude of clanging notes with long vibrations, overlapping
and mingling and clashing together, seemed at the same time
one and many--that tempest from the tower which had
mysteriously ceased to be audible came back in strokes or
notes distinct and separate and multiplied many times.  The
sound, the echo, was distributed over the whole face of the
steep hill before me, and was changed in character, and it was
as if every one of those thousands of oak trees had a peal of
bells in it, and that they were raining that far-up bright
spiritual tree music down into the valley below.  As I stood
listening it seemed to me that I had never heard anything so
beautiful, nor had any man--not the monk of Eynsham in that
vision when he heard the Easter bells on the holy Saturday
evening, and described the sound as "a ringing of a marvellous
sweetness, as if all the bells in the world, or whatsoever is
of sounding, had been rung together at once."

Here, then, I had found and had become the possessor of
something priceless, since in that moment of surprise and
delight the mysterious beautiful sound, with the whole scene,
had registered an impression which would outlast all others
received at that place, where I had viewed all things with but
languid interest.  Had it not come as a complete surprise, the
emotion experienced and the resultant mental image would not
have been so vivid; as it is, I can mentally stand in that
valley when I will, seeing that green-wooded hill in front of
me and listen to that unearthly music.

Naturally, after quitting the spot, I looked at the first
opportunity into a guide-book of the district, only to find
that it contained not one word about those wonderful illusive
sounds!  The book-makers had not done their work well, since
it is a pleasure after having discovered something delightful
for ourselves to know how others have been affected by it and
how they describe it.

Of many other incidents of the kind I will, in this chapter,
relate one more, which has a historical or legendary interest.
I was staying with the companion of my walks at a village in
Southern England in a district new to us.  We arrived on a
Saturday, and next morning after breakfast went out for a long
walk.  Turning into the first path across the fields on
leaving the village, we came eventually to an oak wood, which
was like an open forest, very wild and solitary.  In half an
hour's walk among the old oaks and underwood we saw no sign of
human occupancy, and heard nothing but the woodland birds.  We
heard, and then saw, the cuckoo for the first time that
season, though it was but April the fourth.  But the cuckoo
was early that spring and had been heard by some from the
middle of March.  At length, about half-past ten o'clock, we
caught sight of a number of people walking in a kind of
straggling procession by a path which crossed ours at right
angles, headed by a stout old man in a black smock frock and
brown leggings, who carried a big book in one hand.  One of
the processionists we spoke to told us they came from a hamlet
a mile away on the borders of the wood and were on their way
to church.  We elected to follow them, thinking that the
church was at some neighbouring village; to our surprise we
found it was in the wood, with no other building in sight
--a small ancient-looking church built on a raised mound,
surrounded by a wide shallow grass-grown trench, on the border
of a marshy stream.  The people went in and took their seats,
while we remained standing just by the door.  Then the priest
came from the vestry, and seizing the rope vigorously, pulled
at it for five minutes, after which he showed us where to sit
and the service began.  It was very pleasant there, with the
door open to the sunlit forest and the little green churchyard
without, with a willow wren, the first I had heard, singing
his delicate little strain at intervals.

The service over, we rambled an hour longer in the wood, then
returned to our village, which had a church of its own, and
our landlady, hearing where we had been, told us the story, or
tradition, of the little church in the wood.  Its origin goes
very far back to early Norman times, when all the land in this
part was owned by one of William's followers on whom it had
been bestowed.  He built himself a house or castle on the edge
of the forest, where he lived with his wife and two little
daughters who were his chief delight.  It happened that one
day when he was absent the two little girls with their female
attendant went into the wood in search of flowers, and that
meeting a wild boar they turned and fled, screaming for help.
The savage beast pursued, and, quickly overtaking them,
attacked the hindermost, the youngest of the two little girls,
anal killed her, the others escaping in the meantime.  On the
following day the father returned, and was mad with grief and
rage on hearing of the tragedy, and in his madness resolved to
go alone on foot to the forest and search for the beast and
taste no food or drink until he had slain it.  Accordingly to
the forest he went, and roamed through it by day and night,
and towards the end of the following day he actually found and
roused the dreadful animal, and although weakened by his long
fast and fatigue, his fury gave him force to fight and conquer
it, or else the powers above came to his aid; for when he
stood spear in hand to wait the charge of the furious beast he
vowed that if he overcame it on that spot he would build a
chapel, where God would be worshipped for ever.  And there it
was raised and has stood to this day, its doors open every
Sunday to worshippers, with but one break, some time in the
sixteenth century to the third year of Elizabeth, since when
there has been no suspension of the weekly service.

That the tradition is not true no one can say.  We know that
the memory of an action or tragedy of a character to stir the
feelings and impress the imagination may live unrecorded in
any locality for long centuries.  And more, we know or
suppose, from at least one quite familiar instance from
Flintshire, that a tradition may even take us back to
prehistoric times and find corroboration in our own day.

But of this story what corroboration is there, and what do
the books say?  I have consulted the county history, and no
mention is made of such a tradition, and can only assume that
the author had never heard it--that he had not the curious
Aubrey mind.  He only says that it is a very early church
--how early he does not know--and adds that it was built "for
the convenience of the inhabitants of the place."  An odd
statement, seeing that the place has every appearance of
having always been what it is, a forest, and that the
inhabitants thereof are weasels, foxes, jays and such-like,
and doubtless in former days included wolves, boars, roe-deer
and stags, beings which, as Walt Whitman truly remarks, do not
worry themselves about their souls.

With this question, however, we need not concern ourselves.
To me, after stumbling by chance on the little church in that
solitary woodland place, the story of its origin was accepted
as true; no doubt it had come down unaltered from generation
to generation through all those centuries, and it moved my
pity yet was a delight to hear, as great perhaps as it had
been to listen to the beautiful chimes many times multiplied
from the wooded hill.  And if I have a purpose in this book,
which is without a purpose, a message to deliver and a lesson
to teach, it is only this--the charm of the unknown, and the
infinitely greater pleasure in discovering the interesting
things for ourselves than in informing ourselves of them by
reading.  It is like the difference in flavour in wild fruits
and all wild meats found and gathered by our own hands in wild
places and that of the same prepared and put on the table for
us.  The ever-varying aspects of nature, of earth and sea and
cloud, are a perpetual joy to the artist, who waits and watches
for their appearance, who knows that sun and atmosphere have
for him revelations without end.  They come and go and mock
his best efforts; he knows that his striving is in vain--that
his weak hands and earthy pigments cannot reproduce these
effects or express his feeling--that, as Leighton said, "every
picture is a subject thrown away."  But he has his joy none
the less; it is in the pursuit and in the dream of capturing
something illusive, mysterious, and inexpressibly beautiful.




Chapter Two: On Going Back


In looking over the preceding chapter it occurred to me that I
had omitted something, or rather that it would have been well
to drop a word of warning to those who have the desire to
revisit a place where they have experienced a delightful
surprise.  Alas! they cannot have that sensation a second
time, and on this account alone the mental image must always
be better than its reality.  Let the image--the first sharp
impression--content us.  Many a beautiful picture is spoilt by
the artist who cannot be satisfied that he has made the best
of his subject, and retouching his canvas to bring out some
subtle charm which made the work a success loses it
altogether.  So in going back, the result of the inevitable
disillusionment is that the early mental picture loses
something of its original freshness.  The very fact that the
delightful place or scene was discovered by us made it the
shining place it is in memory.  And again, the charm we found
in it may have been in a measure due to the mood we were in,
or to the peculiar aspect in which it came before us at the
first, due to the season, to atmospheric and sunlight effects,
to some human interest, or to a conjunction of several
favourable circumstances; we know we can never see it again
in that aspect and with that precise feeling.

On this account I am shy of revisiting the places where I have
experienced the keenest delight.  For example, I have no
desire to revisit that small ancient town among the hills,
described in the last chapter; to go on a Sunday evening
through that narrow gorge, filled with the musical roar of the
church bells; to leave that great sound behind and stand again
listening to the marvellous echo from the wooded hill on the
other side of the valley.  Nor would I care to go again in
search of that small ancient lost church in the forest.  It
would not be early April with the clear sunbeams shining
through the old leafless oaks on the floor of fallen yellow
leaves with the cuckoo fluting before his time; nor would that
straggling procession of villagers appear, headed by an old
man in a smock frock with a big book in his hand; nor would I
hear for the first time the strange history of the church
which so enchanted me.

I will here give an account of yet another of the many
well-remembered delightful spots which I would not revisit,
nor even look upon again if I could avoid doing so by going
several miles out of my way.

It was green open country in the west of England--very far
west, although on the east side of the Tamar--in a beautiful
spot remote from railroads and large towns, and the road by
which I was travelling (on this occasion on a bicycle) ran or
serpentined along the foot of a range of low round hills on my
right hand, while on my left I had a green valley with other
low round green hills beyond it.  The valley had a marshy
stream with sedgy margins and occasional clumps of alder and
willow trees.  It was the end of a hot midsummer day; the sun
went down a vast globe of crimson fire in a crystal clear sky;
and as I was going east I was obliged to dismount and stand
still to watch its setting.  When the great red disc had gone
down behind the green world I resumed my way but went slowly,
then slower still, the better to enjoy the delicious coolness
which came from the moist valley and the beauty of the evening
in that solitary place which I had never looked on before.
Nor was there any need to hurry; I had but three or four miles
to go to the small old town where I intended passing the
night.  By and by the winding road led me down close to the
stream at a point where it broadened to a large still pool.
This was the ford, and on the other side was a small rustic
village, consisting of a church, two or three farm-houses with
their barns and outbuildings, and a few ancient-looking stone
cottages with thatched roofs.  But the church was the main
thing; it was a noble building with a very fine tower, and
from its size and beauty I concluded that it was an ancient
church dating back to the time when there was a passion in the
West Country and in many parts of England of building these
great fanes even in the remotest and most thinly populated
parishes.  In this I was mistaken through having seen it at a
distance from the other side of the ford after the sun had
set.

Never, I thought, had I seen a lovelier village with its old
picturesque cottages shaded by ancient oaks and elms, and the
great church with its stately tower looking dark against the
luminous western sky.  Dismounting again I stood for some time
admiring the scene, wishing that I could make that village my
home for the rest of my life, conscious at the same time that
is was the mood, the season, the magical hour which made it
seem so enchanting.  Presently a young man, the first human
figure that presented itself to my sight, appeared, mounted on
a big carthorse and leading a second horse by a halter, and
rode down into the pool to bathe the animals' legs and give
them a drink.  He was a sturdy-looking young fellow with a
sun-browned face, in earth-coloured, working clothes, with a
small cap stuck on the back of his round curly head; he
probably imagined himself not a bad-looking young man, for
while his horses were drinking he laid over on the broad bare
backs and bending down studied his own reflection in the
bright water.  Then an old woman came out of a cottage close
by, and began talking to him in her West Country dialect in a
thin high-pitched cracked voice.  Their talking was the only
sound in the village; so silent was it that all the rest of
its inhabitants might have been in bed and fast asleep; then,
the conversation ended, the young man rode out with a great
splashing and the old woman turned into her cottage again, and
I was left in solitude.

Still I lingered: I could not go just yet; the chances were
that I should never again see that sweet village in that
beautiful aspect at the twilight hour.

For now it came into my mind that I could not very well settle
there for the rest of my life; I could not, in fact, tie
myself to any place without sacrificing certain other
advantages I possessed; and the main thing was that by taking
root I should deprive myself of the chance of looking on still
other beautiful scenes and experiencing other sweet surprises.
I was wishing that I had come a little earlier on the scene to
have had time to borrow the key of the church and get a sight
of the interior, when all at once I heard a shrill voice and a
boy appeared running across the wide green space of the
churchyard.  A second boy followed, then another, then still
others, and I saw that they were going into the church by the
side door.  They were choir-boys going to practice.  The
church was open then, and late as it was I could have half an
hour inside before it was dark!  The stream was spanned by an
old stone bridge above the ford, and going over it I at once
made my way to the great building, but even before entering it
I discovered that it possessed an organ of extraordinary power
and that someone was performing on it with a vengeance.
Inside the noise was tremendous--a bigger noise from an organ,
it seemed to me, than I had ever heard before, even at the
Albert Hall and the Crystal Palace, but even more astonishing
than the uproar was the sight that met my eyes.  The boys,
nine or ten sturdy little rustics with round sunburnt West
Country faces, were playing the roughest game ever witnessed
in a church.  Some were engaged in a sort of flying fight,
madly pursuing one another up and down the aisles and over the
pews, and whenever one overtook another he would seize hold of
him and they would struggle together until one was thrown and
received a vigorous pommelling.  Those who were not fighting
were dancing to the music.  It was great fun to them, and they
were shouting and laughing their loudest only not a sound of
it all could be heard on account of the thunderous roar of the
organ which filled and seemed to make the whole building
tremble.  The boys took no notice of me, and seeing that there
was a singularly fine west window, I went to it and stood
there some time with my back to the game which was going on at
the other end of the building, admiring the beautiful colours
and trying to make out the subjects depicted.  In the centre
part, lit by the after-glow in the sky to a wonderful
brilliance, was the figure of a saint, a lovely young woman in
a blue robe with an abundance of loose golden-red hair and an
aureole about her head.  Her pale face wore a sweet and placid
expression, and her eyes of a pure forget-me-not blue were
looking straight into mine.  As I stood there the music, or
noise, ceased and a very profound silence followed--not a
giggle, not a whisper from the outrageous young barbarians,
and not a sound of the organist or of anyone speaking to them.
Presently I became conscious of some person standing almost
but not quite abreast of me, and turning sharply I found a
clergyman at my side.  He was the vicar, the person who had
been letting himself go on the organ; a slight man with a
handsome, pale, ascetic face, clean-shaven, very dark-eyed,
looking more like an Italian monk or priest than an English
clergyman.  But although rigidly ecclesiastic in his
appearance and dress, there was something curiously engaging
in him, along with a subtle look which it was not easy to
fathom.  There was a light in his dark eyes which reminded me
of a flame seen through a smoked glass or a thin black veil,
and a slight restless movement about the corners of his mouth
as if a smile was just on the point of breaking out.  But it
never quite came; he kept his gravity even when he said things
which would have gone very well with a smile.

"I see," he spoke, and his penetrating musical voice had, too,
like his eyes and mouth, an expression of mystery in it, "that
you are admiring our beautiful west window, especially the
figure in the centre.  It is quite new--everything is new
here--the church itself was only built a few years ago.  This
window is its chief glory: it was done by a good artist--he
has done some of the most admired windows of recent years; and
the centre figure is supposed to be a portrait of our generous
patroness.  At all events she sat for it to him.  You have
probably heard of Lady Y--?"

"What!" I exclaimed.  "Lady Y--: that funny old woman!"

"No--middle-aged," he corrected, a little frigidly and perhaps
a little mockingly at the same time.

"Very well, middle-aged if you like; I don't know her
personally.  One hears about her; but I did not know she had a
place in these parts."

"She owns most of this parish and has done so much for us that
we can very well look leniently on a little weakness--her wish
that the future inhabitants of the place shall not remember her
as a middle-aged woman not remarkable for good looks--'funny,'
as you just now said."

He was wonderfully candid, I thought.  But what extraordinary
benefits had she bestowed on them, I asked, to enable them to
regard, or to say, that this picture of a very beautiful young
female was her likeness!

"Why," he said, "the church would not have been built but for
her.  We were astonished at the sum she offered to contribute
towards the work, and at once set about pulling the small old
church down so as to rebuild on the exact site."

"Do you know," I returned, "I can't help saying something you
will not like to hear.  It is a very fine church, no doubt,
but it always angers me to hear of a case like this where some
ancient church is pulled down and a grand new one raised in
its place to the honour and glory of some rich parvenu with or
without a brand new title."

"You are not hurting me in the least," he replied, with that
change which came from time to time in his eyes as if the
flame behind the screen had suddenly grown brighter.  "I agree
with every word you say; the meanest church in the land should
be cherished as long as it will hold together.  But
unfortunately ours had to come down.  It was very old and
decayed past mending.  The floor was six feet below the level
of the surrounding ground and frightfully damp.  It had been
examined over and over again by experts during the past forty
or fifty years, and from the first they pronounced it a
hopeless case, so that it was never restored.  The interior,
right down to the time of demolition, was like that of most
country churches of a century ago, with the old black worm-
eaten pews, in which the worshippers shut themselves up as if
in their own houses or castles.  On account of the damp we
were haunted by toads.  You smile, sir, but it was no smiling
matter for me during my first year as vicar, when I discovered
that it was the custom here to keep pet toads in the church.
It sounds strange and funny, no doubt, but it is a fact that
all the best people in the parish had one of these creatures,
and it was customary for the ladies to bring it a weekly
supply of provisions--bits of meat, hard-boiled eggs chopped
up, and earth-worms, and whatever else they fancied it would
like--in their reticules.  The toads, I suppose, knew when it
was Sunday--their feeding day; at all events they would crawl
out of their holes in the floor under the pews to receive
their rations--and caresses.  The toads got on my nerves with
rather unpleasant consequences.  I preached in a way which my
listeners did not appreciate or properly understand,
particularly when I took for my subject our duty towards the
lower animals, including reptiles."

"Batrachians," I interposed, echoing as well as I could the
tone in which he had rebuked me before.

"Very well, batrachians--I am not a naturalist.  But the
impression created on their minds appeared to be that I was
rather an odd person in the pulpit.  When the time came to
pull the old church down the toad-keepers were bidden to
remove their pets, which they did with considerable
reluctance.  What became of them I do not know--I never
inquired.  I used to have a careful inspection made of the
floor to make sure that these creatures were not put back
in the new building, and I am happy to think it is not
suited to their habits.  The floors are very well cemented,
and are dry and clean."

Having finished his story he invited me to go to the parsonage
and get some refreshment.  "I daresay you are thirsty," he
said.

But it was getting late; it was almost dark in the church by
now, although the figure of the golden-haired saint still
glowed in the window and gazed at us out of her blue eyes.  "I
must not waste more of your time," I added.  "There are your
boys still patiently waiting to begin their practice--such
nice quiet fellows!"

"Yes, they are," he returned a little bitterly, a sudden
accent of weariness in his voice and no trace now of what I
had seen in his countenance a little while ago--the light that
shone and brightened behind the dark eye and the little play
about the corners of the mouth as of dimpling motions on the
surface of a pool.

And in that new guise, or disguise, I left him, the austere
priest with nothing to suggest the whimsical or grotesque in
his cold ascetic face.  Recrossing the bridge I stood a little
time and looked once more at the noble church tower standing
dark against the clear amber-coloured sky, and said to myself:
"Why, this is one of the oddest incidents of my life!  Not
that I have seen or heard anything very wonderful--just a
small rustic village, one of a thousand in the land; a big new
church in which some person was playing rather madly on the
organ, a set of unruly choir-boys; a handsome stained-glass
west window, and, finally, a nice little chat with the vicar."
It was not in these things; it was a sense of something
strange in the mind, of something in some way unlike all other
places and people and experiences.  The sensation was like
that of the reader who becomes absorbed in Henry Newbolt's
romance of The Old Country, who identifies himself with the
hero and unconsciously, or without quite knowing how, slips
back out of this modern world into that of half a thousand
years ago.  It is the same familiar green land in which he
finds himself--the same old country and the same sort of
people with feelings and habits of life and thought
unchangeable as the colour of grass and flowers, the songs
of birds and the smell of the earth, yet with a difference.
I recognized it chiefly in the parish priest I had been
conversing with; for one thing, his mediaeval mind evidently
did not regard a sense of humour and of the grotesque as out
of place in or on a sacred building.  If it had been lighter I
should have looked at the roof for an effigy of a semi-human
toad-like creature smiling down mockingly at the worshippers
as they came and went.

On departing it struck me that it would assuredly be a mistake
to return to this village and look at it again by the common
lights of day.  No, it was better to keep the impressions I
had gathered unspoilt; even to believe, if I could, that no
such place existed, but that it had existed exactly as I had
found it, even to the unruly choir-boys, the ascetic-looking
priest with a strange light in his eyes, and the worshippers
who kept pet toads in the church.  They were not precisely
like people of the twentieth century.  As for the eccentric
middle-aged or elderly person whose portrait adorned the west
window, she was not the lady I knew something about, but
another older Lady Y--, who flourished some six or seven
centuries ago.




Chapter Three: Walking and Cycling


We know that there cannot be progression without
retrogression, or gain with no corresponding loss; and often
on my wheel, when flying along the roads at a reckless rate of
very nearly nine miles an hour, I have regretted that time of
limitations, galling to me then, when I was compelled to go on
foot.  I am a walker still, but with other means of getting
about I do not feel so native to the earth as formerly.  That
is a loss.  Yet a poorer walker it would have been hard to
find, and on even my most prolonged wanderings the end of each
day usually brought extreme fatigue.  This, too, although my
only companion was slow--slower than the poor proverbial snail
or tortoise--and I would leave her half a mile or so behind to
force my way through unkept hedges, climb hills, and explore
woods and thickets to converse with every bird and shy little
beast and scaly creature I could discover.  But mark what
follows.  In the late afternoon I would be back in the road or
footpath, satisfied to go slow, then slower still, until--the
snail in woman shape would be obliged to slacken her pace to
keep me company, and even to stand still at intervals to give
me needful rest.

But there were compensations, and one, perhaps the best of
all, was that this method of seeing the country made us more
intimate with the people we met and stayed with.  They were
mostly poor people, cottagers in small remote villages; and
we, too, were poor, often footsore, in need of their
ministrations, and nearer to them on that account than if we
had travelled in a more comfortable way.  I can recall a
hundred little adventures we met with during those wanderings,
when we walked day after day, without map or guide-book as our
custom was, not knowing where the evening would find us, but
always confident that the people to whom it would fall in the
end to shelter us would prove interesting to know and would
show us a kindness that money could not pay for.  Of these
hundred little incidents let me relate one.

It was near the end of a long summer day when we arrived at a
small hamlet of about a dozen cottages on the edge of an
extensive wood--a forest it is called; and, coming to it, we
said that here we must stay, even if we had to spend the night
sitting in a porch.  The men and women we talked to all
assured us that they did not know of anyone who could take us
in, but there was Mr. Brownjohn, who kept the shop, and was
the right person to apply to.  Accordingly we went to the
little general shop and heard that Mr. Brownjohn was not at
home.  His housekeeper, a fat, dark, voluble woman with
prominent black eyes, who minded the shop in the master's
absence, told us that Mr. Brownjohn had gone to a neighbouring
farm-house on important business, but was expected back
shortly.  We waited, and by and by he returned, a shabbily
dressed, weak-looking little old man, with pale blue eyes and
thin yellowish white hair.  He could not put us up, he said,
he had no room in his cottage; there was nothing for us but to
go on to the next place, a village three miles distant, on the
chance of finding a bed there.  We assured him that we could
go no further, and after revolving the matter a while longer
he again said that we could not stay, as there was not a room
to be had in the place since poor Mrs. Flowerdew had her
trouble.  She had a spare room and used to take in a lodger
occasionally, and a good handy woman she was too; but now--no,
Mrs. Flowerdew could not take us in.  We questioned him, and
he said that no one had died there and there had been no
illness.  They were all quite well at Mrs. Flowerdew's; the
trouble was of another kind.  There was no more to be said
about it.

As nothing further could be got out of him we went in search
of Mrs. Flowerdew herself, and found her in a pretty
vine-clad cottage.  She was a young woman, very poorly
dressed, with a pleasing but careworn face, and she had four
small, bright, healthy, happy-faced children.  They were all
grouped round her as she stood in the doorway to speak to us,
and they too were poorly dressed and poorly shod.  When we
told our tale she appeared ready to burst into tears.  Oh, how
unfortunate it was that she could not take us in!  It would
have made her so happy, and the few shillings would have been
such a blessing!  But what could she do now--the landlord's
agent had put in a distress and carried off and sold all her
best things.  Every stick out of her nice spare room had been
taken from them!  Oh, it was cruel!

As we wished to hear more she told us the whole story.  They
had got behindhand with the rent, but that had often been the
case, only this time it happened that the agent wanted a
cottage for a person he wished to befriend, and so gave them
notice to quit.  But her husband was a high-spirited man and
determined to stick to his rights, so he informed the agent
that he refused to move until he received compensation for his
improvements.

Questioned about these improvements, she led us through to the
back to show us the ground, about half an acre in extent, part
of which was used as a paddock for the donkey, and on the
other part there were about a dozen rather sickly-looking
young fruit trees.  Her husband, she said, had planted the
orchard and kept the fence of the paddock in order, and they
refused to compensate him!  Then she took us up to the spare
room, empty of furniture, the floor thick with dust.  The bed,
table, chairs, washhandstand, toilet service--the things she
had been so long struggling to get together, saving her money
for months and months, and making so many journeys to the town
to buy--all, all he had taken away and sold for almost
nothing!

Then, actually with tears in her eyes, she said that now we
knew why she couldn't take us in--why she had to seem so
unkind.

But we are going to stay, we told her.  It was a very good
room; she could surely get a few things to put in it, and in
the meantime we would go and forage for provisions to last us
till Monday.

It is odd to find how easy it is to get what one wants by
simply taking it!  At first she was amazed at our decision,
then she was delighted and said she would go out to her
neighbours and try to borrow all that was wanted in the way of
furniture and bedding.  Then we returned to Mr. Brownjohn's to
buy bread, bacon, and groceries, and he in turn sent us to Mr.
Marling for vegetables.  Mr. Marling heard us, and soberly
taking up a spade and other implements led us out to his
garden and dug us a mess of potatoes while we waited.  In the
meantime good Mrs. Flowerdew had not been idle, and we formed
the idea that her neighbours must have been her debtors for
unnumbered little kindnesses, so eager did they now appear to
do her a good turn.  Out of one cottage a woman was seen
coming burdened with a big roll of bedding; from others
children issued bearing cane chairs, basin and ewer, and so
on, and when we next looked into our room we found it swept
and scrubbed, mats on the floor, and quite comfortably
furnished.

After our meal in the small parlour, which had been given up
to us, the family having migrated into the kitchen, we sat for
an hour by the open window looking out on the dim forest and
saw the moon rise--a great golden globe above the trees--and
listened to the reeling of the nightjars.  So many were the
birds, reeling on all sides, at various distances, that the
evening air seemed full of their sounds, far and near, like
many low, tremulous, sustained notes blown on reeds, rising
and falling, overlapping and mingling.  And presently from
the bushes close by, just beyond the weedy, forlorn little
"orchard," sounded the rich, full, throbbing prelude to the
nightingale's song, and that powerful melody that in its
purity and brilliance invariably strikes us with surprise
seemed to shine out, as it were, against the background of
that diffused, mysterious purring of the nightjars, even as
the golden disc of the moon shone against and above the
darkening skies and dusky woods.

And as we sat there, gazing and listening, a human voice
came out of the night--a call prolonged and modulated like
the  coo-ee of the Australian bush, far off and faint; but
the children in the kitchen heard it at the same time, for
they too had been listening, and instantly went mad with
excitement.

"Father!" they all screamed together.  "Father's coming!" and
out they rushed and away they fled down the darkening road,
exerting their full voices in shrill answering cries.

We were anxious to see this unfortunate man, who was yet happy
in a loving family.  He had gone early in the morning in his
donkey-cart to the little market town, fourteen miles away, to
get the few necessaries they could afford to buy.  Doubtless
they would be very few.  We had not long to wait, as the white
donkey that drew the cart had put on a tremendous spurt at the
end, notwithstanding that the four youngsters had climbed in
to add to his burden.  But what was our surprise to behold in
the charioteer a tall, gaunt, grey-faced old man with long
white hair and beard!  He must have been seventy, that old man
with a young wife and four happy bright-eyed little children!

We could understand it better when he finally settled down in
his corner in the kitchen and began to relate the events of
the day, addressing his poor little wife, now busy darning
or patching an old garment, while the children, clustered
at his knee, listened as to a fairy tale.  Certainly this
white-haired man had not grown old in mind; he was keenly
interested in all he saw and heard, and he had seen and heard
much in the little market town that day.  Cattle and pigs and
sheep and shepherds and sheepdogs; farmers, shopkeepers,
dealers, publicans, tramps, and gentlefolks in carriages and
on horseback; shops, too, with beautiful new things in the
windows; millinery, agricultural implements, flowers and fruit
and vegetables; toys and books and sweeties of all colours.
And the people he had met on the road and at market, and what
they had said to him about the weather and their business and
the prospects of the year, how their wives and children were,
and the clever jokes they had made, and his own jokes, which
were the cleverest of all.  If he had just returned from
Central Africa or from Thibet he could not have had more to
tell them nor told it with greater zest.

We went to our room, but until the small hours the wind of the
old traveller's talk could still be heard at intervals from
the kitchen, mingled with occasional shrill explosions of
laughter from the listening children.

It happened that on the following day, spent in idling in the
forest and about the hamlet, conversing with the cottagers, we
were told that our old man was a bit of a humbug; that he was
a great talker, with a hundred schemes for the improvement
of his fortunes, and, incidently, for the benefit of his
neighbours and the world at large; but nothing came of it all
and he was now fast sinking into the lowest depths of poverty.
Yet who would blame him?  'Tis the nature of the gorse to be
"unprofitably gay."  All that, however, is a question for the
moralist; the point now is that in walking, even in that poor
way, when, on account of physical weakness, it was often a
pain and weariness, there are alleviations which may be more
to us than positive pleasures, and scenes to delight the eye
that are missed by the wheelman in his haste, or but dimly
seen or vaguely surmised in passing--green refreshing nooks
and crystal streamlets, and shadowy woodland depths with
glimpses of a blue sky beyond--all in the wilderness of the
human heart.




Chapter Four: Seeking a Shelter


The "walks" already spoken of, at a time when life had
little or no other pleasure for us on account of poverty and
ill-health, were taken at pretty regular intervals two or
three times a year.  It all depended on our means; in very
lean years there was but one outing.  It was impossible to
escape altogether from the immense unfriendly wilderness of
London simply because, albeit "unfriendly," it yet appeared to
be the only place in the wide world where our poor little
talents could earn us a few shillings a week to live on.
Music and literature! but I fancy the nearest crossing-sweeper
did better, and could afford to give himself a more generous
dinner every day.  It occasionally happened that an article
sent to some magazine was not returned, and always after so
many rejections to have one accepted and paid for with a
cheque worth several pounds was a cause of astonishment, and
was as truly a miracle as if the angel of the sun had
compassionately thrown us down a handful of gold.  And out of
these little handfuls enough was sometimes saved for the
country rambles at Easter and Whitsuntide and in the autumn.
It was during one of these Easter walks, when seeking for a
resting-place for the night, that we met with another
adventure worth telling.

We had got to that best part of Surrey not yet colonized by
wealthy men from the City, but where all things are as they
were of old, when, late in the day, we came to a pleasant
straggling village with one street a mile long.  Here we
resolved to stay, and walked the length of the street making
inquiries, but were told by every person we spoke to that the
only place we could stay at was the inn--the "White Hart."
When we said we preferred to stay at a cottage they smiled a
pitying smile.  No, there was no such place.  But we were
determined not to go to the inn, although it had a very
inviting look, and was well placed with no other house near
it, looking on the wide village green with ancient trees
shading the road on either side.

Having passed it and got to the end of the village, we turned
and walked back, still making vain inquiries, passing it
again, and when once more at the starting-point we were in
despair when we spied a man coming along the middle of the
road and went out to meet him to ask the weary question for
the last time.  His appearance was rather odd as he came
towards us on that blowy March evening with dust and straws
flying past and the level sun shining full on him.  He
was tall and slim, with a large round smooth face and big
pale-blue innocent-looking eyes, and he walked rapidly but in
a peculiar jerky yet shambling manner, swinging and tossing
his legs and arms about.  Moving along in this disjointed
manner in his loose fluttering clothes he put one in mind of
a big flimsy newspaper blown along the road by the wind.
This unpromising-looking person at once told us that there was
a place where we could stay; he knew it well, for it happened
to be his father's house and his own home.  It was away at the
other end of the village.  His people had given accommodation
to strangers before, and would be glad to receive us and make
us comfortable.

Surprised, and a little doubtful of our good fortune, I asked
my young man if he could explain the fact that so many of his
neighbours had assured us that no accommodation was to be had
in the village except at the inn.  He did not make a direct
reply.  He said that the ways of the villagers were not the
ways of his people.  He and all his house cherished only kind
feelings towards their neighbours; whether those feelings were
returned or not, it was not for him to say.  And there was
something else.  A small appointment which would keep a man
from want for the term of his natural life, without absorbing
all his time, had become vacant in the village.  Several of
the young men in the place were anxious to have it; then he,
too, came forward as a candidate, and all the others jeered at
him and tried to laugh him out of it.  He cared nothing for
that, and when the examination came off he proved the best man
and got the place.  He had fought his fight and had overcome
all his enemies; if they did not like him any the better for
his victory, and did and said little things to injure him, he
did not mind much, he could afford to forgive them.

Having finished his story, he said good-bye, and went his way,
blown, as it were, along the road by the wind.

We were now very curious to see the other members of his
family; they would, we imagined, prove amusing, if nothing
better.  They proved a good deal better.  The house we sought,
for a house it was, stood a little way back from the street
in a large garden.  It had in former times been an inn, or
farm-house, possibly a manor-house, and was large, with
many small rooms, and short, narrow, crooked staircases,
half-landings and narrow passages, and a few large rooms,
their low ceilings resting on old oak beams, black as ebony.
Outside, it was the most picturesque and doubtless the oldest
house in the village; many-gabled, with very tall ancient
chimneys, the roofs of red tiles mottled grey and yellow with
age and lichen.  It was a surprise to find a woodman--for that
was what the man was--living in such a big place.  The woodman
himself, his appearance and character, gave us a second and
greater surprise.  He was a well-shaped man of medium height;
although past middle life he looked young, and had no white
thread in his raven-black hair and beard.  His teeth were
white and even, and his features as perfect as I have seen in
any man.  His eyes were pure dark blue, contrasting rather
strangely with his pale olive skin and intense black hair.
Only a woodman, but he might have come of one of the oldest
and best families in the country, if there is any connection
between good blood and fine features and a noble expression.
Oddly enough, his surname was an uncommon and aristocratic
one.  His wife, on the other hand, although a very good woman
as we found, had a distinctly plebeian countenance.  One day
she informed us that she came of a different and better class
than her husband's.  She was the daughter of a small
tradesman, and had begun life as a lady's-maid: her husband
was nothing but a labourer; his people had been labourers for
generations, consequently her marriage to him had involved a
considerable descent in the social scale.  Hearing this, it
was hard to repress a smile.

The contrast between this man and the ordinary villager of his
class was as great in manners and conversation as in features
and expression.  His combined dignity and gentleness, and
apparent unconsciousness of any caste difference between man
and man, were astonishing in one who had been a simple toiler
all his life.

There were some grown-up children, others growing up, with
others that were still quite small.  The boys, I noticed,
favoured their mother, and had commonplace faces; the girls
took after their father, and though their features were not so
perfect they were exceptionally good-looking.  The eldest son
--the disjointed, fly-away-looking young man who had conquered
all his enemies--had a wife and child.  The eldest daughter
was also married, and had one child.  Altogether the three
families numbered about sixteen persons, each family having
its separate set of rooms, but all dining at one table.
How did they do it?  It seemed easy enough to them.  They were
serious people in a sense, although always cheerful and
sometimes hilarious when together of an evening, or at their
meals.  But they regarded life as a serious matter, a state of
probation; they were non-smokers, total abstainers, diligent
at their work, united, profoundly religious.  A fresh wonder
came to light when I found that this poor woodman, with so
large a family to support, who spent ten or twelve hours every
day at his outdoor work, had yet been able out of his small
earnings to buy bricks and other materials, and, assisted by
his sons, to build a chapel adjoining his house.  Here he held
religious services on Sundays, and once or twice of an evening
during the week.  These services consisted of extempore
prayers, a short address, and hymns accompanied by a
harmonium, which they all appeared able to play.

What his particular doctrine was I did not inquire, nor did I
wish for any information on that point.  Doubtless he was a
Dissenter of some kind living in a village where there was no
chapel; the services were for the family, but were also
attended by a few of the villagers and some persons from
neighbouring farms who preferred a simpler form of worship to
that of the Church.

It was not strange that this little community should have been
regarded with something like disfavour by the other villagers.
For these others, man for man, made just as much money, and
paid less rent for their small cottages, and, furthermore,
received doles from the vicar and his well-to-do parishioners,
yet they could not better their position, much less afford the
good clothing, books, music, and other pleasant things which
the independent woodman bestowed on his family.  And they knew
why.  The woodman's very presence in their midst was a
continual reproach, a sermon on improvidence and intemperance,
which they could not avoid hearing by thrusting their fingers
into their ears.

During my stay with these people something occurred to cause
them a very deep disquiet.  The reader will probably smile
when I tell them what it was.  Awaking one night after
midnight I heard the unusual sound of voices in earnest
conversation in the room below; this went on until I fell
asleep again.  In the morning we noticed that our landlady had
a somewhat haggard face, and that the daughters also had pale
faces, with purple marks under the eyes, as if they had kept
their mother company in some sorrowful vigil.  We were not
left long in ignorance of the cause of this cloud.  The good
woman asked if we had been much disturbed by the talking.  I
answered that I had heard voices and had supposed that friends
from a distance had arrived overnight and that they had sat up
talking to a late hour.  No--that was not it, she said; but
someone had arrived late, a son who was sixteen years old, and
who had been absent for some days on a visit to relations in
another county.  When they gathered round him to hear his news
he confessed that while away he had learnt to smoke, and he
now wished them to know that he had well considered the
matter, and was convinced that it was not wrong nor harmful to
smoke, and was determined not to give up his tobacco.  They
had talked to him--father, mother, brothers, and sisters
--using every argument they could find or invent to move him,
until it was day and time for the woodman to go to his woods,
and the others to their several occupations.  But their
"all-night sitting" had been wasted; the stubborn youth had
not been convinced nor shaken.  When, after morning prayers,
they got up from their knees, the sunlight shining in upon
them, they had made a last appeal with tears in their eyes,
and he had refused to give the promise they asked.  The poor
woman was greatly distressed.  This young fellow, I thought,
favours his mother in features, but mentally he is perhaps
more like his father.  Being a smoker myself I ventured to put
in a word for him.  They were distressing themselves too much,
I told her; smoking in moderation was not only harmless,
especially to those who worked out of doors, but it was a
well-nigh universal habit, and many leading men in the
religious world, both churchmen and dissenters, were known to
be smokers.

Her answer, which came quickly enough, was that they did not
regard the practice of smoking as in itself bad, but they knew
that in some circumstances it was inexpedient; and in the case
of her son they were troubled at the thought of what smoking
would ultimately lead to.  People, she continued, did not care
to smoke, any more than they did to eat and drink, in
solitude.  It was a social habit, and it was inevitable that
her boy should look for others to keep him company in smoking.
There would be no harm in that in the summer-time when young
people like to keep out of doors until bedtime; but during the
long winter evenings he would have to look for his companions
in the parlour of the public-house.  And it would not be easy,
scarcely possible, to sit long among the others without
drinking a little beer.  It is really no more wrong to drink
a little beer than to smoke, he would say; and it would be
true.  One pipe would lead to another.  and one glass of
beer to another.  The habit would be formed and at last all
his evenings and all his earnings would be spent in the
public-house.

She was right, and I had nothing more to say except to wish
her success in her efforts.

It is curious that the strongest protests against the evils of
the village pubic, which one hears from village women, come
from those who are not themselves sufferers.  Perhaps it is
not curious.  Instinctively we hide our sores, bodily and
mental, from the public gaze.

Not long ago I was in a small rustic village in Wiltshire,
perhaps the most charming village I have seen in that country.
There was no inn or ale-house, and feeling very thirsty after
my long walk I went to a cottage and asked the woman I saw
there for a drink of milk.  She invited me in, and spreading a
clean cloth on the table, placed a jug of new milk, a loaf,
and butter before me.  For these good things she proudly
refused to accept payment.  As she was a handsome young woman,
with a clear, pleasant voice, I was glad to have her sit there
and talk to me while I refreshed myself.  Besides, I was in
search of information and got it from her during our talk.  My
object in going to the village was to see a woman who, I had
been told, was living there.  I now heard that her cottage was
close by, but unfortunately, while anxious to see her, I had
no excuse for calling.

"Do you think," said I to my young hostess, "that it would do
to tell her that I had heard something of her strange history
and misfortunes, and wished to offer her a little help?  Is
she very poor?"

"Oh, no," she replied.  "Please do not offer her money, if you
see her.  She would be offended.  There is no one in this
village who would take a shilling as a gift from a stranger.
We all have enough; there is not a poor person among us."

"What a happy village!" I exclaimed.  "Perhaps you are all
total abstainers."

She laughed, and said that they all brewed their own beer
--there was not a total abstainer among them.  Every cottager
made from fifty to eighty gallons, or more, and they drank
beer every day, but very moderately, while it lasted.  They
were all very sober; their children would have to go to some
neighbouring village to see a tipsy man.

I remarked that at the next village, which had three
public-houses, there were a good marry persons so poor that
they would gladly at any time take a shilling from any one.

It was the same everywhere in the district, she said, except
in that village which had no public-house.  Not only were they
better off, and independent of blanket societies and charity
in all forms, but they were infinitely happier.  And after the
day's work the men came home to spend the evening with their
wives and children.

At this stage I was surprised by a sudden burst of passion on
her part.  She stood up, her face flushing red, and solemnly
declared that if ever a public-house was opened in that
village, and if the men took to spending their evenings in it,
her husband with them, she would not endure such a condition
of things--she wondered that so many women endured it--but
would take her little ones and go away to earn her own living
under some other roof!




Chapter Five: Wind, Wave, and Spirit


The rambles I have described were mostly inland: when by
chance they took us down to the sea our impressions and
adventures appeared less interesting.  Looking back on the
holiday, it would seem to us a somewhat vacant time compared
to one spent in wandering from village to village.  I mean if
we do not take into account that first impression which the
sea invariably makes on us on returning to it after a long
absence--the shock of recognition and wonder and joy as if we
had been suffering from loss of memory and it had now suddenly
come back to us.  That brief moving experience over, there is
little the sea can give us to compare with the land.  How
could it be otherwise in our case, seeing that we were by it
in a crowd, our movements and way of life regulated for us in
places which appear like overgrown and ill-organized
convalescent homes?  There was always a secret intense dislike
of all parasitic and holiday places, an uncomfortable feeling
which made the pleasure seem poor and the remembrance of days
so spent hardly worth dwelling on.  And as we are able to keep
in or throw out of our minds whatever we please, being
autocrats in our own little kingdom, I elected to cast away
most of the memories of these comparatively insipid holidays.
But not all, and of those I retain I will describe at least
two, one in the present chapter on the East Anglian coast, the
other later on.

It was cold, though the month was August; it blew and the sky
was grey and rain beginning to fall when we came down about
noon to a small town on the Norfolk coast, where we hoped to
find lodging and such comforts as could be purchased out of a
slender purse.  It was a small modern pleasure town of an
almost startling appearance owing to the material used in
building its straight rows of cottages and its ugly square
houses and villas.  This was an orange-brown stone found in
the neighbourhood, the roofs being all of hard, black slate.
I had never seen houses of such a colour, it was stronger,
more glaring and aggressive than the reddest brick, and there
was not a green thing to partially screen or soften it, nor
did the darkness of the wet weather have any mitigating effect
on it.  The town was built on high ground, with an open grassy
space before it sloping down to the cliff in which steps had
been cut to give access to the beach, and beyond the cliff we
caught sight of the grey, desolate, wind-vexed sea.  But the
rain was coming down more and more heavily, turning the
streets into torrents, so that we began to envy those who had
found a shelter even in so ugly a place.  No one would take us
in.  House after house, street after street, we tried, and at
every door with "Apartments to Let" over it where we knocked
the same hateful landlady-face appeared with the same
triumphant gleam in the fish-eyes and the same smile on the
mouth that opened to tell us delightedly that she and the town
were "full up"; that never had there been known such a rush of
visitors; applicants were being turned away every hour from
every door!

After three miserable hours spent in this way we began
inquiring at all the shops, and eventually at one were told of
a poor woman in a small house in a street a good way back from
the front who would perhaps be able to taken us in.  To this
place we went and knocked at a low door in a long blank wall
in a narrow street; it was opened to us by a pale thin
sad-looking woman in a rusty black gown, who asked us into a
shabby parlour, and agreed to take us in until we could find
something better.  She had a gentle voice and was full of
sympathy, and seeing our plight took us into the kitchen
behind the parlour, which was living- and working-room as
well, to dry ourselves by the fire.

"The greatest pleasure in life," said once a magnificent young
athlete, a great pedestrian, to me, "is to rest when you are
tired."  And, I should add, to dry and warm yourself by a big
fire when wet and cold, and to eat and drink when you are
hungry and thirsty.  All these pleasures were now ours, for
very soon tea and chops were ready for us; and so strangely
human, so sister-like did this quiet helpful woman seem after
our harsh experiences on that rough rainy day--that we
congratulated ourselves on our good fortune in having found
such a haven, and soon informed her that we wanted no "better
place."

She worked with her needle to support herself and her one
child, a little boy of ten; and by and by when he came in
pretty wet from some outdoor occupation we made his
acquaintance and the discovery that he was a little boy of an
original character.  He was so much to his mother, who, poor
soul, had nobody else in the world to love, that she was
always haunted by the fear of losing him.  He was her boy, the
child of her body, exclusively her own, unlike all other boys,
and her wise heart told her that if she put him in a school he
would be changed so that she would no longer know him for her
boy.  For it is true that our schools are factories, with a
machinery to unmake and remake, or fabricate, the souls of
children much in the way in which shoddy is manufactured.  You
may see a thousand rags or garments of a thousand shapes and
colours cast in to be boiled, bleached, pulled to pieces,
combed and woven, and finally come out as a piece of cloth a
thousand yards long of a uniform harmonious pattern, smooth,
glossy, and respectable.  His individuality gone, he would in
a sense be lost to her; and although by nature a weak timid
woman, though poor, and a stranger in a strange place, this
thought, or feeling, or "ridiculous delusion" as most people
would call it, had made her strong, and she had succeeded in
keeping her boy out of school.

Hers was an interesting story.  Left alone in the world she
had married one in her own class, very happily as she
imagined.  He was in some business in a country town, well off
enough to provide a comfortable home, and he was very good; in
fact, his one fault was that he was too good, too open-hearted
and fond of associating with other good fellows like himself,
and of pledging them in the cup that cheers and at the same
time inebriates.  Nevertheless, things went very well for a
time, until the child was born, the business declined, and
they began to be a little pinched.  Then it occurred to her
that she, too, might be able to do something.  She started
dressmaking, and as she had good taste and was clever and
quick, her business soon prospered.  This pleased him; it
relieved him from the necessity of providing for the home,
and enabled him to follow his own inclination, which was to
take things easily--to be an idle man, with a little ready
money in his pocket for betting and other pleasures.  The
money was now provided out of "our business."  This state of
things continued without any change, except that process of
degeneration which continued in him, until the child was about
four years old, when all at once one day he told her they were
not doing as well as they might.  She was giving far too much
of her time and attention to domestic matters--to the child
especially.  Business was business--a thing it was hard for a
woman to understand--and it was impossible for her to give her
mind properly to it with her thoughts occupied with the child.
It couldn't be done.  Let the child be put away, he said, and
the receipts would probably be doubled.  He had been making
inquiries and found that for a modest annual payment the boy
could be taken proper care of at a distance by good decent
people he had heard of.

She had never suspected such a thought in his mind, and this
proposal had the effect of a stunning blow.  She answered not
one word: he said his say and went out, and she knew she would
not see him again for many hours, perhaps not for some days;
she knew, too, that he would say no more to her on the
subject, that it would all be arranged about the child with or
without her consent.  His will was law, her wishes nothing.
For she was his wife and humble obedient slave; never had she
pleaded with or admonished him and never complained, even
when, after her long day of hard work, he came in at ten or
eleven o'clock at night with several of his pals, all excited
with drink and noisy as himself, to call for supper.
Nevertheless she had been happy--intensely happy, because of
the child.  The love for the man she had married, wondering
how one so bright and handsome and universally admired and
liked could stoop to her, who had nothing but love and worship
to give in return--that love was now gone and was not missed,
so much greater and more satisfying was the love for her boy.
And now she must lose him.  Two or three silent miserable days
passed by while she waited for the dreadful separation, until
the thought of it became unendurable and she resolved to keep
her child and sacrifice everything else.  Secretly she
prepared for flight, getting together the few necessary things
she could carry; then, with the child in her arms, she stole
out one evening and began her flight, which took her all
across England at its widest part, and ended at this small
coast town, the best hiding-place she could think of.

The boy was a queer little fellow, healthy but colourless,
with strangely beautiful grey eyes which, on first seeing
them, almost startled one with their intelligence.  He was shy
and almost obstinately silent, but when I talked to him on
certain subjects the intense suppressed interest he felt would
show itself in his face, and by and by it would burst out in
speech--an impetuous torrent of words in a high shrill voice.
He reminded me of a lark in a cage.  Watch it in its prison
when the sun shines forth--when, like the captive falcon in
Dante, it is "cheated by a gleam"--its wing-tremblings, and
all its little tentative motions, how the excitement grows and
grows in it, until, although shut up and flight denied it, the
passion can no longer be contained and it bursts out in a
torrent of shrill and guttural sounds, which, if it were free
and soaring, would be its song.  His passion was all for
nature, and his mother out of her small earnings had managed
to get quite a number of volumes together for him.  These he
read and re-read until he knew them by heart; and on Sundays,
or any other day they could take, those two lonely ones would
take a basket containing their luncheon, her work and a book
or two, and set out on a long ramble along the coast to pass
the day in some solitary spot among the sandhills.

With these two, the gentle woman and her quiet boy over his
book, and the kitchen fire to warm and dry us after each
wetting, the bad weather became quite bearable although it
lasted many days.  And it was amazingly bad.  The wind blew
with a fury from the sea; it was hard to walk against it.  The
people in hundreds waited in their dull apartments for a lull,
and when it came they poured out like hungry sheep from the
fold, or like children from a school, swarming over the green
slope down to the beach, to scatter far and wide over the
sands.  Then, in a little while; a new menacing blackness
would come up out of the sea, and by and by a fresh storm of
wind would send the people scuttling back into shelter.  So it
went on day after day, and when night came the sound of the
ever-troubled sea grew louder, so that, shut up in our little
rooms in that back street, we had it in our ears, except at
intervals, when the wind howled loud enough to drown its great
voice, and hurled tempests of rain and hail against the roofs
and windows.

To me the most amazing thing was the spectacle of the swifts.
It was late for them, near the end of August; they should now
have been far away on their flight to Africa; yet here they
were, delaying on that desolate east coast in wind and wet,
more than a hundred of them.  It was strange to see so many at
one spot, and I could only suppose that they had congregated
previous to migration at that unsuitable place, and were being
kept back by the late breeders, who had not yet been wrought
up to the point of abandoning their broods.  They haunted a
vast ruinous old barn-like building near the front, which was
probably old a century before the town was built, and about
fifteen to twenty pairs had their nests under the eaves.  Over
this building they hung all day in a crowd, rising high to
come down again at a frantic speed, and at each descent a few
birds could be seen to enter the holes, while others rushed
out to join the throng, and then all rose and came down again
and swept round and round in a furious chase, shrieking as if
mad.  At all hours they drew me to that spot, and standing
there, marvelling at their swaying power and the fury that
possessed them, they appeared to me like tormented beings, and
were like those doomed wretches in the halls of Eblis whose
hearts were in a blaze of unquenchable fire, and who, every
one with hands pressed to his breast, went spinning round in
an everlasting agonized dance.  They were tormented and crazed
by the two most powerful instincts of birds pulling in
opposite directions--the parental instinct and the passion of
migration which called them to the south.

In such weather, especially on that naked desolate coast,
exposed to the fury of the winds, one marvels at our modern
craze for the sea; not merely to come and gaze upon and listen
to it, to renew our youth in its salt, exhilarating waters and
to lie in delicious idleness on the warm shingle or mossy
cliff; but to be always, for days and weeks and even for
months, at all hours, in all weathers, close to it, with its
murmur, "as of one in pain," for ever in our ears.

Undoubtedly it is an unnatural, a diseased, want in us, the
result of a life too confined and artificial in close dirty
overcrowded cities.  It is to satisfy this craving that towns
have sprung up everywhere on our coasts and extended their
ugly fronts for miles and leagues, with their tens of
thousands of windows from which the city-sickened wretches may
gaze and gaze and listen and feed their sick souls with the
ocean.  That is to say, during their indoor hours; at other
times they walk or sit or lie as close as they can to it,
following the water as it ebbs and reluctantly retiring before
it when it returns.  It was not so formerly, before the
discovery was made that the sea could cure us.  Probably our
great-grandfathers didn't even know they were sick; at all
events, those who had to live in the vicinity of the sea were
satisfied to be a little distance from it, out of sight of its
grey desolation and, if possible, out of hearing of its
"accents disconsolate."  This may be seen anywhere on our
coasts; excepting the seaports and fishing settlements, the
towns and villages are almost always some distance from the
sea, often in a hollow or at all events screened by rising
ground and woods from it.  The modern seaside place has, in
most cases, its old town or village not far away but quite as
near as the healthy ancients wished to be.

The old village nearest to our little naked and ugly modern
town was discovered at a distance of about two miles, but it
might have been two hundred, so great was the change to its
sheltered atmosphere.  Loitering in its quiet streets among
the old picturesque brick houses with tiled or thatched roofs
and tall chimneys--ivy and rose and creeper-covered, with a
background of old oaks and elms--I had the sensation of having
come back to my own home.  In that still air you could hear
men and women talking fifty or a hundred yards away, the cry
or laugh of a child and the clear crowing of a cock, also the
smaller aerial sounds of nature, the tinkling notes of tits
and other birdlings in the trees, the twitter of swallows and
martins, and the "lisp of leaves and ripple of rain."  It was
sweet and restful in that home-like place, and hard to leave
it to go back to the front to face the furious blasts once
more.  Rut there were compensations.

The little town, we have seen, was overcrowded with late
summer visitors, all eager for the sea yet compelled to waste
so much precious time shut up in apartments, and at every
appearance of a slight improvement in the weather they would
pour out of the houses and the green slope would be covered
with a crowd of many hundreds, all hurrying down to the beach.
The crowd was composed mostly of women--about three to every
man, I should say--and their children; and it was one of the
most interesting crowds I had ever come across on account of
the large number of persons in it of a peculiarly fine type,
which chance had brought together at that spot.  It was the
large English blonde, and there were so many individuals of
this type that they gave a character to the crowd so that
those of a different physique and colour appeared to be fewer
than they were and were almost overlooked.  They came from
various places about the country, in the north and the
Midlands, and appeared to be of the well-to-do classes; they,
or many of them, were with their families but without their
lords.  They were mostly tall and large in every way, very
white-skinned, with light or golden hair and large light blue
eyes.  A common character of these women was their quiet
reposeful manner; they walked and talked and rose up and sat
down and did everything, in fact, with an air of deliberation;
they gazed in a slow steady way at you, and were dignified,
some even majestic, and were like a herd of large beautiful
white cows.  The children, too, especially the girls, some
almost as tall as their large mothers, though still in short
frocks, were very fine.  The one pastime of these was
paddling, and it was a delight to see their bare feet and
legs.  The legs of those who had been longest on the spot
--probably several weeks in some instances--were of a deep
nutty brown hue suffused with pink; after these a gradation of
colour, light brown tinged with buff, pinkish buff and cream,
like the Gloire de Dijon rose; and so on to the delicate
tender pink of the clover blossom; and, finally, the purest
ivory white of the latest arrivals whose skins had not yet
been caressed and coloured by sun and wind.

How beautiful are the feet of these girls by the sea who bring
us glad tidings of a better time to come and the day of a
nobler courage, a freer larger life when garments which have
long oppressed and hindered shall have been cast away!
It was, as I have said, mere chance which had brought so many
persons of a particular type together on this occasion, and I
thought I might go there year after year and never see the
like again.  As a fact I did return when August came round and
found a crowd of a different character.  The type was there
but did not predominate: it was no longer the herd of
beautiful white and strawberry cows with golden horns and
large placid eyes.  Nothing in fact was the same, for when I
looked for the swifts there were no more than about twenty
birds instead of over a hundred, and although just on the eve
of departure they were not behaving in the same excited
manner.

Probably I should not have thought so much about that
particular crowd in that tempestuous August, and remembered it
so vividly, but for the presence of three persons in it and
the strange contrast they made to the large white type I have
described.  These were a woman and her two little girls, aged
about eight and ten respectively, but very small for their
years.  She was a little black haired and black-eyed woman
with a pale sad dark face, on which some great grief or
tragedy had left its shadow; very quiet and subdued in her
manner; she would sit on a chair on the beach when the weather
permitted, a book on her knees, while her two little ones
played about, chasing and flying from the waves, or with the
aid of their long poles vaulting from rock to rock.  They were
dressed in black frocks and scarlet blouses, which set off
their beautiful small dark faces; their eyes sparkled like
black diamonds, and their loose hair was a wonder to see, a
black mist or cloud about their heads and necks composed of
threads fine as gossamer, blacker than jet and shining like
spun glass-hair that looked as if no comb or brush could ever
tame its beautiful wildness.  And in spirit they were what
they seemed: such a wild, joyous, frolicsome spirit with such
grace and fleetness one does not look for in human beings, but
only in birds or in some small bird-like volatile mammal--a
squirrel or a marmoset of the tropical forest, or the
chinchilla of the desolate mountain slopes, the swiftest,
wildest, loveliest, most airy and most vocal of small
beasties.  Occasionally to watch their wonderful motions more
closely and have speech with them, I followed when they raced
over the sands or flew about over the slippery rocks, and felt
like a cochin-china fowl, or muscovy duck, or dodo, trying to
keep pace with a humming-bird.  Their voices were well suited
to their small brilliant forms; not loud, though high-pitched
and singularly musical and penetrative, like the high clear
notes of a skylark at a distance.  They also reminded me of
certain notes, which have a human quality, in some of our
songsters--the swallow, redstart, pied wagtail, whinchat, and
two or three others.  Such pure and beautiful sounds are
sometimes heard in human voices, chiefly in children, when
they are talking and laughing in joyous excitement.  But for
any sort of conversation they were too volatile; before I
could get a dozen words from them they would be off again,
flying and flitting along the margin, like sandpipers, and
beating the clear-voiced sandpiper at his own aerial graceful
game.

By and by I was favoured with a fine exhibition of the spirit
animating these two little things.  The weather had made it
possible for the crowd of visitors to go down and scatter
itself over the beach, when the usual black cloud sprang up
and soon burst on us in a furious tempest of wind and rain,
sending the people flying back to the shelter of a large
structure erected for such purposes against the cliff.  It was
a vast barn-like place, open to the front, the roof supported
by wooden columns, and here in a few minutes some three or
four hundred persons were gathered, mostly women and their
girls, white and blue-eyed with long wet golden hair hanging
down their backs.  Finding a vacant place on the bench, I sat
down next to a large motherly-looking woman with a robust or
dumpy blue-eyed girl about four or five years old on her lap.
Most of the people were standing about in groups waiting
for the storm to blow over, and presently I noticed my two
wild-haired dark little girls moving about in the crowd.  It
was impossible not to seen them, for they could not keep still
a moment.  They were here, there, and everywhere, playing
hide-and-seek and skipping and racing wherever they could
find an opening, and by and by, taking hold of each other,
they started dancing.  It was a pretty spectacle, but most
interesting to see was the effect produced on the other
children, the hundred girls, big and little, the little ones
especially, who had been standing there tired and impatient to
get out to the sea, and who were now becoming more and more
excited as they gazed, until, like children when listening to
lively music, they began moving feet and hands and soon their
whole bodies in time to the swift movements of the little
dancers.  At last, plucking up courage, first one, then
another, joined them, and were caught as they came and whirled
round and round in a manner quite new to them and which they
appeared to find very delightful.  By and by I observed that
the little rosy-faced dumpy girl on my neighbour's knees was
taking the infection; she was staring, her blue eyes opened to
their widest in wonder and delight.  Then suddenly she began
pleading, "Oh, mummy, do let me go to the little girls--oh, do
let me!"  And her mother said "No," because she was so little,
and could never fly round like that, and so would fall and
hurt herself and cry.  But she pleaded still, and was ready to
cry if refused, until the good anxious mother was compelled to
release her; and down she slipped, and after standing still
with her little arms and closed hands held up as if to collect
herself before plunging into the new tremendous adventure, she
rushed out towards the dancers.  One of them saw her coming,
and instantly quitting the child she was waltzing with flew to
meet her, and catching her round the middle began spinning her
about as if the solid little thing weighed no more than a
feather.  But it proved too much for her; very soon she came
down and broke into a loud cry, which brought her mother
instantly to her, and she was picked up and taken back to the
seat and held to the broad bosom and soothed with caresses and
tender words until the sobs began to subside.  Then, even
before the tears were dry, her eyes were once more gazing at
the tireless little dancers, taking on child after child as
they came timidly forward to have a share in the fun, and once
more she began to plead with her "mummy," and would not be
denied, for she was a most determined little Saxon, until
getting her way she rushed out for a second trial.  Again the
little dancer saw her coming and flew to her like a bird to
its mate, and clasping her laughed her merry musical little
laugh.  It was her "sudden glory," an expression of pure
delight in her power to infuse her own fire and boundless
gaiety of soul into all these little blue-eyed rosy phlegmatic
lumps of humanity.

What was it in these human mites, these fantastic Brownies,
which, in that crowd of Rowenas and their children, made them
seem like beings not only of another race, but of another
species?  How came they alone to be distinguished among so
many by that irresponsible gaiety, as of the most volatile of
wild creatures, that quickness of sense and mind and sympathy,
that variety and grace and swiftness--all these brilliant
exotic qualities harmoniously housed in their small beautiful
elastic and vigorous frames?  It was their genius, their
character--something derived from their race.  But what
race?  Looking at their mother watching her little ones at
their frolics with dark shining eyes--the small oval-faced
brown-skinned woman with blackest hair--I could but say that
she was an Iberian, pure and simple, and that her children
were like her.  In Southern Europe that type abounds; it is
also to be met with throughout Britain, perhaps most common in
the southern counties, and it is not uncommon in East Anglia.
Indeed, I think it is in Norfolk where we may best see the two
most marked sub-types in which it is divided--the two
extremes.  The small stature, narrow head, dark skin, black
hair and eyes are common to both, and in both these physical
characters are correlated with certain mental traits, as, for
instance, a peculiar vivacity and warmth of disposition; but
they are high and low.  In the latter sub-division the skin is
coarse in texture, brown or old parchment in colour, with
little red in it; the black hair is also coarse, the forehead
small, the nose projecting, and the facial angle indicative of
a more primitive race.  One might imagine that these people
had been interred, along with specimens of rude pottery and
bone and flint implements, a long time back, about the
beginning of the Bronze Age perhaps, and had now come out of
their graves and put on modern clothes.  At all events I don't
think a resident in Norfolk would have much difficulty in
picking out the portraits of some of his fellow-villagers in
Mr. Reed's Prehistoric Peeps.

The mother and her little ones were of the higher sub-type:
they had delicate skins, beautiful faces, clear musical
voices.  They were Iberians in blood, but improved; purified
and refined as by fire; gentleized and spiritualized, and to
the lower types down to the aboriginals, as is the bright
consummate flower to leaf and stem and root.

Often and often we are teased and tantalized and mocked by
that old question:

                Oh!  so old--
        Thousands of years, thousands of years,
             If all were told--

of black and blue eyes; blue versus black and black versus
blue, to put it both ways.  And by black we mean black with
orange-brown lights in it--the eye called tortoise-shell; and
velvety browns with other browns, also hazels.  Blue includes
all blues, from ultramarine, or violet, to the palest blue of
a pale sky; and all greys down to the grey that is almost
white.  Our preference for this or that colour is supposed
to depend on nothing but individual taste, or fancy, and
association.  I believe it is something more, but I do find
that we are very apt to be swayed this way and that by the
colour of the eyes of the people we meet in life, according as
they (the people) attract or repel us.  The eyes of the two
little girls were black as polished black diamonds until
looked at closely, when they appeared a beautiful deep brown
on which the black pupils were seen distinctly; they were so
lovely that I, predisposed to prefer dark to light, felt that
this question was now definitely settled for me--that black
was best.  That irresistible charm, the flame-like spirit
which raised these two so much above the others--how could it
go with anything but the darkest eyes!

But no sooner was the question thus settled definitely and for
all time, to my very great satisfaction, than it was unsettled
again.  I do not know how this came about; it may have been
the sight of some small child's blue eyes looking up at me,
like the arch blue eyes of a kitten, full of wonder at the
world and everything in it;

         "Where did you get those eyes so blue?"
         "Out of the sky as I came through";

or it may have been the sight of a harebell; and perhaps it
came from nothing but the "waste shining of the sky."  At all
events, there they were, remembered again, looking at me from
the past, blue eyes that were beautiful and dear to me, whose
blue colour was associated with every sweetness and charm in
child and woman and with all that is best and highest in human
souls; and I could not and had no wish to resist their appeal.

Then came a new experience of the eye that is blue--a meeting
with one who almost seemed to be less flesh than spirit.  A
middle-aged lady, frail, very frail; exceedingly pale from
long ill-health, prematurely white-haired, with beautiful grey
eyes, gentle but wonderfully bright.  Altogether she was like
a being compounded as to her grosser part of foam and mist and
gossamer and thistledown, and was swayed by every breath of
air, and who, should she venture abroad in rough weather,
would be lifted and blown away by the gale and scattered like
mist over the earth.  Yet she, so frail, so timid, was the one
member of the community who had set herself to do the work of
a giant--that of championing all ill-used and suffering
creatures, wild or tame, holding a protecting shield over them
against the innate brutality of the people.  She had been
abused and mocked and jeered at by many, while others had
regarded her action with an amused smile or else with a cold
indifference.  But eventually some, for very shame, had been
drawn to her side, and a change in the feeling of the people
had resulted; domestic animals were treated better, and it was
no longer universally believed that all wild animals,
especially those with wings, existed only that men might amuse
themselves by killing and wounding and trapping and caging and
persecuting them in various other ways.

The sight of that burning and shining spirit in its frail
tenement--for did I not actually see her spirit and the very
soul of her in those eyes?--was the last of the unforgotten
experiences I had at that place which had startled and
repelled me with its ugliness.

But, no, there was one more, marvellous as any--the experience
of a day of days, one of those rare days when nature appears
to us spiritualized and is no longer nature, when that which
had transfigured this visible world is in us too, and it
becomes possible to believe--it is almost a conviction--that
the burning and shining spirit seen and recognized in one
among a thousand we have known is in all of us and in all
things.  In such moments it is possible to go beyond even the
most advanced of the modern physicists who hold that force
alone exists, that matter is but a disguise, a shadow and
delusion; for we may add that force itself--that which we call
force or energy--is but a semblance and shadow of the
universal soul.

The change in the weather was not sudden; the furious winds
dropped gradually; the clouds floated higher in the heavens,
and were of a lighter grey; there were wider breaks in them,
showing the lucid blue beyond; and the sea grew quieter.  It
had raved and roared too long, beating against the iron walls
that held it back, and was now spent and fallen into an uneasy
sleep, but still moved uneasily and moaned a little.  Then all
at once summer returned, coming like a thief in the night, for
when it was morning the sun rose in splendour and power in a
sky without a cloud on its vast azure expanse, on a calm sea
with no motion but that scarcely perceptible rise and fall as
of one that sleeps.  As the sun rose higher the air grew
warmer until it was full summer heat, but although a "visible
heat," it was never oppressive; for all that day we were
abroad, and as the tide ebbed a new country that was neither
earth nor sea was disclosed, an infinite expanse of pale
yellow sand stretching away on either side, and further and
further out until it mingled and melted into the sparkling
water and faintly seen line of foam on the horizon.  And over
all--the distant sea, the ridge of low dunes marking where the
earth ended and the flat, yellow expanse between--there
brooded a soft bluish silvery haze.  A haze that blotted
nothing out, but blended and interfused them all until earth
and air and sea and sands were scarcely distinguishable.  The
effect, delicate, mysterious, unearthly, cannot be described.

                            Ethereal gauze . . .
            Visible heat, air-water, and dry sea,
            Last conquest of the eye . . .

                                        Sun dust,
            Aerial surf upon the shores of earth,
            Ethereal estuary, frith of light. . . .
            Bird of the sun, transparent winged.

Do we not see that words fail as pigments do--that the effect
is too coarse, since in describing it we put it before the
mental eye as something distinctly visible, a thing of itself
and separate.  But it is not so in nature; the effect is of
something almost invisible and is yet a part of all and makes
all things--sky and sea and land--as unsubstantial as itself.
Even living, moving things had that aspect.  Far out on the
lowest further strip of sand, which appeared to be on a level
with the sea, gulls were seen standing in twos and threes and
small groups and in rows; but they did not look like gulls
--familiar birds, gull-shaped with grey and white plumage.
They appeared twice as big as gulls, and were of a dazzling
whiteness and of no definite shape: though standing still they
had motion, an effect of the quivering dancing air, the
"visible heat"; at rest, they were seen now as separate
objects; then as one with the silver sparkle on the
sea; and when they rose and floated away they were no longer
shining and white, but like pale shadows of winged forms
faintly visible in the haze.

They were not birds but spirits--beings that lived in or were
passing through the world and now, like the heat, made
visible; and I, standing far out on the sparkling sands, with
the sparkling sea on one side and the line of dunes,
indistinctly seen as land, on the other, was one of them; and
if any person had looked at me from a distance he would have
seen me as a formless shining white being standing by the sea,
and then perhaps as a winged shadow floating in the haze.  It
was only necessary to put out one's arms to float.  That was
the effect on my mind: this natural world was changed to a
supernatural, and there was no more matter nor force in sea or
land nor in the heavens above, but only spirit.




Chapter Six: By Swallowfield


One of the most attractive bits of green and wooded country
near London I know lies between Reading and Basingstoke and
includes Aldermaston with its immemorial oaks in Berkshire and
Silchester with Pamber Forest in Hampshire.  It has long been
one of my favourite haunts, summer and winter, and it is
perhaps the only wooded place in England where I have a home
feeling as strong as that which I experience in certain places
among the South Wiltshire downs and in the absolutely flat
country on the Severn, in Somerset, and the flat country in
Cambridgeshire and East Anglia, especially at Lynn and about
Ely.

I am now going back to my first visit to this green retreat;
it was in the course of one of those Easter walks I have
spoken of, and the way was through Reading and by Three Mile
Cross and Swallowfield.  On this occasion I conceived a
dislike to Reading which I have never quite got over, for it
seemed an unconscionably big place for two slow pedestrians to
leave behind.  Worse still, when we did leave it we found that
Reading would not leave us.  It was like a stupendous octopus
in red brick which threw out red tentacles, miles and miles
long in various directions--little rows and single and double
cottages and villas, all in red, red brick and its weary
accompaniment, the everlasting hard slate roof.  These square
red brick boxes with sloping slate tops are built as close as
possible to the public road, so that the passer-by looking in
at the windows may see the whole interior--wall-papers,
pictures, furniture, and oftentimes the dull expressionless
face of the woman of the house, staring back at you out of her
shallow blue eyes.  The weather too was against us; a grey
hard sky, like the slate roofs, and a cold strong east wind to
make the road dusty all day long.

Arrived at Three Mile Cross, it was no surprise to find it no
longer recognizable as the hamlet described in Our Village,
but it was saddening to look at the cottage in which Mary
Russell Mitford lived and was on the whole very happy with her
flowers and work for thirty years of her life, in its present
degraded state.  It has a sign now and calls itself the
"Mitford Arms" and a "Temperance Hotel," and we were told that
you could get tea and bread and butter there but nothing else.
The cottage has been much altered since Miss Mitford's time,
and the open space once occupied by the beloved garden is now
filled with buildings, including a corrugated-iron dissenting
chapel.

From Three Mile Cross we walked on to Swallowfield, still by
those never-ending roadside red-brick cottages and villas, for
we were not yet properly out of the hated biscuit metropolis.
It was a big village with the houses scattered far and wide
over several square miles of country, but just where the
church stands it is shady and pleasant.  The pretty church
yard too is very deeply shaded and occupies a small hill with
the Loddon flowing partly round it, then taking its swift way
through the village.  Miss Mitford's monument is a plain,
almost an ugly, granite cross, standing close to the wall,
shaded by yew, elm, and beech trees, and one is grateful to
think that if she never had her reward when living she has
found at any rate a very peaceful resting-place.

The sexton was there and told us that he was but ten years old
when Miss Mitford died, but that he remembered her well and
she was a very pleasant little woman.  Others in the place
who remembered her said the same--that she was very pleasant
and sweet.  We know that she was sweet and charming, but
unfortunately the portraits we have of her do not give that
impression.  They represent her as a fat common-place looking
person, a little vulgar perhaps.  I fancy the artists were
bunglers.  I possess a copy of a very small pencil sketch made
of her face by a dear old lady friend of mine, now dead, about
the year 1851 or 2.  My friend had a gift for portraiture in a
peculiar way.  When she saw a face that greatly interested
her, in a drawing-room, on a platform, in the street, anywhere,
it remained very vividly in her mind and on going home she
would sketch it, and some of these sketches of well known
persons are wonderfully good.  She was staying in the country
with a friend who drove with her to Swallowfield to call on
Miss Mitford, and on her return to her friend's house she
made the little sketch, and in this tiny portrait I can see
the refinement, the sweetness, the animation and charm which
she undoubtedly possessed.

But let me now venture to step a little outside of my own
province, my small plot--a poor pedestrian's unimportant
impressions of places and faces; all these p's come by
accident; and this I put in parenthetically just because an
editor solemnly told me a while ago that he couldn't abide and
wouldn't have alliteration's artful aid in his periodical.
Let us leave the subject of what Miss Mitford was to those of
her day who knew her; a thousand lovely personalities pass
away every year and in a little while are no more remembered
than the bright-plumaged bird that falls in the tropical
forest, or the vanished orchid bloom of which some one has
said that the angels in heaven can look on no more beautiful
thing.  Leaving all that, let us ask what remains to us of
another generation of all she was and did?

She was a prolific writer, both prose and verse, and, as we
know, had an extraordinary vogue in her own time.  Anything
that came from her pen had an immediate success; indeed, so
highly was she regarded that nothing she chose to write,
however poor, could fail.  And she certainly did write a good
deal of poor stuff: it was all in a sense poor, but books and
books, poor soul, she had to write.  It was in a sense poor
because it was mostly ambitious stuff, and, as the proverb
says, "You cannot fly like an eagle with the wings of a
wren."  She was driven to fly, and gave her little wings too
much to do, and her flights were apt to be mere little weak
flutterings over the surface of the ground.  A wren, and she
had not a cuckoo but a devouring cormorant to sustain--that
dear, beautiful father of hers, who was more to her than any
reprobate son to his devoted mother, and who day after day,
year after year, gobbled up her earnings, and then would
hungrily go on squawking for more until he stumbled into the
grave.  Alas! he was too long in dying; she was worn out by
then, the little heart beating not so fast, and the bright
little brain growing dim and very tired.

Now all the ambitious stuff she wrote to keep the cormorant
and, incidentally, to immortalize herself, has fallen
deservedly into oblivion.  But we--some of us--do not forget
and never want to forget Mary Russell Mitford.  Her letters
remain--the little friendly letters which came from her pen
like balls of silvery down from a sun-ripened plant, and were
wafted far and wide over the land to those she loved.  There
is a wonderful charm in them; they are so spontaneous, so
natural, so perfectly reflect her humour and vivacity, her
overflowing sweetness, her beautiful spirit.  And one book too
remains--the series of sketches about the poor little hamlet,
in which she lived so long and laboured so hard to support
herself and her parents, the turtledove mated with a
cormorant.  Driven to produce work and hard up for a subject,
in a happy moment she took up this humble one lying at her own
door and allowed her self to write naturally even as in her
most intimate letters.  This is the reason of the vitality of
Our Tillage; it was simple, natural, and reflected the author
herself, her tender human heart, her impulsive nature, her
bright playful humorous spirit.  There is no thought, no mind
stuff in it, and it is a classic!  It is about the country,
and she has so little observation that it might have been
written in a town, out of a book, away from nature's sights
and sounds.  Her rustic characters are not comparable to those
of a score or perhaps two or three score of other writers who
treat of such subjects.  The dialogue, when she makes them
talk, is unnatural, and her invention so poor that when she
puts in a little romance of her own making one regrets it.
And so one might go on picking it all to pieces like a
dandelion blossom.  Nevertheless it endures, outliving scores
of in a way better books on the same themes, because her own
delightful personality manifests itself and shines in all
these little pictures.  This short passage describing how she
took Lizzie, the little village child she loved, to gather
cowslips in the meadows, will serve as an illustration.

  They who know these feelings (and who is so happy as not to
have known some of them) will understand why Alfieri became
powerless, and Froissart dull; and why even needlework, the
most effective sedative, that grand soother and composer of
women's distress, fails to comfort me today.  I will go out
into the air this cool, pleasant afternoon, and try what
that will do. . . .  I will go to the meadows, the beautiful
meadows and I will have my materials of happiness, Lizzie
and May, and a basket for flowers, and we will make a
cowslip ball.  "Did you ever see a cowslip ball, Lizzie?"
"No."  "Come away then; make haste! run, Lizzie!"

  And on we go, fast, fast! down the road, across the lea,
past the workhouse, along by the great pond, till we slide
into the deep narrow lane, whose hedges seem to meet over
the water, and win our way to the little farmhouse at the
end.  "Through the farmyard, Lizzie; over the gate; never
mind the cows; they are quiet enough."  "I don't mind 'em,"
said Miss Lizzie, boldly and' truly, and with a proud
affronted air, displeased at being thought to mind anything,
and showing by her attitude and manner some design of proving
her courage by an attack on the largest of the herd, in the
shape of a pull by the tail.  "I don't mind 'em."  "I know
you don't, Lizzie; but let them, alone and don't chase
the turkey-cock.  Come to me, my dear!" and, for wonder,
Lizzie came.

In the meantime my other pet, Mayflower, had also gotten
into a scrape.  She had driven about a huge unwieldy sow,
till the animal's grunting had disturbed the repose of a
still more enormous Newfoundland dog, the guardian of the
yard.

The beautiful white greyhound's mocking treatment of the
surly dog on the chain then follows, and other pretty
scenes and adventures, until after some mishaps and much
trouble the cowslip ball is at length completed.

What a concentration of fragrance and beauty it was!
Golden and sweet to satiety! rich in sight, and touch, and
smell!  Lizzie was enchanted, and ran off with her prize,
hiding amongst the trees in the very coyness of ecstasy, as
if any human eye, even mine, would be a restraint on her
innocent raptures.

Here the very woman is revealed to us, her tender and lively
disposition, her impulsiveness and childlike love of fun
and delight in everything on earth.  We see in such a passage
what her merit really is, the reason of our liking or
"partiality" for her.  Her pleasure in everything makes
everything interesting, and in displaying her feeling without
art or disguise she succeeds in giving what we may call a
literary expression to personal charm--that quality which is
almost untranslatable into written words.  Many women possess
it; it is in them and issues from them, and is like an essential
oil in a flower, but too volatile to be captured and made use
of.  Furthermore, women when they write are as a rule even more
conventional than men, more artificial and out of and away
from themselves.

I do not know that any literary person will agree with me; I
have gone aside to write about Miss Mitford mainly for my own
satisfaction.  Frequently when I have wanted to waste half an
hour pleasantly with a book I have found myself picking up
"Our Village" from among many others, some waiting for a first
perusal, and I wanted to know why this was so--to find out, if
not to invent, some reason for my liking which would not make
me ashamed.

At Swallowfield we failed to find a place to stay at; there
was no such place; and of the inns, named, I think, the
"Crown," "Cricketers," "Bird-in-the-Hand," and "George and
Dragon," only one, was said to provide accommodation for
travellers as the law orders, but on going to the house we
were informed that the landlord or his wife was just dead, or
dangerously ill, I forget which, and they could take no one
in.  Accordingly, we had to trudge back to Three Mile Cross
and the old ramshackle, well-nigh ruinous inn there.  It was a
wretched place, smelling of mould and dry-rot; however, it was
not so bad after a fire had been lighted in the grate, but
first the young girl who waited on us brought in a bundle of
newspapers, which she proceeded to thrust up the chimney-flue
and kindle, "to warm the flue and make the fire burn," she
explained.

On the following day, the weather being milder, we rambled on
through woods and lanes, visiting several villages, and
arrived in the afternoon at Silchester, where we had resolved
to put up for the night.  By a happy chance we found a
pleasant cottage on the common to stay at and pleasant people
in it, so that we were glad to sit down for a week there, to
loiter about the furzy waste, or prowl in the forest and haunt
the old walls; but it was pleasant even indoors with that wide
prospect before the window, the wooded country stretching many
miles away to the hills of Kingsclere, blue in the distance
and crowned with their beechen rings and groves.  Of Roman
Calleva itself and the thoughts I had there I will write in
the following chapter; here I will only relate how on Easter
Sunday, two days after arriving, we went to morning service in
the old church standing on a mound inside the walls, a mile
from the village and common.

It came to pass that during the service the sun began to shine
very brightly after several days of cloud and misty windy wet
weather, and that brilliance and the warmth in it served to
bring a butterfly out of hiding; then another; then a third;
red admirals all; and they were seen through all the prayers,
and psalms, and hymns, and lessons, and the sermon preached by
the white-haired Rector, fluttering against the translucent
glass, wanting to be out in that splendour and renew their
life after so long a period of suspension.  But the glass was
between them and their world of blue heavens and woods and
meadow flowers; then I thought that after the service I would
make an attempt to get them out; but soon reflected that to
release them it would be necessary to capture them first, and
that that could not be done without a ladder and butterfly
net.  Among the women (ladies) on either side of and before me
there were no fewer than five wearing aigrettes of egret and
bird-of-paradise plumes in their hats or bonnets, and these
five all remained to take part in that ceremony of eating
bread and drinking wine in remembrance of an event supposed to
be of importance to their souls, here and hereafter.  It
saddened me to leave my poor red admirals in their prison,
beating their red wings against the coloured glass--to leave
them too in such company, where the aigrette wearers were
worshipping a little god of their own little imaginations, who
did not create and does not regard the swallow and dove and
white egret and bird-of-paradise, and who was therefore not my
god and whose will as they understood it was nothing to me.

It was a consolation when I went out, still thinking of the
butterflies in their prison, and stood by the old ruined walls
grown over with ivy and crowned with oak and holly trees, to
think that in another two thousand years there will be no
archaeologist and no soul in Silchester, or anywhere else in
Britain, or in the world, who would take the trouble to dig up
the remains of aigrette-wearers and their works, and who would
care what had become of their pitiful little souls--their
immortal part.




Chapter Seven: Roman Calleva


An afternoon in the late November of 1903.  Frost, gales, and
abundant rains have more than half stripped the oaks of their
yellow leaves.  But the rain is over now, the sky once more a
pure lucid blue above me--all around me, in fact, since I am
standing high on the top of the ancient stupendous earthwork,
grown over with oak wood and underwood of holly and thorn and
hazel with tangle of ivy and bramble and briar.  It is
marvellously still; no sound from the village reaches me; I
only hear the faint rustle of the dead leaves as they fall,
and the robin, for one spied me here and has come to keep me
company.  At intervals he spurts out his brilliant little
fountain of sound; and that sudden bright melody and the
bright colour of the sunlit translucent leaves seem like one
thing.  Nature is still, and I am still, standing concealed
among trees, or moving cautiously through the dead russet
bracken.  Not that I am expecting to get a glimpse of the
badger who has his hermitage in this solitary place, but I am
on forbidden ground, in the heart of a sacred pheasant
preserve, where one must do one's prowling warily.  Hard by,
almost within a stone's-throw of the wood-grown earthwork on
which I stand, are the ruinous walls of Roman Calleva--the
Silchester which the antiquarians have been occupied in
uncovering these dozen years or longer.  The stone walls, too,
like the more ancient earthwork, are overgrown with trees and
brambles and ivy.  The trees have grown upon the wall, sending
roots deep down between the stones, through the crumbling
cement; and so fast are they anchored that never a tree falls
but it brings down huge masses of masonry with it.  This slow
levelling process has been going on for centuries, and it was
doubtless in this way that the buildings within the walls were
pulled down long ages ago.  Then the action of the earth-worms
began, and floors and foundations, with fallen stones and
tiles, were gradually buried in the soil, and what was once a
city was a dense thicket of oak and holly and thorn.  Finally
the wood was cleared, and the city was a walled wheat field
--so far as we know, the ground has been cultivated since the
days of King John.  But the entire history of this green
walled space before me--less than twenty centuries in
duration--does not seem so very long compared with that of
the huge earthen wall I am standing on, which dates back to
prehistoric times.

Standing here, knee-deep in the dead ruddy bracken, in the
"coloured shade" of the oaks, idly watching the leaves fall
fluttering to the ground, thinking in an aimless way of the
remains of the two ancient cities before me, the British and
the Roman, and of their comparative antiquity, I am struck
with the thought that the sweet sensations produced in me by
the scene differ in character from the feeling I have had in
other solitary places.  The peculiar sense of satisfaction, of
restfulness, of peace, experienced here is very perfect; but
in the wilderness, where man has never been, or has at all
events left no trace of his former presence, there is ever a
mysterious sense of loneliness, of desolation, underlying our
pleasure in nature.  Here it seems good to know, or to
imagine, that the men I occasionally meet in my solitary
rambles, and those I see in the scattered rustic village hard
by, are of the same race, and possibly the descendants, of the
people who occupied this spot in the remote past--Iberian and
Celt, and Roman and Saxon and Dane.  If that hard-featured and
sour-visaged old gamekeeper, with the cold blue unfriendly
eyes, should come upon me here in my hiding-place, and scowl
as he is accustomed to do, standing silent before me, gun in
hand, to hear my excuses for trespassing in his preserves, I
should say (mentally):  This man is distinctly English, and
his far-off progenitors, somewhere about sixteen hundred years
ago, probably assisted at the massacre of the inhabitants of
the pleasant little city at my feet.  By and by, leaving the
ruins, I may meet with other villagers of different features
and different colour in hair, skin, and eyes, and of a
pleasanter expression; and in them I may see the remote
descendants of other older races of men, some who were lords
here before the Romans came, and of others before them, even
back to Neolithic times.

This, I take it, is a satisfaction, a sweetness and peace to
the soul in nature, because it carries with it a sense of the
continuity of the human race, its undying vigour, its
everlastingness.  After all the tempests that have overcome
it, through all mutations in such immense stretches of time,
how stable it is!

I recall the time when I lived on a vast vacant level green
plain, an earth which to the eye, and to the mind which sees
with the eye, appeared illimitable, like the ocean; where the
house I was born in was the oldest in the district--a century
old, it was said; where the people were the children's
children of emigrants from Europe who had conquered and
colonized the country, and had enjoyed but half a century of
national life.  But the people who had possessed the land
before these emigrants--what of them?  They, were but a
memory, a tradition, a story told in books and hardly more
to us than a fable; perhaps they had dwelt there for long
centuries, or for thousands of years; perhaps they had come,
a wandering horde, to pass quickly away like a flight of
migrating locusts; for no memorial existed, no work of their
hands, not the faintest trace of their occupancy.

Walking one day at the side of a ditch, which had been newly
cut through a meadow at the end of our plantation, I caught
sight of a small black object protruding from the side of the
cutting, which turned out to be a fragment of Indian pottery
made of coarse clay, very black, and rudely ornamented on one
side.  On searching further a few more pieces were found.  I
took them home and preserved them carefully, experiencing a
novel and keen sense of pleasure in their possession; for
though worthless, they were man's handiwork, the only real
evidence I had come upon of that vanished people who had been
before us; and it was as if those bits of baked clay, with a
pattern incised on them by a man's finger-nail, had in them
some magical property which enabled me to realize the past,
and to see that vacant plain repeopled with long dead and
forgotten men.

Doubtless we all possess the feeling in some degree--the sense
of loneliness and desolation and dismay at the thought of an
uninhabited world, and of long periods when man was not.  Is
it not the absence of human life or remains rather than the
illimitable wastes of thick-ribbed ice and snow which daunts
us at the thought of Arctic and Antarctic regions?  Again, in
the story of the earth, as told by geology, do we not also
experience the same sense of dismay, and the soul shrinking
back on itself, when we come in imagination to those deserts
desolate in time when the continuity of the race was broken
and the world dispeopled?  The doctrine of evolution has made
us tolerant of the thought of human animals,--our progenitors
as we must believe--who were of brutish aspect, and whose
period on this planet was so long that, compared with it, the
historic and prehistoric periods are but as the life of an
individual.  A quarter of a million years has perhaps elapsed
since the beginning of that cold period which, at all events
in this part of the earth, killed Palaeolithic man; yet how
small a part of his racial life even that time would seem if,
as some believe, his remains may be traced as far back as the
Eocene!  But after this rude man of the Quaternary and
Tertiary epochs had passed away there is a void, a period
which to the imagination seems measureless, when sun and moon
and stars looked on a waste and mindless world.  When man once
more reappears he seems to have been re-created on somewhat
different lines.

It is this break in the history of the human race which amazes
and daunts us, which "shadows forth the heartless voids and
immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind
with the thought of annihilation."

Here, in these words of Hermann Melville, we are let all at
once into the true meaning of those disquieting and seemingly
indefinable emotions so often experienced, even by the most
ardent lovers of nature and of solitude, in uninhabited
deserts, on great mountains, and on the sea.  We find here the
origin of that horror of mountains which was so common until
recent times.  A friend once confessed to me that he was
always profoundly unhappy at sea during long voyages, and the
reason was that his sustaining belief in a superintending
Power and in immortality left him when he was on that waste of
waters, which have no human associations.  The feeling, so
intense in his case, is known to most if not all of us; but we
feel it faintly as a disquieting element in nature of which we
may be but vaguely conscious.

Most travelled Englishmen who have seen much of the world and
resided for long or short periods in many widely separated
countries would probably agree that there is a vast difference
in the feeling of strangeness, or want of harmony with our
surroundings, experienced in old and in new countries.  It is
a compound feeling and some of its elements are the same in
both cases; but in one there is a disquieting element which
the other is without.  Thus, in Southern Europe, Egypt, Syria,
and in many countries of Asia, and some portions of Africa,
the wanderer from home might experience dissatisfaction and be
ill at ease and wish for old familiar sights and sounds; but
in a colony like Tasmania, and in any new country where there
were no remains of antiquity, no links with the past, the
feeling would be very much more poignant, and in some scenes
and moods would be like that sense of desolation which assails
us at the thought of the heartless voids and immensities of
the universe.

He recognizes that he is in a world on which we have but
recently entered, and in which our position is not yet
assured.

Here, standing on this mound, as on other occasions past
counting, I recognize and appreciate the enormous difference
which human associations make in the effect produced on us by
visible nature.  In this silent solitary place, with the
walled field which was once Calleva Atrebatum at my feet, I
yet have a sense of satisfaction, of security, never felt in a
land that had no historic past.  The knowledge that my
individual life is but a span, a breath; that in a little
while I too must wither and mingle like one of those fallen
yellow leaves with the mould, does not grieve me.  I know it
and yet disbelieve it; for am I not here alive, where men have
inhabited for thousands of years, feeling what I now feel
--their oneness with everlasting nature and the undying human
family?  The very soil and wet carpet of moss on which their
feet were set, the standing trees and leaves, green or yellow,
the rain-drops, the air they breathed, the sunshine in their
eyes and hearts, was part of them, not a garment, but of their
very substance and spirit.  Feeling this, death becomes an
illusion; and the illusion that the continuous life of the
species (its immortality) and the individual life are one and
the same is the reality and truth.  An illusion, but, as Mill
says, deprive us of our illusions and life would be
intolerable.  Happily we are not easily deprived of them,
since they are of the nature of instincts and ineradicable.
And this very one which our reason can prove to be the most
childish, the absurdest of all, is yet the greatest, the most
fruitful of good for the race.  To those who have discarded
supernatural religion, it may be a religion, or at all events
the foundation to build one on.  For there is no comfort to
the healthy natural man in being told that the good he does
will not be interred with his bones, since he does not wish to
think, and in fact refuses to think, that his bones will ever
be interred.  Joy in the "choir invisible" is to him a mere
poetic fancy, or at best a rarefied transcendentalism, which
fails to sustain him.  If altruism, or the religion of
humanity, is a living vigorous plant, and as some believe
flourishes more with the progress of the centuries, it must,
like other "soul-growths," have a deeper, tougher woodier root
in our soil.




Chapter Eight: A Gold Day At Silchester


It is little to a man's profit to go far afield if his chief
pleasure be in wild life, his main object to get nearer to the
creatures, to grow day by day more intimate with them, and to
see each day some new thing.  Yet the distance has the same
fascination for him as for another--the call is as sweet and
persistent in his ears.  If he is on a green level country
with blue hills on the horizon, then, especially in the early
morning, is the call sweetest, most irresistible.  Come away
--come away: this blue world has better things than any in
that green, too familiar place.  The startling scream of the
jay--you have heard it a thousand times.  It is pretty to
watch the squirrel in his chestnut-red coat among the oaks in
their fresh green foliage, full of fun as a bright child,
eating his apple like a child, only it is an oak-apple,
shining white or white and rosy-red, in his little paws; but
you have seen it so many times--come away:

It was not this voice alone which made me forsake the green
oaks of Silchester and Pamber Forest, to ramble for a season
hither and thither in Wiltshire, Dorset, and Somerset; there
was something for me to do in those places, but the call
made me glad to go.  And long weeks--months--went by in my
wanderings, mostly in open downland country, too often under
gloomy skies, chilled by cold winds and wetted by cold rains.
Then, having accomplished my purpose and discovered
incidentally that the call had mocked me again, as on so many
previous occasions, I returned once more to the old familiar
green place.

Crossing the common, I found that where it had been dry in
spring one might now sink to his knees in the bog; also that
the snipe which had vanished for a season were back at the old
spot where they used to breed.  It was a bitter day near the
end of an unpleasant summer, with the wind back in the old
hateful north-east quarter; but the sun shone, the sky was
blue, and the flying clouds were of a dazzling whiteness.
Shivering, I remembered the south wall, and went there, since
to escape from the wind and bask like some half-frozen serpent
or lizard in the heat was the highest good one could look for
in such weather.  To see anything new in wild life was not to
be hoped for.

That old grey, crumbling wall of ancient Calleva, crowned with
big oak and ash and thorn and holly, and draped with green
bramble and trailing ivy and creepers--how good a shelter it
is on a cold, rough day!  Moving softly, so as not to disturb
any creature, I yet disturbed a ring snake lying close to the
wall, into which it quickly vanished; and then from their old
place among the stones a pair of blue stock-doves rushed out
with clatter of wings.  The same blue doves which I had known
for three years at that spot!  A few more steps and I came
upon as pretty a little scene in bird life as one could wish
for: twenty to twenty-five small birds of different species
--tits, wrens, dunnocks, thrushes, blackbirds, chaffinches,
yellowhammers--were congregated on the lower outside twigs of
a bramble bush and on the bare ground beside it close to the
foot of the wall.  The sun shone full on that spot, and they
had met for warmth and for company.  The tits and wrens were
moving quietly about in the bush; others were sitting idly or
preening their feathers on the twigs or the ground.  Most of
them were making some kind of small sound--little exclamatory
chirps, and a variety of chirrupings, producing the effect of
a pleasant conversation going on among them.  This was
suddenly suspended on my appearance, but the alarm was soon
over, and, seeing me seated on a fallen stone and, motionless,
they took no further notice of me.  Two blackbirds were there,
sitting a little way apart on the bare ground; these were
silent, the raggedest, rustiest-looking members of that little
company; for they were moulting, and their drooping wings and
tails had many unsightly gaps in them where the old feathers
had dropped out before the new ones had grown.  They were
suffering from that annual sickness with temporary loss of
their brightest faculties which all birds experience in some
degree; the unseasonable rains and cold winds had been bad for
them, and now they were having their sun-bath, their best
medicine and cure.

By and by a pert-looking, bright-feathered, dapper cock
chaffinch dropped down from the bush, and, advancing to one of
the two, the rustiest and most forlorn-looking, started
running round and round him as if to make a close inspection
of his figure, then began to tease him.  At first I thought it
was all in fun--merely animal spirit which in birds often
discharges itself in this way in little pretended attacks and
fights.  But the blackbird had no play and no fight in him, no
heart to defend himself; all he did was to try to avoid the
strokes aimed at him, and he could not always escape them.
His spiritlessness served to inspire the chaffinch with
greater boldness, and then it appeared that the gay little
creature was really and truly incensed, possibly because the
rusty, draggled, and listless appearance of the larger bird
was offensive to him.  Anyhow, the persecutions continued,
increasing in fury until they could not be borne, and the
blackbird tried to escape by hiding in the bramble.  But he
was not permitted to rest there; out he was soon driven and
away into another bush, and again into still another further
away, and finally he was hunted over the sheltering wall into
the bleak wind on the other side.  Then the persecutor came
back and settled himself on his old perch on the bramble, well
satisfied at his victory over a bird so much bigger than
himself.  All was again peace and harmony in the little social
gathering, and the pleasant talkee-talkee went on as before.
About five minutes passed, then the hunted blackbird returned,
and, going to the identical spot from which he had been
driven, composed himself to rest; only now he sat facing his
lively little enemy.

I was astonished to see him back; so, apparently, was the
chaffinch.  He started, craned his neck, and regarded his
adversary first with one eye then with the other.  "What, rags
and tatters, back again so soon!"  I seem to hear him say.
"You miserable travesty of a bird, scarcely fit for a weasel
to dine on!  Your presence is an insult to us, but I'll soon
settle you.  You'll feel the cold on the other, side of the
wall when I've knocked off a few more of your rusty rags."

Down from his perch he came, but no sooner had he touched his
feet to the ground than the blackbird went straight at him
with extraordinary fury.  The chaffinch, taken by surprise,
was buffeted and knocked over, then, recovering himself, fled
in consternation, hotly pursued by the sick one.  Into the
bush they went, but in a moment they were out again, darting
this way and that, now high up in the trees, now down to the
ground, the blackbird always close behind; and no little bird
flying from a hawk could have exhibited a greater terror than
that pert chaffinch--that vivacious and most pugnacious little
cock bantam.  At last they went quite away, and were lost to
sight.  By and by the blackbird returned alone, and, going
once more to his place near the second bird, he settled down
comfortably to finish his sunbath in peace and quiet.

I had assuredly witnessed a new thing on that unpromising day,
something quite different from anything witnessed in my wide
rambles; and, though a little thing, it had been a most
entertaining comedy in bird life with a very proper ending.
It was clear that the sick blackbird had bitterly resented the
treatment he had received; that, brooding on it out in the
cold, his anger had made him strong, and that he came back
determined to fight, with his plan of action matured.  He was
not going to be made a fool every time!

The birds all gone their several ways at last, I got up from
my stone and wondered if the old Romans ever dreamed that this
wall which they made to endure would after seventeen hundred
years have no more important use than this--to afford shelter
to a few little birds and to the solitary man that watched
them--from the bleak wind.  Many a strange Roman curse on this
ungenial climate must these same stones have heard.
Looking through a gap in the wall  I saw, close by, on the
other side, a dozen men at work with pick and shovel throwing
up huge piles of earth.  They were uncovering a small portion
of that ancient buried city and were finding the foundations
and floors and hypocausts of Silchester's public baths; also
some broken pottery and trifling ornaments of bronze and bone.
The workmen in that bitter wind were decidedly better off than
the gentlemen from Burlington House in charge of the
excavations.  These stood with coats buttoned up and hands
thrust deep down in their pockets.  It seemed to me that
it was better to sit in the shelter of the wall and watch the
birds than to burrow in the crumbling dust for that small
harvest.  Yet I could understand and even appreciate their
work, although it is probable that the glow I experienced was
in part reflected.  Perhaps my mental attitude, when standing
in that sheltered place, and when getting on to the windy wall
I looked down on the workers and their work, was merely
benevolent.  I had pleasure in their pleasure, and a vague
desire for a better understanding, a closer alliance and
harmony.  It was the desire that we might all see nature--the
globe with all it contains--as one harmonious whole, not as
groups of things, or phenomena, unrelated, cast there by
chance or by careless or contemptuous gods.  This dust of past
ages, dug out of a wheat-field, with its fragments of men's
work--its pottery and tiles and stones--this is a part, too,
even as the small birds, with their little motives and
passions, so like man's, are a part.  I thought with self
shame of my own sins in this connection; then, considering
the lesser faults on the other side, I wished that Mr. St.
John Hope would experience a like softening mood and regret
that he had abused the ivy.  It grieves me to hear it called a
"noxious weed."  That perished people, whose remains in this
land so deeply interest him, were the mightiest "builders of
ruins" the world has known; but who except the archaeologist
would wish to see these piled stones in their naked harshness,
striking the mind with dismay at the thought of Time and its
perpetual desolations!  I like better the old Spanish poet who
says, "What of Rome; its world-conquering power, and majesty
and glory--what has it come to?"  The ivy on the wall, the
yellow wallflower, tell it.  A "deadly parasite" quotha!  Is
it not well that this plant, this evergreen tapestry of
innumerable leaves, should cover and partly hide and partly
reveal the "strange defeatures" the centuries have set on
man's greatest works?  I would have no ruin nor no old and
noble building without it; for not only does it beautify
decay, but from long association it has come to be in the mind
a very part of such scenes and so interwoven with the human
tragedy, that, like the churchyard yew, it seems the most
human of green things.

Here in September great masses of the plant are already
showing a greenish cream-colour of the opening blossoms, which
will be at their perfection in October.  Then, when the sun
shines, there will be no lingering red admiral, nor blue fly
or fly of any colour, nor yellow wasp, nor any honey-eating or
late honey-gathering insect that will not be here to feed on
the ivy's sweetness.  And behind the blossoming curtain, alive
with the minute, multitudinous, swift-moving, glittering
forms, some nobler form will be hidden in a hole or fissure in
the wall.  Here on many a night I have listened to the
sibilant screech of the white owl and the brown owl's clear,
long-drawn, quavering lamentation:

              "Good Ivy, what byrdys hast thou?"
              "Non but the Howlet, that How! How!"




Chapter Nine: Rural Rides


"A-birding on a Broncho" is the title of a charming little book
published some years ago, and probably better known to readers
on the other side of the Atlantic than in England.  I remember
reading it with pleasure and pride on account of the author's
name, Florence Merriam, seeing that, on my mother's side, I am
partly a Merriam myself (of the branch on the other side of
the Atlantic), and having been informed that all of that rare
name are of one family, I took it that we were related, though
perhaps very distantly.  "A-birding on a Broncho" suggested an
equally alliterative title for this chapter--"Birding on a
Bike"; but I will leave it to others, for those who go
a-birding are now very many and are hard put to find fresh
titles to their books.  For several reasons it will suit me
better to borrow from Cobbett and name this chapter "Rural
Rides."

Sore of us do not go out on bicycles to observe the ways of
birds.  Indeed, some of our common species have grown almost
too familiar with the wheel: it has become a positive danger
to them.  They not infrequently mistake its rate of speed and
injure themselves in attempting to fly across it.  Recently I
had a thrush knock himself senseless against the spokes of my
forewheel, and cycling friends have told me of similar
experiences they have had, in some instances the heedless
birds getting killed.  Chaffinches are like the children in
village streets--they will not get out of your way; by and by
in rural places the merciful man will have to ring his bell
almost incessantly to avoid running over them.  As I do not
travel at a furious speed I manage to avoid most things, even
the wandering loveless oil-beetle and the small rose-beetle
and that slow-moving insect tortoise the tumbledung.  Two or
three seasons ago I was so unfortunate as to run over a large
and beautifully bright grass snake near Aldermaston, once a
snake sanctuary.  He writhed and wriggled on the road as if I
had broken his back, but on picking him up I was pleased to
find that my wind-inflated rubber tyre had not, like the
brazen chariot wheel, crushed his delicate vertebra; he
quickly recovered, and when released glided swiftly and easily
away into cover.  Twice only have I deliberately tried to run
down, to tread on coat-tails so to speak, of any wild
creature.  One was a weasel, the other a stoat, running along
at a hedge-side before me.  In both instances, just as the
front wheel was touching the tail, the little flat-headed
rascal swerved quickly aside and escaped.

Even some of the less common and less tame birds care as
little for a man on a bicycle as they do for a cow.  Not long
ago a peewit trotted leisurely across the road not more than
ten yards from my front wheel; and on the same day I came upon
a green woodpecker enjoying a dust-bath in the public road.
He declined to stir until I stopped to watch him, then merely
flew about a dozen yards away and attached himself to the
trunk of a fir tree at the roadside and waited there for me to
go.  Never in all my wanderings afoot had I seen a yaffingale
dusting himself like a barn-door fowl!

It is not seriously contended that birds can be observed
narrowly in this easy way; but even for the most conscientious
field naturalist the wheel has its advantages.  It carries him
quickly over much barren ground and gives him a better view of
the country he traverses; finally, it enables him to see more
birds.  He will sometimes see thousands in a day where,
walking, he would hardly have seen hundreds, and there is joy
in mere numbers.  It was just to get this general rapid sight
of the bird life of the neighbouring hilly district of
Hampshire that I was at Newbury on the last day of October.
The weather was bright though very cold and windy, and towards
evening I was surprised to see about twenty swallows in
Northbrook Street flying languidly to and fro in the shelter
of the houses, often fluttering under the eaves and at
intervals sitting on ledges and projections.  These belated
birds looked as if they wished to hibernate, or find the most
cosy holes to die in, rather than to emigrate.  On the
following day at noon they came out again and flew up and down
in the same feeble aimless manner.

Undoubtedly a few swallows of all three species, but mostly
house-martins, do "lie up" in England every winter, but
probably very few survive to the following spring.  We should
have said that it was impossible that any should survive but
for one authentic instance in recent years, in which a
barn-swallow lived through the winter in a semi-torpid state
in an outhouse at a country vicarage.  What came of the
Newbury birds I do not know, as I left on the 2nd of November
--tore myself away, I may say, for, besides meeting with
people I didn't know who treated a stranger with sweet
friendliness, it is a town which quickly wins one's
affections.  It is built of bricks of a good deep rich red
--not the painfully bright red so much in use now--and no
person has had the bad taste to spoil the harmony by
introducing stone and stucco.  Moreover, Newbury has, in Shaw
House, an Elizabethan mansion of the rarest beauty.  Let him
that is weary of the ugliness and discords in our town
buildings go and stand by the ancient cedar at the gate and
look across the wide green lawn at this restful house, subdued
by time to a tender rosy-red colour on its walls and a deep
dark red on its roof, clouded with grey of lichen.

From Newbury and the green meadows of the Kennet the Hampshire
hills may be seen, looking like the South Down range at its
highest point viewed from the Sussex Weald.  I made for Coombe
Hill, the highest hill in Hampshire, and found it a
considerable labour to push my machine up from the pretty
tree-hidden village of East Woodhay at its foot.  The top is a
league-long tableland, with stretches of green elastic turf,
thickets of furze and bramble, and clumps of ancient noble
beeches--a beautiful lonely wilderness with rabbits and birds
for only inhabitants.  From the highest point where a famous
gibbet stands for ever a thousand feet above the sea and where
there is a dew-pond, the highest in England, which has never
dried up although a large flock of sheep drink in it every
summer day, one looks down into an immense hollow, a Devil's
Punch Bowl very many times magnified,--and spies, far away and
far below, a few lonely houses half hidden by trees at the
bottom.  This is the romantic village of Coombe, and hither I
went and found the vicar busy in the garden of the small old
picturesque parsonage.  Here a very pretty little bird comedy
was in progress: a pair of stock-doves which had been taken
from a rabbit-hole in the hill and reared by hand had just
escaped from the large cage where they had always lived, and
all the family were excitedly engaged in trying to recapture
them.  They were delightful to see--those two pretty blue
birds with red legs running busily about on the green lawn,
eagerly searching for something to eat and finding nothing.
They were quite tame and willing to be fed, so that anyone
could approach them and put as much salt on their tails as he
liked, but they refused to be touched or taken; they were too
happy in their new freedom, running and flying about in that
brilliant sunshine, and when I left towards the evening they
were still at large.

But before quitting that small isolated village in its green
basin--a human heart in a chalk hill, almost the highest in
England--I wished the hours I spent in it had been days, so
much was there to see and hear.  There was the gibbet on the
hill, for example, far up on the rim of the green basin, four
hundred feet above the village; why had that memorial, that
symbol of a dreadful past, been preserved for so many years
and generations? and why had it been raised so high--was it
because the crime of the person put to death there was of so
monstrous a nature that it was determined to suspend him, if
not on a gibbet fifty cubits high, at all events higher above
the earth than Haman the son of Hammedatha the Agagite?  The
gruesome story is as follows.

Once upon a time there lived a poor widow woman in Coombe,
with two sons, aged fourteen and sixteen, who worked at a farm
in the village.  She had a lover, a middle-aged man, living at
Woodhay, a carrier who used to go on two or three days each
week with his cart to deliver parcels at Coombe.  But he was a
married man, and as he could not marry the widow while his
wife remained alive, it came into his dull Berkshire brain
that the only way out of the difficulty was to murder her, and
to this course the widow probably consented.  Accordingly, one
day, he invited or persuaded her to accompany him on his
journey to the remote village, and on the way he got her out
of the cart and led her into a close thicket to show her
something he had discovered there.  What he wished to show her
(according to one version of the story) was a populous
hornets' nest, and having got her there he suddenly flung her
against it and made off, leaving the cloud of infuriated
hornets to sting her to death.  That night he slept at Coombe,
or stayed till a very late hour at the widow's cottage and
told her what he had done.  In telling her he had spoken in
his ordinary voice, but by and by it occurred to him that the
two boys, who were sleeping close by in the living-room, might
have been awake and listening.  She assured him that they were
both fast asleep, but he was not satisfied, and said that if
they had heard him he would kill them both, as he had no wish
to swing, and he could not trust them to hold their tongues.
Thereupon they got up and examined the faces of the two boys,
holding a candle over them, and saw that they were in a deep
sleep, as was natural after their long day's hard work on the
farm, and the murderer's fears were set at rest.  Yet one of
the boys, the younger, had been wide awake all the time,
listening, trembling with terror, with wide eyes to the
dreadful tale, and only when they first became suspicious
instinct came to his aid and closed his eyes and stilled his
tremors and gave him the appearance of being asleep.  Early
next morning, with his terror still on him, he told what he
had heard to his brother, and by and by, unable to keep the
dreadful secret, they related it to someone--a carter or
ploughman on the farm.  He in turn told the farmer, who at
once gave information, and in a short time the man and woman
were arrested.  In due time they were tried, convicted, and
sentenced to be hanged in the parish where the crime had been
committed.

Everybody was delighted, and Coombe most delighted of all, for
it happened that some of their wise people had been diligently
examining into the matter and had made the discovery that the
woman had been murdered just outside their borders in the
adjoining parish of Inkpen, so that they were going to enjoy
seeing the wicked punished at somebody else's expense.  Inkpen
was furious and swore that it would not be saddled with the
cost of a great public double execution.  The line dividing
the two parishes had always been a doubtful one; now they were
going to take the benefit of the doubt and let Coombe hang its
own miscreants!

As neither side would yield, the higher authorities were
compelled to settle the matter for them, and ordered the cost
to be divided between the two parishes, the gibbet to be
erected on the boundary line, as far as it could be
ascertained.  This was accordingly done, the gibbet being
erected at the highest point crossed by the line, on a stretch
of beautiful smooth elastic turf, among prehistoric
earthworks--a spot commanding one of the finest and most
extensive views in Southern England.  The day appointed for
the execution brought the greatest concourse of people ever
witnessed at that lofty spot, at all events since prehistoric
times.  If some of the ancient Britons had come out of their
graves to look on, seated on their earthworks, they would have
probably rubbed their ghostly hands together and remarked to
each other that it reminded them of old times.  All classes
were there, from the nobility and gentry, on horseback and in
great coaches in which they carried their own provisions, to
the meaner sort who had trudged from all the country round on
foot, and those who had not brought their own food and beer
were catered for by traders in carts.  The crowd was a
hilarious one, and no doubt that grand picnic on the beacon
was the talk of they country for a generation or longer.
The two wretches having been hanged in chains on one gibbet
were left to be eaten by ravens, crows, and magpipes, and
dried by sun and winds, until, after long years, the swinging,
creaking skeletons with their chains on fell to pieces and
were covered with the turf, but the gibbet itself was never
removed.

Then a strange thing happened.  The sheep on a neighbouring
farm became thin and sickly and yielded little wool and died
before their time.  No remedies availed and the secret of
their malady could not be discovered; but it went on so long
that the farmer was threatened with utter ruin.  Then, by
chance, it was discovered that the chains in which the
murderers had been hanged had been thrown by some evil-minded
person into a dew-pond on the farm.  This was taken to be the
cause of the malady in the sheep; at all events, the chains
having been taken out of the pond and buried deep in the
earth, the flock recovered: it was supposed that the person
who had thrown the chains in the water to poison it had done
so to ruin the farmer in revenge for some injustice or grudge.
But even now we are not quite done with the gibbet!  Many,
many years had gone by when Inkpen discovered from old
documents that their little dishonest neighbour, Coombe, had
taken more land than she was entitled to, that not only a part
but the whole of that noble hill-top belonged to her!  It was
Inkpen's turn to chuckle now; but she chuckled too soon, and
Coombe, running out to look, found the old rotten stump of the
gibbet still in the ground.  Hands off! she cried.  Here
stands a post, which you set up yourself, or which we put up
together and agreed that this should be the boundary line for
ever.  Inkpen sneaked off to hide herself in her village, and
Coombe, determined to keep the subject in mind, set up a
brand-new stout gibbet in the place of the old rotting one.
That too decayed and fell to pieces in time, and the present
gibbet is therefore the third, and nobody has ever been hanged
on it.  Coombe is rather proud of it, but I am not sure that
Inkpen is.

That was one of three strange events in the life of the
village which I heard: the other two must be passed by; they
would take long to tell and require a good pen to do them
justice.  To me the best thing in or of the village was the
vicar himself, my put-upon host, a man of so blithe a nature,
so human and companionable, that when I, a perfect stranger
without an introduction or any excuse for such intrusion came
down like a wolf on his luncheon-table, he received me as if I
had been an old friend or one of his own kindred, and freely
gave up his time to me for the rest of that day.  To count his
years he was old: he had been vicar of Coombe for half a
century, but he was a young man still and had never had a
day's illness in his life--he did not know what a headache
was.  He smoked with me, and to prove that he was not a total
abstainer he drank my health in a glass of port wine--very
good wine.  It was Coombe that did it--its peaceful life,
isolated from a distracting world in that hollow hill, and the
marvellous purity of its air.  "Sitting there on my lawn," he
said, "you are six hundred feet above the sea, although in a
hollow four hundred feet deep."  It was an ideal open-air
room, round and green, with the sky for a roof.  In winter it
was sometimes very cold, and after a heavy fall of snow the
scene was strange and impressive from the tiny village set in
its stupendous dazzling white bowl.  Not only on those rare
arctic days, but at all times it was wonderfully quiet.  The
shout of a child or the peaceful crow of a cock was the
loudest sound you heard.  Once a gentleman from London town
came down to spend a week at the parsonage.  Towards evening
on the very first day he grew restless and complained of the
abnormal stillness.  "I like a quiet place well enough," he
exclaimed, "but this tingling silence I can't stand!"  And
stand it he wouldn't and didn't, for on the very next morning
he took himself off.  Many years had gone by, but the vicar
could not forget the Londoner who had come down to invent a
new way of describing the Coombe silence.  His tingling phrase
was a joy for ever.

He took me to the church--one of the tiniest churches in the
country, just the right size for a church in a tiny village
and assured me that he had never once locked the door in his
fifty years--day and night it was open to any one to enter.
It was a refuge and shelter from the storm and the Tempest,
and many a poor homeless wretch had found a dry place to sleep
in that church during the last half a century.  This man's
feeling of pity and tenderness for the very poor, even the
outcast and tramp, was a passion.  But how strange all this
would sound in the ears of many country clergymen!  How many
have told me when I have gone to the parsonage to "borrow the
key" that it had been found necessary to keep the church door
locked, to prevent damage, thefts, etc.  "Have you never had
anything stolen?" I asked him.  Yes, once, a great many years
ago, the church plate had been taken away in the night.  But
it was recovered: the thief had taken it to the top of the
hill and thrown it into the dewpond there, no doubt intending
to take it out and dispose of it at some more convenient time.
But it was found, and had ever since then been kept safe at
the vicarage.  Nothing of value to tempt a man to steal was
kept in the church.  He had never locked it, but once in his
fifty years it had been locked against him by the
churchwardens.  This happened in the days of the Joseph Arch
agitation, when the agricultural labourer's condition was
being hotly discussed throughout the country.  The vicar's
heart was stirred, for he knew better than most how hard these
conditions were at Coombe and in the surrounding parishes.  He
took up the subject and preached on it in his own pulpit in a
way that offended the landowners and alarmed the farmers in
the district.  The church wardens, who were farmers, then
locked him out of his church, and for two or three weeks there
was no public worship in the parish of Coombe.  Doubtless
their action was applauded by all the substantial men in the
neighbourhood; the others who lived in the cottages and were
unsubstantial didn't matter.  That storm blew over, but its
consequences endured, one being that the inflammatory parson
continued to be regarded with cold disapproval by the squires
and their larger tenants.  But the vicar himself was
unrepentant and unashamed; on the contrary, he gloried in what
he had said and done, and was proud to be able to relate that
a quarter of a century later one of the two men who had taken
that extreme course said to him, "We locked you out of your
own church, but years have brought me to another mind about
that question.  I see it in a different light now and know
that you were right and we were wrong."

Towards evening I said good-bye to my kind friend and
entertainer and continued my rural ride.  From Coombe it is
five miles to Hurstbourne Tarrant, another charming "highland"
village, and the road, sloping down the entire distance,
struck me as one of the best to be on I had travelled in
Hampshire, running along a narrow green valley, with oak and
birch and bramble and thorn in their late autumn colours
growing on the slopes on either hand.  Probably the beauty of
the scene, or the swift succession of beautiful scenes, with
the low sun flaming on the "coloured shades," served to keep
out of my mind something that should have been in it.  At all
events, it was odd that I had more than once promised myself a
visit to the very village I was approaching solely because
William Cobbett had described and often stayed in it, and now
no thought of him and his ever-delightful Rural Rides was in
my mind.

Arrived at the village I went straight to the "George and
Dragon," where a friend had assured me I could always find
good accommodations.  But he was wrong: there was no room for
me, I was told by a weird-looking, lean, white-haired old
woman with whity-blue unfriendly eyes.  She appeared to resent
it that any one should ask for accommodation at such a time,
when the "shooting gents" from town required all the rooms
available.  Well, I had to sleep somewhere, I told her:
couldn't she direct me to a cottage where I could get a bed?
No, she couldn't--it is always so; but after the third time of
asking she unfroze so far as to say that perhaps they would
take me in at a cottage close by.  So I went, and a poor kind
widow who lived there with a son consented to put me up.  She
made a nice fire in the sitting-room, and after warming myself
before it, while watching the firelight and shadows playing on
the dim walls and ceiling, it came to me that I was not in a
cottage, but in a large room with an oak floor and
wainscoting.  "Do you call this a cottage?" I said to the
woman when she came in with tea.  "No, I have it as a cottage,
but it is an old farm-house called the Rookery," she returned.
Then, for the first time, I remembered Rural Rides.  "This
then is the very house where William Cobbett used to stay
seventy or eighty years ago," I said.  She had never heard of
William Cobbett; she only knew that at that date it had been
tenanted by a farmer named Blount, a Roman Catholic, who had
some curious ideas about the land.

That settled it.  Blount was the name of Cobbett's friend, and
I had come to the very house where Cobbett was accustomed to
stay.  But how odd that my first thought of the man should
have come to me when sitting by the fire where Cobbett himself
had sat on many a cold evening!  And this was November the
second, the very day eighty-odd years ago when he paid his
first visit to the Rookery; at all events, it is the first
date he gives in Rural Rides.  And he too had been delighted
with the place and the beauty of the surrounding country with
the trees in their late autumn colours.  Writing on November
2nd, 1821, he says: "The place is commonly called Uphusband,
which is, I think, as decent a corruption of names as one
could wish to meet with.  However, Uphusband the people will
have it, and Uphusband it shall be for me."  That is indeed
how he names it all through his book, after explaining that
"husband" is a corruption of Hurstbourne, and that there are
two Hurstbournes, this being the upper one.

I congratulated myself on having been refused accommodation at
the "George and Dragon," and was more than satisfied to pass
an evening without a book, sitting there alone listening to an
imaginary conversation between those two curious friends.
"Lord Carnarvon," says Cobbett, "told a man, in 1820, that he
did not like my politics.  But what did he mean by my
politics?  I have no politics but such as he ought to like.
To be sure I labour most assiduously to destroy a system of
distress and misery; but is that any reason why a Lord should
dislike my politics?  However, dislike them or like them, to
them, to those very politics, the Lords themselves must come
at last."

Undoubtedly he talked like that, just as he wrote and as he
spoke in public, his style, if style it can be called, being
the most simple, direct, and colloquial ever written.  And for
this reason, when we are aweary of the style of the stylist,
where the living breathing body becomes of less consequence
than its beautiful clothing, it is a relief, and refreshment,
to turn from the precious and delicate expression, the
implicit word, sought for high and low and at last found, the
balance of every sentence and perfect harmony of the whole
work--to go from it to the simple vigorous unadorned talk of
Rural Rides.  A classic, and as incongruous among classics as
a farmer in his smock-frock, leggings, and stout boots would
appear in a company of fine gentlemen in fashionable dress.
The powerful face is the main thing, and we think little of
the frock and leggings and how the hair is parted or if parted
at all.  Harsh and crabbed as his nature no doubt was, and
bitter and spiteful at times, his conversation must yet have
seemed like a perpetual feast of honeyed sweets to his farmer
friend.  Doubtless there was plenty of variety in it: now he
would expatiate on the beauty of the green downs over which he
had just ridden, the wooded slopes in their glorious autumn
colours, and the rich villages between; this would remind him
of Malthus, that blasphemous monster who had dared to say that
the increase in food production did not keep pace with
increase of population; then a quieting down, a
breathing-space, all about the turnip crop, the price of eggs
at Weyhill Fair, and the delights of hare coursing, until
politics would come round again and a fresh outburst from the
glorious demagogue in his tantrums.

At eight o'clock Cobbett would say good night and go to bed,
and early next morning write down what he had said to his
friend, or some of it, and send it off to be printed in his
paper.  That, I take it, is how Rural Rides was written, and
that is why it seems so fresh to us to this day, and that to
take it up after other books is like going out from a
luxurious room full of fine company into the open air to feel
the wind and rain on one's face and see the green grass.
But I very much regret that Cobbett tells us nothing of his
farmer friend.  Blount, I imagine, must have been a man of a
very fine character to have won the heart and influenced such
a person.  Cobbett never loses an opportunity of vilifying the
parsons and expressing his hatred of the Established Church;
and yet, albeit a Protestant, he invariably softens down when
he refers to the Roman Catholic faith and appears quite
capable of seeing the good that is in it.

It was Blount, I think, who had soothed the savage breast of
the man in this matter.  The only thing I could hear about
Blount and his "queer notions" regarding the land was his idea
that the soil could be improved by taking the flints out.
"The soil to look upon," Cobbett truly says, "appears to be
more than half flint, but is a very good quality."  Blount
thought to make it better, and for many years employed all the
aged poor villagers and the children in picking the flints
from the ploughed land and gathering them in vast heaps.  It
does not appear that he made his land more productive, but his
hobby was a good one for the poor of the village; the stones,
too, proved useful afterwards to the road-makers, who have
been using them these many years.  A few heaps almost clothed
over with a turf which had formed on them in the course of
eighty years were still to be seen on the land when I was
there.

The following day I took no ride.  The weather was so
beautiful it seemed better to spend the time sitting or
basking in the warmth and brightness or strolling about.
At all events, it was a perfect day at Hurstbourne Tarrant,
though not everywhere, for on that third of November the
greatest portion of Southern England was drowned in a cold
dense white fog.  In London it was dark, I heard.  Early in
the morning I listened to a cirl-bunting singing merrily from
a bush close to the George and Dragon Inn.  This charming bird
is quite common in the neighbourhood, although, as elsewhere
in England, the natives know it not by its book name, nor by
any other, and do not distinguish it from its less engaging
cousin, the yellowhammer.

After breakfast I strolled about the common and in Doles Wood,
on the down above the village, listening to the birds, and on
my way back encountered a tramp whose singular appearance
produced a deep impression on my mind.  We have heard of a
work by some modest pressman entitled "Monarchs I have met",
and I sometimes think that one equally interesting might be
written on "Tramps I have met".  As I have neither time nor
stomach for the task, I will make a present of the title to
any one of my fellow-travellers, curious in tramps, who cares
to use it.  This makes two good titles I have given away in
this chapter with a borrowed one.

But if it had been possible for me to write such a book, a
prominent place would be given in it to the one tramp I have
met who could be accurately described as gorgeous.  I did not
cultivate his acquaintance; chance threw us together and we
separated after exchanging a few polite commonplaces, but his
big flamboyant image remains vividly impressed on my mind.

At noon, in the brilliant sunshine, as I came loiteringly down
the long slope from Doles Wood to the village, he overtook me.
He was a huge man, over six feet high, nobly built, suggesting
a Scandinavian origin, with a broad blond face, good features,
and prominent blue eyes, and his hair was curly and shone like
gold in the sunlight.  Had he been a mere labourer in a
workman's rough clay-stained clothes, one would have stood
still to look at and admire him, and say perhaps what a
magnificent warrior he would have looked with sword and spear
and plumed helmet, mounted on a big horse!  But alas! he had
the stamp of the irreclaimable blackguard on his face; and
that same handsome face was just then disfigured with several
bruises in three colours--blue, black, and red.  Doubtless he
had been in a drunken brawl on the previous evening and had
perhaps been thrown out of some low public-house and properly
punished.

In his dress he was as remarkable as in his figure.  Bright
blue trousers much too small for his stout legs, once the
property, no doubt, of some sporting young gent of loud tastes
in colours; a spotted fancy waistcoat, not long enough to meet
the trousers, a dirty scarlet tie, long black frock-coat,
shiny in places, and a small dirty grey cap which only covered
the topmost part of his head of golden hair.

Walking by the hedge-side he picked and devoured the late
blackberries, which were still abundant.  It was a beautiful
unkept hedge with scarlet and purple fruit among the
many-coloured fading leaves and silver-grey down of old-man's-
beard.

I too picked and ate a few berries and made the remark that it
was late to eat such fruit in November.  The Devil in these
parts, I told him, flies abroad in October to spit on the
bramble bushes and spoil the fruit.  It was even worse further
north, in Norfolk and Suffolk, where they say the Devil goes
out at Michaelmas and shakes his verminous trousers over the
bushes.

He didn't smile; he went on sternly eating blackberries, and
then remarked in a bitter tone, "That Devil they talk about
must have a busy time, to go messing about blackberry bushes
in addition to all his other important work."

I was silent, and presently, after swallowing a few more
berries, he resumed in the same tone: "Very fine, very
beautiful all this"--waving his hand to indicate the hedge,
its rich tangle of purple-red stems and coloured leaves, and
scarlet fruit and silvery oldman's-beard.  "An artist enjoys
seeing this sort of thing, and it's nice for all those who go
about just for the pleasure of seeing things.  But when it
comes to a man tramping twenty or thirty miles a day on an
empty belly, looking for work which he can't find, he doesn't
see it quite in the same way."

"True," I returned, with indifference.

But he was not to be put off by my sudden coldness, and he
proceeded to inform me that he had just returned from
Salisbury Plain, that it had been noised abroad that ten
thousand men were wanted by the War Office to work in forming
new camps.  On arrival he found it was not so--it was all a
lie--men were not wanted--and he was now on his way to
Andover, penniless and hungry and--

By the time he had got to that part of his story we were some
distance apart, as I had remained standing still while he,
thinking me still close behind, had gone on picking
blackberries and talking.  He was soon out of sight.

At noon the following day, the weather still being bright and
genial, I went to Crux Easton, a hilltop village consisting of
some low farm buildings, cottages, and a church not much
bigger than a cottage.  A great house probably once existed
here, as the hill has a noble avenue of limes, which it wears
like a comb or crest.  On the lower slope of the hill, the old
unkept hedges were richer in colour than in most places, owing
to the abundance of the spindle-wood tree, laden with its
loose clusters of flame-bright, purple-pink and orange
berries.

Here I saw a pretty thing: a cock cirl-bunting, his yellow
breast towards me, sitting quietly on a large bush of these
same brilliant berries, set amidst a mass of splendidly
coloured hazel leaves, mixed with bramble and tangled with ivy
and silver-grey traveller's-joy.  An artist's heart would have
leaped with joy at the sight, but all his skill and oriental
colours would have made nothing of it, for all visible nature
was part of the picture, the wide wooded earth and the blue
sky beyond and above the bird, and the sunshine that glorified
all.

On the other side of the hedge there were groups of fine old
beech trees and, strange to see, just beyond the green slope
and coloured trees, was the great whiteness of the fog which
had advanced thus far and now appeared motionless.  I went
down and walked by the side of the bank of mist, feeling its
clammy coldness on one cheek while the other was fanned by the
warm bright air.  Seen at a distance of a couple of hundred
yards, the appearance was that of a beautiful pearly-white
cloud resting upon the earth.  Many fogs had I seen, but never
one like this, so substantial-looking, so sharply defined,
standing like a vast white wall or flat-topped hill at the
foot of the green sunlit slope!  I had the fancy that if I had
been an artist in sculpture, and rapid modeller, by using the
edge of my hand as a knife I could have roughly carved out a
human figure, then drawing it gently out of the mass proceeded
to press and work it to a better shape, the shape, let us say,
of a beautiful woman.  Then, if it were done excellently, and
some man-mocking deity, or power of the air, happened to be
looking on, he would breathe life and intelligence into it,
and send it, or her, abroad to mix with human kind and
complicate their affairs.  For she would seem a woman and
would be like some women we have known, beautiful with blue
flower-like eyes, pale gold or honey-coloured hair; very white
of skin, Leightonian, almost diaphanous, so delicate as to
make all other skins appear coarse and made of clay.  And with
her beauty and a mysterious sweetness not of the heart, since
no heart there would be in that mist-cold body, she would draw
all hearts, ever inspiring, but never satisfying passion, her
beauty and alluring smiles being but the brightness of a cloud
on which the sun is shining.

Birds, driven by the fog to that sunlit spot, were all about
me in incredible numbers.  Rooks and daws were congregating on
the bushes, where their black figures served to intensify the
red-gold tints of the foliage.  At intervals the entire vast
cawing multitude simultaneously rose up with a sound as
of many waters, and appeared now at last about to mount up
into the blue heavens, to float circling there far above the
world as they are accustomed to do on warm windless days in
autumn.  But in a little while their brave note would change
to one of trouble; the sight of that immeasurable whiteness
covering so much of the earth would scare them, and led by
hundreds of clamouring daws they would come down again to
settle once more in black masses on the shining yellow trees.

Close by a ploughed field of about forty acres was the
camping-ground of an army of peewits; they were travellers
from the north perhaps, and were quietly resting, sprinkled
over the whole area.  More abundant were the small birds in
mixed flocks or hordes--finches, buntings, and larks in
thousands on thousands, with a sprinkling of pipits and pied
and grey wagtails, all busily feeding on the stubble and fresh
ploughed land.  Thickly and evenly distributed, they appeared
to the vision ranging over the brown level expanse as minute
animated and variously coloured clods--black and brown and
grey and yellow and olive-green.

It was a rare pleasure to be in this company, to revel in
their astonishing numbers, to feast my soul on them as it
were--little birds in such multitudes that ten thousand
Frenchmen and Italians might have gorged to repletion on their
small succulent bodies--and to reflect that they were safe
from persecution so long as they remained here in England.
This is something for an Englishman to be proud of.

After spending two hours at Crux Easton, with that dense
immovable fog close by, I at length took the plunge to get to
Highclere.  What a change!  I was at once where all form and
colour and melody had been blotted out.  My clothes were hoary
with clinging mist, my fingers numb with cold, and Highclere,
its scattered cottages appearing like dim smudges through the
whiteness, was the dreariest village on earth.  I fled on to
Newbury in quest of warmth and light, and found it indoors,
but the town was deep in the fog.

The next day I ventured out again to look for the sun, and
found it not, but my ramble was not without its reward.  In a
pine wood three miles from the town I stood awhile to listen
to the sound as of copious rain of the moisture dropping from
the trees, when a sudden tempest of loud, sharp metallic
notes--a sound dear to the ornithologist's ears--made me jump;
and down into the very tree before which I was standing
dropped a flock of about twenty crossbills.  So excited and
noisy when coming down, the instant they touched the tree they
became perfectly silent and motionless.  Seven of their number
had settled on the outside shoots, and sat there within forty
feet of me, looking like painted wooden images of small green
and greenish-yellow parrots; for a space of fifteen minutes
not the slightest movement did they make, and at length,
before going, I waved my arms about and shouted to frighten
them, and still they refused to stir.

Next morning that memorable fog lifted, to England's joy, and
quitting my refuge I went out once more into the region of
high sheep-walks, adorned with beechen woods and
traveller's-joy in the hedges, rambling by Highclere,
Burghclere, and Kingsclere.  The last--Hampshire's little
Cuzco--is a small and village-like old red brick town,
unapproached by a railroad and unimproved, therefore still
beautiful, as were all places in other, better, less civilized
days.  Here in the late afternoon a chilly grey haze crept
over the country and set me wishing for a fireside and the
sound of friendly voices, and I turned my face towards beloved
Silchester.  Leaving the hills behind me I got away from the
haze and went my devious way by serpentine roads through a
beautiful, wooded, undulating country.  And I wish that for a
hundred, nay, for a thousand years to come, I could on each
recurring November have such an afternoon ride, with that
autumnal glory in the trees.  Sometimes, seeing the road
before me carpeted with pure yellow, I said to myself, now I
am coming to elms; but when the road shone red and russet-gold
before me I knew it was overhung by beeches.  But the oak is
the common tree in this place, and from every high point on
the road I saw far before me and on either hand the woods and
copses all a tawny yellow gold--the hue of the dying oak leaf.
The tall larches were lemon-yellow, and when growing among
tall pines produced a singular effect.  Best of all was it
where beeches grew among the firs, and the low sun on my left
hand shining through the wood gave the coloured translucent
leaves an unimaginable splendour.  This was the very effect
which men, inspired by a sacred passion, had sought to
reproduce in their noblest work--the Gothic cathedral and
church, its dim interior lit by many-coloured stained glass.
The only choristers in these natural fanes were the robins and
the small lyrical wren; but on passing through the rustic
village of Wolverton I stopped for a couple of minutes to
listen to the lively strains of a cirl-bunting among some farm
buildings.

Then on to Silchester, its furzy common and scattered village
and the vast ruinous walls, overgrown with ivy, bramble, and
thorn, of ancient Roman Calleva.  Inside the walls, at one
spot, a dozen men were still at work in the fading light; they
were just finishing--shovelling earth in to obliterate all
that had been opened out during the year.  The old flint
foundations that had been revealed; the houses with porches
and corridors and courtyards and pillared hypocausts; the
winter room with its wide beautiful floor--red and black and
white and grey and yellow, with geometric pattern and twist
and scroll and flower and leaf and quaint figures of man and
beast and bird--all to be covered up with earth so that the
plough may be driven over it again, and the wheat grow and
ripen again as it has grown and ripened there above the dead
city for so many centuries.  The very earth within those walls
had a reddish cast owing to the innumerable fragments of red
tile and tessera mixed with it.  Larks and finches were busily
searching for seeds in the reddish-brown soil.  They would
soon be gone to their roosting-places and the tired men to
their cottages, and the white owl coming from his hiding-place
in the walls would have old Silchester to himself, as he has
had it since the cries and moans of the conquered died into
silence so long ago.




Chapter Ten: The Last of His Name


I came by chance to the village--Norton, we will call it, just
to call it something, but the county in which it is situated
need not be named.  It happened that about noon that day I
planned to pass the night at a village where, as I was
informed at a small country town I had rested in, there was a
nice inn--"The Fox and Grapes"--to put up at, but when I
arrived, tired and hungry, I was told that I could not have a
bed and that the only thing to do was to try Norton, which
also boasted an inn.  It was hard to have to turn some two or
three miles out of my road at that late hour on a chance of a
shelter for the night, but there was nothing else to do, so on
to Norton I went with heavy steps, and arrived a little after
sunset, more tired and hungry than ever, only to be told at
the inn that they had no accommodation for me, that their one
spare room had been engaged!  "What am I to do, then?" I
demanded of the landlord.  "Beyond this village I cannot go
to-night--do you want me to go out and sleep under a hedge?"
He called his spouse, and after some conversation they said
the village baker might be able to put me up, as he had a
spare bedroom in his house.  So to the baker's I went, and
found it a queer, ramshackle old place, standing a little back
from the village street in a garden and green plot with a few
fruit trees growing on it.  To my knock the baker himself came
out--a mild-looking, flabby-faced man, with his mouth full, in
a very loose suit of pyjama-like garments of a bluish floury
colour.  I told him my story, and he listened, swallowing his
mouthful, then cast his eyes down and rubbed his chin, which
had a small tuft of hairs growing on it, and finally said, "I
don't know.  I must ask my wife.  But come in and have a cup
of tea--we're just having a cup ourselves, and perhaps you'd
like one."

I could have told him that I should like a dozen cups and a
great many slices of bread-and-butter, if there was nothing
else more substantial to be had.  However, I only said, "Thank
you," and followed him in to where his wife, a nice-looking
woman, with black hair and olive face, was seated behind the
teapot.  Imagine my surprise when I found that besides tea
there was a big hot repast on the table--a ham, a roast fowl,
potatoes and cabbage, a rice pudding, a dish of stewed fruit,
bread-and-butter, and other things.

"You call this a cup of tea!" I exclaimed delightedly.  The
woman laughed, and he explained in an apologetic way that he
had formerly suffered grievously from indigestion, so that for
many years his life was a burden to him, until he discovered
that if he took one big meal a day, after the work was over,
he could keep perfectly well.

I was never hungrier than on this evening, and never, I think,
ate a bigger or more enjoyable meal; nor have I ever ceased to
remember those two with gratitude, and if I were to tell here
what they told me--the history of their two lives--I think it
would be a more interesting story than the one I am about to
relate.  I stayed a whole week in their hospitable house; a
week which passed only too quickly, for never had I been in a
sweeter haunt of peace than this village in a quiet, green
country remote from towns and stations.  It was a small rustic
place, a few old houses and thatched cottages, and the ancient
church with square Norman tower hard to see amid the immense
old oaks and elms that grew all about it.  At the end of the
village were the park gates, and the park, a solitary, green
place with noble trees, was my favourite haunt; for there was
no one to forbid me, the squire being dead, the old red
Elizabethan house empty, with only a caretaker in the
gardener's lodge to mind it, and the estate for sale.  Three
years it had been in that condition, but nobody seemed to want
it; occasionally some important person came rushing down in a
motor-car, but after running over the house he would come out
and, remarking that it was a "rummy old place," remount his
car and vanish in a cloud of dust to be seen no more.

The dead owner, I found, was much in the village mind; and no
wonder, since Norton had never been without a squire until he
passed away, leaving no one to succeed him.  It was as if some
ancient landmark, or an immemorial oak tree on the green in
whose shade the villagers had been accustomed to sit for many
generations, had been removed.  There was a sense of something
wanting something gone out of their lives.  Moreover, he had
been a man of a remarkable character, and though they never
loved him they yet reverenced his memory.

So much was he in their minds that I could not be in the
village and not hear the story of his life--the story which, I
said, interested me less than that of the good baker and his
wife.  On his father's death at a very advanced age he came, a
comparative stranger, to Norton, the first half of his life
having been spent abroad.  He was then a middle-aged man,
unmarried, and a bachelor he remained to the end.  He was of a
reticent disposition and was said to be proud; formal, almost
cold, in manner; furthermore, he did not share his neighbours'
love of sport of any description, nor did he care for society,
and because of all this he was regarded as peculiar, not to
say eccentric.  But he was deeply interested in agriculture,
especially in cattle and their improvement, and that object
grew to be his master passion.  It was a period of great
depression, and as his farms fell vacant he took them into his
own hands, increased his stock and built model cowhouses, and
came at last to be known throughout his own country, and
eventually everywhere, as one of the biggest cattle-breeders
in England.  But he was famous in a peculiar way.  Wise
breeders and buyers shook their heads and even touched their
foreheads significantly, and predicted that the squire of
Norton would finish by ruining himself.  They were right, he
ruined himself; not that he was mentally weaker than those who
watched and cunningly exploited him; he was ruined because his
object was a higher one than theirs.  He saw clearly that the
prize system is a vicious one and that better results may be
obtained without it.  He proved this at a heavy cost by
breeding better beasts than his rivals, who were all
exhibitors and prizewinners, and who by this means got their
advertisements and secured the highest prices, while he, who
disdained prizes and looked with disgust at the overfed and
polished animals at shows, got no advertisements and was
compelled to sell at unremunerative prices.  The buyers, it
may be mentioned, were always the breeders for shows, and they
made a splendid profit out of it.

He carried on the fight for a good many years, becoming more
and more involved, until his creditors took possession of the
estate, sold off the stock, let the farms, and succeeded in
finding a tenant for the furnished house.  He went to a
cottage in the village and there passed his remaining years.
To the world he appeared unmoved by his reverses.  The change
from mansion and park to a small thatched cottage, with a
labourer's wife for attendant, made no change in the man, nor
did he resign his seat on the Bench of Magistrates or any
other unpaid office he held.  To the last he was what he had
always been, formal and ceremonious, more gracious to those
beneath him than to equals; strict in the performance of his
duties, living with extreme frugality and giving freely to
those in want, and very regular in his attendance at church,
where he would sit facing the tombs and memorials of his
ancestors, among the people but not of them--a man alone and
apart, respected by all but loved by none.

Finally he died and was buried with the others, and one more
memorial with the old name, which he bore last was placed on
the wall.  That was the story as it was told me, and as it was
all about a man who was without charm and had no love interest
it did not greatly interest me, and I soon dismissed it from
my thoughts.  Then one day coming through a grove in the park
and finding myself standing before the ancient, empty,
desolate house--for on the squire's death everything had been
sold and taken away--I remembered that the caretaker had
begged me to let him show me over the place.  I had not felt
inclined to gratify him, as I had found him a young man of a
too active mind whose only desire was to capture some person
to talk to and unfold his original ideas and schemes, but now
having come to the house I thought I would suffer him, and
soon found him at work in the vast old walled garden.  He
joyfully threw down his spade and let me in and then up to the
top floor, determined that I should see everything.  By the
time we got down to the ground floor I was pretty tired of
empty rooms, oak panelled, and passages and oak staircases,
and of talk, and impatient to get away.  But no, I had not
seen the housekeeper's room--I must see that!--and so into
another great vacant room I was dragged, and to keep me as
long as possible in that last room he began unlocking and
flinging open all the old oak cupboards and presses.  Glancing
round at the long array of empty shelves, I noticed a small
brown-paper parcel, thick with dust, in a corner, and as it
was the only movable thing I had seen in that vacant house I
asked him what the parcel contained.  Books, he replied--they
had been left as of no value when the house was cleared of
furniture.  As I wished to see the books he undid the parcel;
it contained forty copies of a small quarto-shaped book of
sonnets, with the late squire's name as author on the title
page.  I read a sonnet, and told him I should like to read
them all.  "You can have a copy, of course," he exclaimed.
"Put it in your pocket and keep it."  When I asked him if he
had any right to give one away he laughed and said that if any
one had thought the whole parcel worth twopence it would not
have been left behind.  He was quite right; a cracked dinner
--plate or a saucepan with a hole in it or an earthenware
teapot with a broken spout would not have been left, but the
line was drawn at a book of sonnets by the late squire.
Nobody wanted it, and so without more qualms I put it in my
pocket, and have it before me now, opened at page 63, on which
appears, without a headline, the sonnet I first read, and
which I quote:--

   How beautiful are birds, of God's sweet air
     Free denizens; no ugly earthly spot
     Their boundless happiness doth seem to blot.
   The swallow, swiftly flying here and there,
   Can it be true that dreary household care
     Doth goad her to incessant flight?
     If not How can it be that she doth cast her lot
   Now there, now here, pursuing summer everywhere?
     I sadly fear that shallow, tiny brain
   Is not exempt from anxious cares and fears,
     That mingled heritage of joy and pain
   That for some reason everywhere appears;
     And yet those birds, how beautiful they are!
     Sure beauty is to happiness no bar.

This has a fault that doth offend the reader of modern verse,
and there are many of the eighty sonnets in the book which do
not equal it in merit.  He was manifestly an amateur; he
sometimes writes with labour, and he not infrequently ends
with the unpardonable weak line.  Nevertheless he had rightly
chosen this difficult form in which to express his inner self.
It suited his grave, concentrated thought, and each little
imperfect poem of fourteen lines gives us a glimpse into a
wise, beneficent mind.  He had fought his fight and suffered
defeat, and had then withdrawn himself silently from the field
to die.  But if he had been embittered he could have relieved
himself in this little book.  There is no trace of such a
feeling.  He only asks, in one sonnet, where can a balm be
found for the heart fretted and torn with eternal cares; when
we have thought and striven for some great and good purpose,
when all our striving has ended in disaster?  His plan, he
concludes, is to go out in the quiet night-time and look at
the stars.

Here let me quote two more sonnets written in contemplative
mood, just to give the reader a fuller idea not of the verse,
as verse, but of the spirit in the old squire.  There is no
title to these two:--

   I like a fire of wood; there is a kind
     Of artless poetry in all its ways:
     When first 'tis lighted, how it roars and plays,
   And sways to every breath its flames, refined
   By fancy to some shape by life confined.
     And then how touching are its latter days;
     When, all its strength decayed, and spent the blaze
   Of fiery youth, grey ash is all we find.
     Perhaps we know the tree, of which the pile
   Once formed a part, and oft beneath its shade
     Have sported in our youth; or in quaint style
      Have carved upon its rugged bark a name
      Of which the memory doth alone remain
   A memory doomed, alas! in turn to fade.

Bad enough as verse, the critic will say; refined, confined,
find--what poor rhymes are these! and he will think me wrong
to draw these frailties from their forgotten abode.  But I
like to think of the solitary old man sitting by his wood
fire in the old house, not brooding bitterly on his frustrate
life, but putting his quiet thoughts into the form of a
sonnet.  The other is equally good--or bad, if the critic
will have it so:--

   The clock had just struck five, and all was still
     Within my house, when straight I open threw
     With eager hand the casement dim with dew.
   Oh, what a glorious flush of light did fill
   That old staircase!  and then and there did kill
     All those black doubts that ever do renew
     Their civil war with all that's good and true
   Within our hearts, when body and mind are ill
     From this slight incident I would infer
     A cheerful truth, that men without demur,
   In times of stress and doubt, throw open wide
   The windows of their breast; nor stung by pride
     In stifling darkness gloomily abide;
     But bid the light flow in on either side.

A "slight incident" and a beautiful thought.  But all I have
so far said about the little book is preliminary to what I
wish to say about another sonnet which must also be quoted.
It is perhaps, as a sonnet, as ill done as the others, but the
subject of it specially attracted me, as it happened to be one
which was much in my mind during my week's stay at Norton.
That remote little village without a squire or any person of
means or education in or near it capable of feeling the
slightest interest in the people, except the parson, an old
infirm man who was never seen but once a week--how wanting in
some essential thing it appeared!  It seemed to me that the
one thing which might be done in these small centres of rural
life to brighten and beautify existence is precisely the thing
which is never done, also that what really is being done is of
doubtful value and sometimes actually harmful.

Leaving Norton one day I visited other small villages in the
neighbourhood and found they were no better off.  I had heard
of the rector of one of these villages as a rather original
man, and went and discussed the subject with him.  "It is
quite useless thinking about it," he said.  "The people here
are clods, and will not respond to any effort you can make to
introduce a little light and sweetness into their lives."
There was no more to be said to him, but I knew he was wrong.
I found the villagers in that part of the country the most
intelligent and responsive people of their class I had ever
encountered.  It was a delightful experience to go into their
cottages, not to read them a homily or to present them with a
book or a shilling, nor to inquire into their welfare,
material and spiritual, but to converse intimately with a
human interest in them, as would be the case in a country
where there are no caste distinctions.  It was delightful,
because they were so responsive, so sympathetic, so alive.
Now it was just at this time, when the subject was in my mind,
that the book of sonnets came into my hands--given to me by
the generous caretaker--and I read in it this one on "Innocent
Amusements":-

   There lacks a something to complete the round
     Of our fair England's homely happiness
     A something, yet how oft do trifles bless
   When greater gifts by far redound
   To honours lone, but no responsive sound
     Of joy or mirth awake, nay, oft oppress,
     While gifts of which we scarce the moment guess
   In never-failing joys abound.
   No nation can be truly great
     That hath not something childlike in its life
     Of every day; it should its youth renew
   With simple joys that sweetly recreate
     The jaded mind, conjoined in friendly strife
     The pleasures of its childhood days pursue.

What wise and kindly thoughts he had--the old squire of
Norton!  Surely, when telling me the story of his life, they
had omitted something!  I questioned them on the point.  Did
he not in all the years he was at Norton House, and later when
he lived among them in a cottage in the village--did he not go
into their homes and meet them as if he knew and felt that
they were all of the same flesh, children of one universal
Father, and did he not make them feel this about him--that
the differences in fortune and position and education were
mere accidents?  And the answer was: No, certainly not! as
if I had asked a preposterous question.  He was the squire,
a gentleman--any one might understand that he could not come
among them like that!  That is what a parson can do because he
is, so to speak, paid to keep an eye on them, and besides it's
religion there and a different thing.  But the squire!--their
squire, that dignified old gentleman, so upright in his
saddle, so considerate and courteous to every one--but he
never forgot his position--never in that way!  I also asked if
he had never tried to establish, or advocated, or suggested to
them any kind of reunions to take place from time to time, or
an entertainment or festival to get them to come pleasantly
together, making a brightness in their lives--something which
would not be cricket or football, nor any form of sport for a
few of the men, all the others being mere lookers-on and the
women and children left out altogether; something which would
be for and include everyone, from the oldest grey labourer no
longer able to work to the toddling little ones; something of
their own invention, peculiar to Norton, which would be their
pride and make their village dearer to them?  And the answer
was still no, and no, and no.  He had never attempted, never
suggested, anything of the sort.  How could he--the squire!
Yet he wrote those wise words:--

   No nation can be truly great
     That hath not something childlike in its life
     Of every day.

Why are we lacking in that which others undoubtedly have, a
something to complete the round of homely happiness in our
little rural centres; how is it that we do not properly
encourage the things which, albeit childlike, are essential,
which sweetly recreate?  It is not merely the selfishness of
those who are well placed and prefer to live for themselves,
or who have light but care not to shed it on those who are not
of their class.  Selfishness is common enough everywhere, in
men of all races.  It is not selfishness, nor the growth of
towns or decay of agriculture, which as a fact does not decay,
nor education, nor any of the other causes usually given for
the dullness, the greyness of village life.  The chief cause,
I take it, is that gulf, or barrier, which exists between men
and men in different classes in our country, or a considerable
portion of it--the caste feeling which is becoming increasingly
rigid in the rural world, if my own observation, extending over
a period of twenty-five years, is not all wrong.




Chapter Eleven: Salisbury and Its Doves


Never in my experience has there been a worse spring season
than that of 1903 for the birds, more especially for the
short-winged migrants.  In April I looked for the woodland
warblers and found them not, or saw but a few of the commonest
kinds.  It was only too easy to account for this rarity.  The
bitter north-east wind had blown every day and all day long
during those weeks when birds are coming, and when nearing the
end of their journey, at its most perilous stage, the wind had
been dead against them; its coldness and force was too much
for these delicate travellers, and doubtless they were beaten
down in thousands into the grey waters of a bitter sea.  The
stronger-winged wheatear was more fortunate, since he comes in
March, and before that spell of deadly weather he was already
back in his breeding haunts on Salisbury Plain, and, in fact,
everywhere on that open down country.  I was there to hear him
sing his wild notes to the listening waste--singing them, as
his pretty fashion is, up in the air, suspended on quickly
vibrating wings like a great black and white moth.  But he was
in no singing mood, and at last, in desperation, I fled to
Salisbury to wait for loitering spring in that unattractive
town.

The streets were cold as the open plain, and there was no
comfort indoors; to haunt the cathedral during those vacant
days was the only occupation left to me.  There was some
shelter to be had under the walls, and the empty, vast
interior would seem almost cosy on coming in from the wind.
At service my due feet never failed, while morning, noon, and
evening I paced the smooth level green by the hour, standing
at intervals to gaze up at the immense pile with its central
soaring spire, asking myself why I had never greatly liked it
in the past and did not like it much better now when grown
familiar with it.  Undoubtedly it is one of the noblest
structures of its kind in England--even my eyes that look
coldly on most buildings could see it; and I could admire,
even reverence, but could not love.  It suffers by comparison
with other temples into which my soul has wandered.  It has
not the majesty and appearance of immemorial age, the dim
religious richness of the interior, with much else that goes
to make up, without and within, the expression which is so
marked in other mediaeval fanes--Winchester, Ely, York,
Canterbury, Exeter, and Wells.  To the dry, mechanical mind of
the architect these great cathedrals are in the highest degree
imperfect, according to the rules of his art: to all others
this imperfectness is their chief excellence and glory; for
they are in a sense a growth, a flower of many minds and many
periods, and are imperfect even as Nature is, in her rocks and
trees; and, being in harmony with Nature and like Nature, they
are inexpressibly beautiful and satisfying beyond all
buildings to the aesthetic as well as to the religious sense.

Occasionally I met and talked with an old man employed at the
cathedral.  One day, closing one eye and shading the other
with his hand, he gazed up at the building for some time, and
then remarked: "I'll tell you what's wrong with Salisbury--it
looks too noo."  He was near the mark; the fault is that to
the professional eye it is faultless; the lack of expression
is due to the fact that it came complete from its maker's
brain, like a coin from the mint, and being all on one
symmetrical plan it has the trim, neat appearance of a toy
cathedral carved out of wood and set on a green-painted
square.

After all, my thoughts and criticisms on the cathedral, as a
building, were merely incidental; my serious business was with
the feathered people to be seen there.  Few in the woods and
fewer on the windy downs, here birds were abundant, not only
on the building, where they were like seafowl congregated on a
precipitous rock, but they were all about me.  The level green
was the hunting ground of many thrushes--a dozen or twenty
could often be seen at one time--and it was easy to spot those
that had young.  The worm they dragged out was not devoured;
another was looked for, then another; then all were cut up in
proper lengths and beaten and bruised, and finally packed into
a bundle and carried off.  Rooks, too, were there, breeding on
the cathedral elms, and had no time and spirit to wrangle, but
could only caw-caw distressfully at the wind, which tossed
them hither and thither in the air and lashed the tall trees,
threatening at each fresh gust to blow their nests to pieces.
Small birds of half a dozen kinds were also there, and one
tinkle-tinkled his spring song quite merrily in spite of the
cold that kept the others silent and made me blue.  One day I
spied a big queen bumble-bee on the ground, looking extremely
conspicuous in its black and chestnut coat on the fresh green
sward; and thinking it numbed by the cold I picked it up.  It
moved its legs feebly, but alas! its enemy had found and
struck it down, and with its hard, sharp little beak had
drilled a hole in one of the upper plates of its abdomen, and
from that small opening had cunningly extracted all the meat.
Though still alive it was empty as a blown eggshell.  Poor
queen and mother, you survived the winter in vain, and went
abroad in vain in the bitter weather in quest of bread to
nourish your few first-born--the grubs that would help you by
and by; now there will be no bread for them, and for you no
populous city in the flowery earth and a great crowd of
children to rise up each day, when days are long, to call you
blessed!  And he who did this thing, the unspeakable oxeye
with his black and yellow breast--"catanic black and amber"--
even while I made my lamentation was tinkling his merry song
overhead in the windy elms.

The birds that lived on the huge cathedral itself had the
greatest attraction for me; and here the daws, if not the most
numerous, were the most noticeable, as they ever are on
account of their conspicuousness in their black plumage, their
loquacity and everlasting restlessness.  Far up on the ledge
from which the spire rises a kestrel had found a cosy corner
in which to establish himself, and one day when I was there a
number of daws took it on themselves to eject him: they
gathered near and flew this way and that, and cawed and cawed
in anger, and swooped at him, until he could stand their
insults no longer, and, suddenly dashing out, he struck and
buffeted them right and left and sent them screaming with fear
in all directions.  After this they left him in peace: they
had forgotten that he was a hawk, and that even the gentle
mousing wind-hover has a nobler spirit than any crow of them
all.

On first coming to the cathedral I noticed a few pigeons
sitting on the roof and ledges very high up, and, not seeing
them well, I assumed that they were of the common or domestic
kind.  By and by one cooed, then another; and recognizing the
stock-dove note I began to look carefully, and found that all
the birds on the building--about thirty pairs--were of this
species.  It was a great surprise, for though we occasionally
find a pair of stock-doves breeding on the ivied wall of some
inhabited mansion in the country, it was a new thing to find a
considerable colony of this shy woodland species established
on a building in a town.  They lived and bred there just as
the common pigeon--the vari-coloured descendant of the blue
rock--does on St. Paul's, the Law Courts, and the British
Museum in London.  Only, unlike our metropolitan doves, both
the domestic kind and the ringdove in the parks, the Salisbury
doves though in the town are not of it.  They come not down to
mix with the currents of human life in the streets and open
spaces; they fly away to the country to feed, and dwell on the
cathedral above the houses and people just as sea-birds
--kittiwake and guillemot and gannet--dwell on the ledges of
some vast ocean-fronting cliff.

The old man mentioned above told me that the birds were called
"rocks" by the townspeople, also that they had been there for
as long as he could remember.  Six or seven years ago, he
said, when the repairs to the roof and spire were started, the
pigeons began to go away until there was not one left.  The
work lasted three years, and immediately on its conclusion the
doves began to return, and were now as numerous as formerly.
How, I inquired, did these innocent birds get on with their
black neighbours, seeing that the daw is a cunning creature
much given to persecution--a crow, in fact, as black as any of
his family?  They got on badly, he said; the doves were early
breeders, beginning in March, and were allowed to have the use
of the holes until the daws wanted them at the end of April,
when they forcibly ejected the young doves.  He said that in
spring he always picked up a good many young doves, often
unfledged, thrown down by the dawn.  I did not doubt his
story.  I had just found a young bird myself--a little
blue-skinned, yellow-mouthed fledgling which had fallen sixty
or seventy feet on to the gravel below.  But in June, he said,
when the daws brought off their young, the doves entered into
possession once more, and were then permitted to rear their
young in peace.

I returned to Salisbury about the middle of May in better
weather, when there were days that were almost genial, and
found the cathedral a greater "habitacle of birds" than ever:
starlings, swifts, and swallows were there, the lively little
martins in hundreds, and the doves and daws in their usual
numbers.  All appeared to be breeding, and for some time I saw
no quarreling.  At length I spied a pair of doves with a nest
in a small cavity in the stone at the back of a narrow ledge
about seventy feet from the ground, and by standing back some
distance I could see the hen bird sitting on the nest, while
the cock stood outside on the ledge keeping guard.  I watched
this pair for some hours and saw a jackdaw sweep down on them
a dozen or more times at long intervals.  Sometimes after
swooping down he would alight on the ledge a yard or two away,
and the male dove would then turn and face him, and if he then
began sidling up the dove would dash at and buffet him with
his wings with the greatest violence and throw him off.  When
he swooped closer the dove would spring up and meet him in the
air, striking him at the moment of meeting, and again the daw
would be beaten.  When I left three days after witnessing this
contest, the doves were still in possession of their nest, and
I concluded that they were not so entirely at the mercy of the
jackdaw as the old man had led me to believe.

It was, on this occasion, a great pleasure to listen to the
doves.  The stock-dove has no set song, like the ringdove, but
like all the other species in the typical genus Columba it has
the cooing or family note, one of the most human-like sounds
which birds emit.  In the stock-dove this is a better, more
musical, and a more varied sound than in any other Columba
known to me.  The pleasing quality of the sound as well as the
variety in it could be well noted here where the birds were
many, scattered about on ledges and projections high above the
earth, and when bird after bird uttered its plaint, each
repeating his note half a dozen to a dozen times, one in slow
measured time, and deep-voiced like the rock-dove, but more
musical; another rapidly, with shorter, impetuous notes in a
higher key, as if carried away by excitement.  There were not
two birds that cooed in precisely the same way, and the same
bird would often vary its manner of cooing.

It was best to hear them during the afternoon service in the
cathedral, when the singing of the choir and throbbing and
pealing of the organ which filled the vast interior was heard
outside, subdued by the walls through which it passed, and was
like a beautiful mist or atmosphere of sound pervading and
enveloping the great building; and when the plaining of the
doves, owing to the rhythmic flow of the notes and their human
characters, seemed to harmonize with and be a part of that
sacred music.




Chapter Twelve: Whitesheet Hill


On Easter Saturday the roadsides and copses by the little
river Nadder were full of children gathering primroses; they
might have filled a thousand baskets without the flowers being
missed, so abundant were they in that place.  Cold though it
was the whole air was laden with the delicious fragrance.  It
was pleasant to see and talk with the little people occupied
with the task they loved so well, and I made up my mind to see
the result of all this flower-gathering next day in some of
the village churches in the neighbourhood--Fovant, Teffant
Evias, Chilmark, Swallowcliffe, Tisbury, and Fonthill Bishop.
I had counted on some improvement in the weather--some
bright sunshine to light up the flower-decorated interiors;
but Easter Sunday proved colder than ever, with the bitter
north-east still blowing, the grey travelling cloud still
covering the sky; and so to get the full benefit of the
bitterness I went instead to spend my day on the top of the
biggest down above the valley.  That was Whitesheet Hill, and
forms the highest part of the long ridge dividing the valleys
of the Ebble and Nadder.

It was roughest and coldest up there, and suited my temper
best, for when the weather seems spiteful one finds a grim
sort of satisfaction in defying it.  On a genial day it would
have been very pleasant on that lofty plain, for the flat top
of the vast down is like a plain in appearance, and the
earthworks on it show that it was once a populous habitation
of man.  Now because of the wind and cloud its aspect was bare
and bleak and desolate, and after roaming about for an hour,
exploring the thickest furze patches, I began to think that my
day would have to be spent in solitude, without a living
creature to keep me company.  The birds had apparently all
been blown away and the rabbits were staying at home in their
burrows.  Not even an insect could I see, although the furze
was in full blossom; the honey-suckers were out of sight
and torpid, and the bloom itself could no longer look
"unprofitably gay," as the poet says it does.  "Not even a
wheatear!" I said, for I had counted on that bird in the
intervals between the storms, although I knew I should not
hear his wild delightful warble in such weather.

Then, all at once, I beheld that very bird, a solitary female,
flittering on over the flat ground before me, perching on the
little green ant-mounds and flirting its tail and bobbing as
if greatly excited at my presence in that lonely place.  I
wondered where its mate was, following it from place to place
as it flew, determined now I had found a bird to keep it in
sight.  Presently a great blackness appeared low down in the
cloudy sky, and rose and spread, travelling fast towards me,
and the little wheatear fled in fear from it and vanished from
sight over the rim of the down.  But I was there to defy the
weather, and so instead of following the bird in search of
shelter I sat down among some low furze bushes and waited and
watched.  By and by I caught sight of three magpies, rising
one by one at long intervals from the furze and flying
laboriously towards a distant hill-top grove of pines.  Then I
heard the wailing cry of a peewit, and caught sight of the
bird at a distance, and soon afterwards a sound of another
character--the harsh angry cry of a carrion crow, almost as
deep as the raven's angry voice.  Before long I discovered the
bird at a great height coming towards me in hot pursuit of a
kestrel.  They passed directly over me so that I had them a
long time in sight, the kestrel travelling quietly on in the
face of the wind, the crow toiling after, and at intervals
spurting till he got near enough to hurl himself at his enemy,
emitting his croaks of rage.  For invariably the kestrel with
one of his sudden swallow-like turns avoided the blow and went
on as before.  I watched them until they were lost to sight in
the coming blackness and wondered that so intelligent a
creature as a crow should waste his energies in that vain
chase.  Still one could understand it and even sympathize with
him.  For the kestrel is a most insulting creature towards the
bigger birds.  He knows that they are incapable of paying him
out, and when he finds them off their guard he will drop down
and inflict a blow just for the fun of the thing.  This
outraged crow appeared determined to have his revenge.

Then the storm broke on me, and so fiercely did the rain and
sleet thrash me that, fearing a cold soaking, I fled before it
to the rim of the plain, where the wheatear had vanished, and
saw a couple of hundred yards down on the smooth steep slope a
thicket of dwarf trees.  It was, the only shelter in sight,
and to it I went, to discover much to my disgust that the
trees were nothing but elders.  For there is no tree that
affords so poor a shelter, especially on the high open downs,
where the foliage is scantier than in other situations and
lets in the wind and rain in full force upon you.

But the elder affects me in two ways.  I like it on account of
early associations, and because the birds delight in its
fruit, though they wisely refuse to build in its branches; and
I dislike it because its smell is offensive to me and its
berries the least pleasant of all wild fruits to my taste.  I
can eat ivy-berries in March, and yew in its season, poison or
not; and hips and haws and holly-berries and harsh acorn, and
the rowan, which some think acrid; but the elderberry I can't
stomach.

How comes it, I have asked more than once, that this poor tree
is so often seen on the downs where it is so badly fitted to
be and makes so sorry an appearance with its weak branches
broken and its soft leaves torn by the winds?  How badly it
contrasts with the other trees and bushes that flourish on the
downs--furze, juniper, holly, blackthorn, and hawthorn!

Two years ago, one day in the early spring, I was walking on
an extensive down in another part of Wiltshire with the tenant
of the land, who began there as a large sheep-farmer, but
eventually finding that he could make more with rabbits than
with sheep turned most of his land into a warren.  The higher
part of this down was overgrown with furze, mixed with holly
and other bushes, but the slopes were mostly very bare.  At
one spot on a wide bare slope where the rabbits had formed a
big group of burrows there was a close little thicket of young
elder trees, looking exceedingly conspicuous in the bright
green of early April.  Calling my companion's attention to
this little thicket I said something about the elder growing
on the open downs where it always appeared to be out of
harmony with its surroundings.  "I don't suppose you planted
elders here," I said.

"No, but I know who did," he returned, and he then gave me
this curious history of the trees.  Five years before, the
rabbits, finding it a suitable spot to dig in, probably
because of a softer chalk there, made a number of deep burrows
at that spot.  When the wheatears, or "horse-maggers" as he
called them, returned in spring two or three pairs attached
themselves to this group of burrows and bred in them.  There
was that season a solitary elder-bush higher up on the down
among the furze which bore a heavy crop of berries; and when
the fruit was ripe he watched the birds feeding on it, the
wheatears among them.  The following spring seedlings came up
out of the loose earth heaped about the rabbit burrows, and as
they were not cut down by the rabbits, for they dislike the
elder, they grew up, and now formed a clump of fifty or sixty
little trees of six feet to eight feet in height.

Who would have thought to find a tree-planter in the wheatear,
the bird of the stony waste and open naked down, who does not
even ask for a bush to perch on?

It then occurred to me that in every case where I had observed
a clump of elder bushes on the bare downside, it grew upon a
village or collection of rabbit burrows, and it is probable
that in every case the clump owed its existence to the
wheatears who had dropped the seed about their nesting-place.
The clump where I had sought a shelter from the storm was
composed of large old dilapidated-looking half-dead elders;
perhaps their age was not above thirty or forty years, but
they looked older than hawthorns of one or two centuries; and
under them the rabbits had their diggings--huge old mounds and
burrows that looked like a badger's earth.  Here, too, the
burrows had probably existed first and had attracted the
wheatears, and the birds had brought the seed from some
distant bush.

Crouching down in one of the big burrows at the roots of an
old elder I remained for half an hour, listening to the
thump-thump of the alarmed rabbits about me, and the
accompanying hiss and swish of the wind and sleet and rain in
the ragged branches.

The storm over I continued my rambles on Whitesheet Hill, and
coming back an hour or two later to the very spot where I had
seen and followed the wheatear, I all at once caught sight of
a second bird, lying dead on the turf close to my feet!  The
sudden sight gave me a shock of astonishment, mingled with
admiration and grief.  For how pretty it looked, though dead,
lying on its back, the little black legs stuck stiffly up, the
long wings pressed against the sides, their black tips
touching together like the clasped hands of a corpse; and the
fan-like black and white tail, half open as in life, moved
perpetually up and down by the wind, as if that tail-flirting
action of the bird had continued after death.  It was very
beautiful in its delicate shape and pale harmonious colouring,
resting on the golden-green mossy turf.  And it was a male,
undoubtedly the mate of the wheatear I had seen at the spot,
and its little mate, not knowing what death is, had probably
been keeping watch near it, wondering at its strange stillness
and greatly fearing for its safety when I came that way, and
passed by without seeing it.

Poor little migrant, did you come back across half the world
for this--back to your home on Whitesheet Hill to grow cold
and fail in the cold April wind, and finally to look very
pretty, lying stiff and cold, to the one pair of human eyes
that were destined to see you!  The little birds that come
and go and return to us over such vast distances, they perish
like this in myriads annually; flying to and from us they
are blown away by death like sere autumn leaves, "the
pestilence-stricken multitudes" whirled away by the wind!
They die in myriads: that is not strange; the strange, the
astonishing thing is the fact of death; what can they tell
us of it--the wise men who live or have ever lived on the
earth--what can they say now of the bright intelligent spirit,
the dear little emotional soul, that had so fit a tenement and
so fitly expressed itself in motions of such exquisite grace,
in melody so sweet!  Did it go out like the glow-worm's lamp,
the life and sweetness of the flower?  Was its destiny not
like that of the soul, specialized in a different direction,
of the saint or poet or philosopher!  Alas, they can tell us
nothing!

I could not go away leaving it in that exposed place on the
turf, to be found a little later by a magpie or carrion crow
or fox, and devoured.  Close by there was a small round
hillock, an old forsaken nest of the little brown ants, green
and soft with moss and small creeping herbs--a suitable grave
for a wheatear.  Cutting out a round piece of turf from the
side, I made a hole with my stick and put the dead bird in and
replacing the turf left it neatly buried.

It was not that I had or have any quarrel with the creatures
I have named, or would have them other than they are
--carrion-eaters and scavengers, Nature's balance-keepers and
purifiers.  The only creatures on earth I loathe and hate are
the gourmets, the carrion-crows and foxes of the human kind
who devour wheatears and skylarks at their tables.




Chapter Thirteen: Bath and Wells Revisited


'Tis so easy to get from London to Bath, by merely stepping
into a railway carriage which takes you smoothly without a
stop in two short hours from Paddington, that I was amazed at
myself in having allowed five full years to pass since my
previous visit.  The question was much in my mind as I
strolled about noting the old-remembered names of streets and
squares and crescents.  Quiet Street was the name inscribed on
one; it was, to me, the secret name of them all.  The old
impressions were renewed, an old feeling partially recovered.
The wide, clean ways; the solid, stone-built houses with their
dignified aspect; the large distances, terrace beyond terrace;
mansions and vast green lawns and parks and gardens; avenues
and groups of stately trees, especially that unmatched clump
of old planes in the Circus; the whole town, the design in the
classic style of one master mind, set by the Avon, amid green
hills, produced a sense of harmony and repose which cannot be
equalled by any other town in the kingdom.

This idle time was delightful so long as I gave my attention
exclusively to houses from the outside, and to hills, rocks,
trees, waters, and all visible nature, which here harmonizes
with man's works.  To sit on some high hill and look down on
Bath, sun-flushed or half veiled in mist; to lounge on Camden
Crescent, or climb Sion Hill, or take my ease with the
water-drinkers in the spacious, comfortable Pump Room; or,
better still, to rest at noon in the ancient abbey--all this
was pleasure pure and simple, a quiet drifting back until I
found myself younger by five years than I had taken myself to
be.

I haunted the abbey, and the more I saw of it the more I loved
it.  The impression it had made on me during my former visits
had faded, or else I had never properly seen it, or had not
seen it in the right emotional mood.  Now I began to think it
the best of all the great abbey churches of England and the
equal of the cathedrals in its effect on the mind.  How rich
the interior is in its atmosphere of tempered light or tender
gloom!  How tall and graceful the columns holding up the high
roof of white stone with its marvellous palm-leaf sculpture!
What a vast expanse of beautifully stained glass!  I certainly
gave myself plenty of time to appreciate it on this occasion,
as I visited it every day, sometimes two or three times, and
not infrequently I sat there for an hour at a stretch.

Sitting there one day, thinking of nothing, I was gradually
awakened to a feeling almost of astonishment at the sight of
the extraordinary number of memorial tablets of every
imaginable shape and size which crowd the walls.  So numerous
are they and so closely placed that you could not find space
anywhere to put your hand against the wall.  We are accustomed
to think that in cathedrals and other great ecclesiastical
buildings the illustrious dead receive burial, and their names
and claims on our gratitude and reverence are recorded, but in
no fane in the land is there so numerous a gathering of the
dead as in this place.  The inscription-covered walls were
like the pages of an old black-letter volume without margins.
Yet when I came to think of it I could not recall any Bath
celebrity or great person associated with Bath except Beau
Nash, who was not perhaps a very great person.  Probably
Carlyle would have described him as a "meeserable creature."

Leaving my seat I began to examine the inscriptions, and found
that they had not been placed there in memory of men belonging
to Bath or even Somerset.  These monuments were erected to
persons from all counties in the three kingdoms, and from all
the big towns, those to Londoners being most numerous.  Nor
were they of persons distinguished in any way.  Here you
find John or Henry or Thomas Smith, or Brown, or Jones, or
Robinson, provision dealer, or merchant, of Clerkenwell, or
Bermondsey, or Bishopsgate Street Within or Without; also many
retired captains, majors, and colonels.  There were hundreds
more whose professions or occupations in life were not stated.
There were also hundreds of memorials to ladies--widows and
spinsters.  They were all, in fact, to persons who had come to
die in Bath after "taking the waters," and dying, they or
their friends had purchased immortality on the walls of the
abbey with a handful or two of gold.  Here is one of several
inscriptions of the kind I took the trouble to copy: "His
early virtues, his cultivated talents, his serious piety,
inexpressibly endeared him to his friends and opened to them
many bright prospects of excellence and happiness.  These
prospects have all faded," and so on for several long lines in
very big letters, occupying a good deal of space on the wall.
But what and who was he, and what connection had he with Bath?
He was a young man born in the West Indies who died in
Scotland, and later his mother, coming to Bath for her health,
"caused this inscription to be placed on the abbey walls"!
If this policy or tradition is still followed by the abbey
authorities, it will be necessary for them to build an annexe;
if it be no longer followed, would it be going too far to
suggest that these mural tablets to a thousand obscurities,
which ought never to have been placed there, should now be
removed and placed in some vault where the relations or
descendants of the persons described could find, and if they
wished it, have them removed?

But it must be said that the abbey is not without a fair
number of memorials with which no one can quarrel; the one I
admire most, to Quin, the actor, has, I think, the best or the
most appropriate epitaph ever written.  No, one, however
familiar with the words, will find fault with me for quoting
them here:

   That tongue which set the table on a roar
   And charmed the public ear is heard no more.
   Closed are those eyes, the harbingers of wit,
   Which spake before the tongue what Shakespeare writ.
   Cold is that hand which living was stretched forth
   At friendship's call to succor modest worth.
   Here lies James Quin, deign readers to be taught
   Whate'er thy strength of body, force of thought,
   In Nature's happiest mood however cast,
   To this complexion thou must come at last.

Quin's monument strikes one as the greatest there because of
Garrick's living words, but there is another very much more
beautiful.

I first noticed this memorial on the wall at a distance of
about three yards, too far to read anything in the inscription
except the name of Sibthorpe, which was strange to me, but
instead of going nearer to read it I remained standing to
admire it at that distance.  The tablet was of white marble,
and on it was sculptured the figure of a young man with curly
head and classic profile.  He was wearing sandals and a loose
mantle held to his breast with one hand, while in the other
hand he carried a bunch of leaves and flowers.  He appeared in
the act of stepping ashore from a boat of antique shape, and
the artist had been singularly successful in producing the
idea of free and vigorous motion in the figure as well as of
some absorbing object in his mind.  The figure was undoubtedly
symbolical, and I began to amuse myself by trying to guess its
meaning.  Then a curious thing happened.  A person who had
been moving slowly along near me, apparently looking with no
great interest at the memorials, came past me and glanced
first at the tablet I was looking at, then at me.  As our eyes
met I remarked that I was admiring the best memorial I had
found in the abbey, and then added, "I've been trying to make
out its meaning.  You see the man is a traveller and is
stepping ashore with a flowering spray in his hand.  It
strikes me that it may have been erected to the memory of a
person who introduced some valuable plant into England."

"Yes, perhaps," he said.  "But who was he?"

"I don't know yet," I returned.  "I can only see that his name
was Sibthorpe."

"Sibthorpe!" he exclaimed excitedly.  "Why, this is the very
memorial I've been looking for all over the abbey and had
pretty well given up all hopes of finding it."  With that he
went to it and began studying the inscription, which was in
Latin.  John Sibthorpe, I found, was a distinguished botanist,
author of the Flora Graeca, who died over a century ago.

I asked him why he was interested in Sibthorpe's memorial.

"Well, you see, I'm a great botanist myself," he explained,
"and have been familiar with his name and work all my life.
Of course," he added, "I don't mean I'm great in the sense
that Sibthorpe was.  I'm only a little local botanist, quite
unknown outside my own circle; I only mean that I'm a great
lover of botany."

I left him there, and had the curiosity to look up the great
man's life, and found some very curious things in it.  He was
a son of Humphrey Sibthorpe, also a great botanist, who
succeeded the still greater Dillenius as Sherardian Professor
of Botany at Oxford, a post which he held for thirty-six
years, and during that time he delivered one lecture, which
was a failure.  John, if he did not suck in botany with his
mother's milk, took it quite early from his father, and on
leaving the University went abroad to continue his studies.
Eventually he went to Greece, inflamed with the ambition to
identify all the plants mentioned by Dioscorides.  Then he set
about writing his Flora Graeca; but he had a rough time of it
travelling about in that rude land, and falling ill he had to
leave his work undone.  When nearing his end he came to Bath,
like so many other afflicted ones, only to die, and he was
very properly buried in the abbey.  In his will he left an
estate the proceeds of which were to be devoted to the
completion of his work, which was to be in ten folio volumes,
with one hundred plates in each.  This was done and the work
finished forty-four years after his death, when thirty copies
were issued to the patient subscribers at two hundred and
forty guineas a copy.  But the whole cost of the work was set
down at 30,000 pounds!   A costlier work it would be hard to
find; I wonder how many of us have seen it?

But I must go back to my subject.  I was not in Bath just to
die and lie there, like poor Sibthorpe, with all those strange
bedfellows of his, nor was I in search of a vacant space the
size of my hand on the walls to bespeak it for my own
memorial.  On the contrary, I was there, as we have seen, to
knock five years off my age.  And it was very pleasant, as I
have said, so long as I confined my attention to Bath, the
stone-built town of old memories and associations--so long as
I was satisfied to loiter in the streets and wide green places
and in the Pump Room and the abbey.  The bitter came in only
when, going from places to faces, I began to seek out the
friends and acquaintances of former days.  The familiar faces
seemed not wholly familiar now.  A change had been wrought; in
some cases a great change, as in that of some weedy girl who
had blossomed into fair womanhood.  One could not grieve at
that; but in the middle-aged and those who were verging on or
past that period, it was impossible not to feel saddened at
the difference.  "I see no change in you," is a lie ready to
the lips which would speak some pleasing thing, but it does
not quite convince.  Men are naturally brutal, and use no
compliments to one another; on the contrary, they do not
hesitate to make a joke of wrinkles and grey hairs--their own
and yours.  "But, oh, the difference" when the familiar face,
no longer familiar as of old, is a woman's!  This is no light
thing to her, and her eyes, being preternaturally keen in such
matters, see not only the change in you, but what is
infinitely sadder, the changed reflection of herself.  Your
eyes have revealed the shock you have experienced.  You cannot
hide it; her heart is stabbed with a sudden pain, and she is
filled with shame and confusion; and the pain is but greater
if her life has glided smoothly--if she cannot appeal to your
compassion, finding a melancholy relief in that saddest cry:--

   O Grief has changed me since you saw me last!

For not grief, nor sickness, nor want, nor care, nor any
misery or calamity which men fear, is her chief enemy.  Time
alone she hates and fears--insidious Time who has lulled her
mind with pleasant flatteries all these years while subtly
taking away her most valued possessions, the bloom and colour,
the grace, the sparkle, the charm of other years.

Here is a true and pretty little story, which may or may not
exactly fit the theme, but is very well worth telling.  A lady
of fashion, middle-aged or thereabouts, good-looking but pale
and with the marks of care and disillusionment on her
expressive face, accompanied by her pretty sixteen-years-old
daughter, one day called on an artist and asked him to show
her his studio.  He was a very great artist, the greatest
portrait-painter we have ever had and he did not know who she
was, but with the sweet courtesy which distinguished him
through all his long life--he died recently at a very advanced
age--he at once put his work away and took her round his
studio to show her everything he thought would interest her.
But she was restless and inattentive, and by and by leaving
the artist talking to her young daughter she began going round
by herself, moving constantly from picture to picture.
Presently she made an exclamation, and turning they saw her
standing before a picture, a portrait of a girl, staring
fixedly at it.  "Oh," she cried, and it was a cry of pain,
"was I once as beautiful as that?" and burst into tears.  She
had found the picture she had been looking for, which she had
come to see; it had been there twenty to twenty-five years,
and the story of it was as follows.

When she was a young girl her mother took her to the great
artist to have her portrait painted, and when the work was at
length finished she and her mother went to see it.  The artist
put it before them and the mother looked at it, her face
expressing displeasure, and said not one word.  Nor did the
artist open his lips.  And at last the girl, to break the
uncomfortable silence, said, "Where shall we hang it, mother?"
and the lady replied, "Just where you like, my dear, so long
as you hang it with the face to the wall."  It was an
insolent, a cruel thing to say, but the artist did not answer
her bitterly; he said gently that she need not take the
portrait as it failed to please her, and that in any case he
would decline to take the money she had agreed to pay him for
the work.  She thanked him coldly and went her way, and he
never saw her again.  And now Time, the humbler of proud
beautiful women, had given him his revenge: the portrait,
scorned and rejected when the colour and sparkle of life was
in the face, had been looked on once more by its subject and
had caused her to weep at the change in herself.

To return.  One wishes in these moments of meeting, of
surprise and sudden revealings, that it were permissible to
speak from the heart, since then the very truth might have
more balm than bitterness in it.  "Grieve not, dear friend of
old days, that I have not escaped the illusion common to all
--the idea that those we have not looked on this long time
--full five years, let us say--have remained as they were
while we ourselves have been moving onwards and downwards in
that path in which our feet are set.  No one, however hardened
he may be, can escape a shock of surprise and pain; but now
the illusion I cherished has gone--now I have seen with my
physical eyes, and a new image, with Time's writing on it, has
taken the place of the old and brighter one, I would not have
it otherwise.  No, not if I could would I call back the
vanished lustre, since all these changes, above all that
wistful look in the eyes, do but serve to make you dearer, my
sister and friend and fellow-traveller in a land where we
cannot find a permanent resting-place."

Alas! it cannot be spoken, and we cannot comfort a sister if
she cannot divine the thought; but to brood over these
inevitable changes is as idle as it is to lament that we were
born into this mutable world.  After all, it is because of the
losses, the sadnesses, that the world is so infinitely sweet
to us.  The thought is in Cory's Mimnernus in Church:

   All beauteous things for which we live
   By laws of time and space decay.
   But oh, the very reason why
   I clasp them is because they die.

From this sadness in Bath I went to a greater in Wells, where
I had not been for ten years, and timing my visit so as to
have a Sunday service at the cathedral of beautiful memories,
I went on a Saturday to Shepton Mallet.  A small, squalid
town, a "manufacturing town" the guide-book calls it.  Well,
yes; it manufactures Anglo-Bavarian beer in a gigantic
brewery which looks bigger than all the other buildings
together, the church and a dozen or twenty public-houses
included.  To get some food I went to the only eating-house
in the place, and saw a pleasant-looking woman, plump and
high-coloured, with black hair, with an expression of good
humour and goodness of every description in her comely
countenance.  She promised to have a chop ready by the time I
had finished looking at the church, and I said I would have it
with a small Guinness.  She could not provide that, the house,
she said, was strictly temperance.  "My doctor has ordered me
to take it," said I, "and if you are religious, remember that
St. Paul tells us to take a little stout when we find it
beneficial."

"Yes, I know that's what St. Paul says," she returned, with a
heightened colour and a vicious emphasis on the saint's name,
"but we go on a different principle."

So I had to go for my lunch to one of the big public-houses,
called hotels; but whether it called itself a cow, or horse,
or stag, or angel, or a blue or green something, I cannot
remember.  They gave me what they called a beefsteak pie--a
tough crust and under it some blackish cubes carved out of the
muscle of an antediluvian ox-and for this delicious fare and a
glass of stout I paid three shillings and odd pence.

As I came away Shepton Mallet was shaken to its foundations by
a tremendous and most diabolical sound, a prolonged lupine
yell or yowl, as if a stupendous wolf, as big, say, as the
Anglo-Bavarian brewery, had howled his loudest and longest.
This infernal row, which makes Shepton seem like a town or
village gone raving mad, was merely to inform the men, and,
incidentally, the universe, that it was time for them to knock
off work.

Turning my back on the place, I said to myself, "What a fool I
am to be sure!  Why could I not have been satisfied for once
with a cup of coffee with my lunch?  I should have saved a
shilling, perhaps eighteen-pence, to rejoice the soul of some
poor tramp; and, better still, I could have discussed some
interesting questions with that charming rosy-faced woman.
What, for instance, was the reason of her quarrel with the
apostle; by the by, she never rebuked me for misquoting his
words; and what is the moral effect (as seen through her clear
brown eyes) of the Anglo-Bavarian brewery on the population of
the small town and the neighbouring villages?"

The road I followed from Shepton to Wells winds by the
water-side, a tributary of the Brue, in a narrow valley with
hills on either side.  It is a five-mile road through a
beautiful country, where there is practically no cultivation,
and the green hills, with brown woods in their hollows, and
here and there huge masses of grey and reddish Bath stone
cropping out on their sides, resembling gigantic castles and
ramparts, long ruined and overgrown with ivy and bramble,
produce the effect of a land dispeopled and gone back to a
state of wildness.

A thaw had come that morning, ending the severest frost
experienced this winter anywhere in England, and the valley
was alive with birds, happy and tuneful at the end of January
as in April.  Looking down on the stream the sudden glory of a
kingfisher passed before me; but the sooty-brown water-ouzel
with his white bib, a haunter, too, of this water, I did not
see.  Within a mile or so of Wells I overtook a small boy who
belonged there, and had been to Shepton like me, noticing the
birds.  "I saw a kingfisher," I said.  "So did I," he returned
quickly, with pride.  He described it as a biggish bird with a
long neck, but its colour was not blue--oh, no!  I suggested
that it was a heron, a long-necked creature under six feet
high, of no particular colour.  No, it was not a heron; and
after taking thought, he said, "I think it was a wild duck."

Bestowing a penny to encourage him in his promising researches
into the feathered world, I went on by a footpath over a hill,
and as I mounted to the higher ground there before me rose the
noble tower of St. Cuthbert's Church, and a little to the
right of it, girt with high trees, the magnificent pile of the
cathedral, with green hills and the pale sky beyond.  O joy to
look again on it, to add yet one more enduring image of it to
the number I had long treasured!  For the others were not
exactly like this one; the building was not looked at from the
same point of view at the same season and late hour, with the
green hills lit by the departing sun and the clear pale winter
sky beyond.

Coming in by the moated palace I stood once more on the Green
before that west front, beautiful beyond all others, in spite
of the strange defeatures Time has written on it.  I watched
the daws, numerous as ever, still at their old mad games, now
springing into the air to scatter abroad with ringing cries,
only to return the next minute and fling themselves back on
their old perches on a hundred weather-stained broken statues
in the niches.  And while I stood watching them from the
palace trees close by came the loud laugh of the green
woodpecker.  The same wild, beautiful sound, uttered perhaps
by the same bird, which I had often heard at that spot ten
years ago!  "You will not hear that woodland sound in any
other city in the kingdom," I wrote in a book of sketches
entitled "Birds and Man", published in 1901.

But of my soul's adventures in Wells on the two or three
following days I will say very little.  That laugh of the
woodpecker was an assurance that Nature had suffered no
change, and the town too, like the hills and rocks and running
waters, seemed unchanged; but how different and how sad when I
looked for those I once knew, whose hands I had hoped to grasp
again!  Yes, some were living still; and a dog too, one I used
to take out for long walks and many a mad rabbit-hunt--a very
handsome white-and-liver coloured spaniel.  I found him lying
on a sofa, and down he got and wagged his tail vigorously,
pretending, with a pretty human hypocrisy in his gentle yellow
eyes, that he knew me perfectly well, that I was not a bit
changed, and that he was delighted to see me.

On my way back to Bath I had a day at Bristol.  It was
cattle-market day, and what with the bellowings, barkings, and
shoutings, added to the buzz and clang of innumerable electric
tramcars and the usual din of street traffic, one got the idea
that the Bristolians had adopted a sort of Salvation Army
theory, and were endeavouring to conquer earth (it is not
heaven in this case) by making a tremendous noise.  I amused
myself strolling about and watching the people, and as train
after train came in late in the day discharging loads of
humanity, mostly young men and women from the surrounding
country coming in for an evening's amusement, I noticed again
the peculiarly Welsh character of the Somerset peasant--the
shape of the face, the colour of the skin, and, above all, the
expression.

Freeman, when here below, proclaimed it his mission to prove
that "Englishmen were Englishmen, and not somebody else."  It
appeared to me that any person, unbiassed by theories on such
a subject, looking at that crowd, would have come to the
conclusion, sadly or gladly, according to his nature, that we
are, in fact, "somebody else."




Chapter Fourteen: The Return of the Native


That "going back" about which I wrote in the second chapter to
a place where an unexpected beauty or charm has revealed
itself, and has made its image a lasting and prized possession
of the mind, is not the same thing as the revisiting a famous
town or city, rich in many beauties and old memories, such as
Bath or Wells, for instance.  Such centres have a permanent
attraction, and one who is a rover in the land must return to
them again and again, nor does he fail on each successive
visit to find some fresh charm or interest.  The sadness of
such returns, after a long interval, is only, as I have said,
when we start "looking up" those with whom we had formed
pleasant friendly relations.  And all because of the illusion
that we shall see them as they were--that Time has stood still
waiting for our return, and by and by, to our surprise and
grief, we discover that it is not so; that the dear friends of
other days, long unvisited but unforgotten, have become
strangers.  This human loss is felt even more in the case of a
return to some small centre, a village or hamlet where we knew
every one, and our intimacy with the people has produced the
sense of being one in blood with them.  It is greatest of all
when we return to a childhood's or boyhood's home.  Many
writers have occupied themselves with this mournful theme, and
I imagine that a person of the proper Amiel-like tender and
melancholy moralizing type of mind, by using his own and his
friends' experiences, could write a charmingly sad and pretty
book on the subject.

The really happy returns of this kind must be exceedingly
rare.  I am almost surprised to think that I am able to recall
as many as two, but they hardly count, as in both instances
the departure or exile from home happens at so early a time of
life that no recollections of the people survived--nothing, in
fact, but a vague mental picture of the place.  One was of a
business man I knew in London, who lost his early home in a
village in the Midlands, as a boy of eight or nine years of
age, through the sale of the place by his father, who had
become impoverished.  The boy was trained to business in
London, and when a middle-aged man, wishing to retire and
spend the rest of his life in the country, he revisited his
native village for the first time, and dicovered to his joy
that he could buy back the old home.  He was, when I last saw
him, very happy in its possession.

The other case I will relate more fully, as it is a very
curious one, and came to my knowledge in a singular way.

At a small station near Eastleigh a man wearing a highly
pleased expression on his face entered the smoking-carriage in
which I was travelling to London.  Putting his bag on the
rack, he pulled out his pipe and threw himself back in his
seat with a satisfied air; then, looking at me and catching my
eye, he at once started talking.  I had my newspaper, but
seeing him in that overflowing mood I responded readily
enough, for I was curious to know why he appeared so happy and
who and what he was.  Not a tradesman nor a bagman, and not a
farmer, though he looked like an open-air man; nor could I
form a guess from his speech and manner as to his native
place.  A robust man of thirty-eight or forty, with blue eyes
and a Saxon face, he looked a thorough Englishman, and yet he
struck me as most un-English in his lively, almost eager
manner, his freedom with a stranger, and something, too, in
his speech.  From time to time his face lighted up, when,
looking to the window, his eyes rested on some pretty scene--a
glimpse of stately old elm trees in a field where cattle were
grazing, of the vivid green valley of a chalk stream, the
paler hills beyond, the grey church tower or spire of some
tree-hidden village.  When he discovered that these hills and
streams and rustic villages had as great a charm for me as for
himself, that I knew and loved the two or three places he
named in a questioning way, he opened his heart and the secret
of his present happiness.

He was a native of the district, born at a farmhouse of which
his father in succession to his grandfather had been the
tenant.  It was a small farm of only eighty-five acres, and as
his father could make no more than a bare livelihood out of
it, he eventually gave it up when my informant was but three
years old, and selling all he had, emigrated to Australia.
Nine years later he died, leaving a numerous family poorly
provided for; the home was broken up and boys and girls had to
go out and face the world.  They had somehow all got on very
well, and his brothers and sisters were happy enough out
there, Australians in mind, thoroughly persuaded that theirs
was the better land, the best country in the world, and with
no desire to visit England.  He had never felt like that;
somehow his father's feeling about the old country had taken
such a hold of him that he never outlived it--never felt at
home in Australia, however successful he was in his affairs.
The home feeling had been very strong in his father; his
greatest delight was to sit of an evening with his children
round him and tell them of the farm and the old farm-house
where he was born and had lived so many years, and where some
of them too had been born.  He was never tired of talking of
it, of taking them by the hand, as it were, and leading them
from place to place, to the stream, the village, the old stone
church, the meadows and fields and hedges, the deep shady
lanes, and, above all, to the dear old ivied house with its
gables and tall chimneys.  So many times had his father
described it that the old place was printed like a map on his
mind, and was like a picture which kept its brightness even
after the image of his boyhood's home in Australia had become
faded and pale.  With that mental picture to guide him he
believed that he could go to that angle by the porch where the
flycatchers bred every year and find their nest; where in the
hedge the blackberries were most abundant; where the elders
grew by the stream from which he could watch the moorhens and
watervoles; that he knew every fence, gate, and outhouse,
every room and passage in the old house.  Through all his busy
years that picture never grew less beautiful, never ceased its
call, and at last, possessed of sufficient capital to yield
him a modest income for the rest of his life, he came home.
What he was going to do in England he did not consider.  He
only knew that until he had satisfied the chief desire of his
heart and had looked upon the original of the picture he had
borne so long in his mind he could not rest nor make any plans
for the future.

He came first to London and found, on examining the map of
Hampshire, that the village of Thorpe (I will call it), where
he was born, is three miles from the nearest station, in the
southern part of the county.  Undoubtedly it was Thorpe; that
was one of the few names of places his father had mentioned
which remained in his memory always associated with that vivid
image of the farm in his mind.  To Thorpe he accordingly went
--as pretty a rustic village as he had hoped to find it.  He
took a room at the inn and went out for a long walk--"just to
see the place," he said to the landlord.  He would make no
inquiries; he would find his home for himself; how could he
fail to recognize it?  But he walked for hours in a widening
circle and saw no farm or other house, and no ground that
corresponded to the picture in his brain.

Troubled at his failure, he went back and questioned his
landlord, and, naturally, was asked for the name of the farm
he was seeking.  He had forgotten the name--he even doubted
that he had ever heard it.  But there was his family name to
go by--Dyson; did any one remember a farmer Dyson in the
village?  He was told that it was not an uncommon name in that
part of the country.  There were no Dysons now in Thorpe, but
some fifteen or twenty years ago one of that name had been the
tenant of Long Meadow Farm in the parish.  The name of the
farm was unfamiliar, and when he visited the place he found it
was not the one he sought.

It was a grievous disappointment.  A new sense of loneliness
oppressed him; for that bright image in his mind, with the
feeling about his home, had been a secret source of comfort
and happiness, and was like a companion, a dear human friend,
and now he appeared to be on the point of losing it.  Could it
be that all that mental picture, with the details that seemed
so true to life, was purely imaginary?  He could not believe
it; the old house had probably been pulled down, the big trees
felled, orchard and hedges grabbed up--all the old features
obliterated--and the land thrown into some larger neighbouring
farm.  It was dreadful to think that such devastating changes
had been made, but it had certainly existed as he saw it in
his mind, and he would inquire of some of the old men in the
place, who would perhaps be able to tell him where his home
had stood thirty years ago.

At once he set about interviewing all the old men he came upon
in his rounds, describing to them the farm tenanted by a man
named Dyson about forty years ago, and by and by he got hold
of one who knew.  He listened for a few minutes to the
oft-repeated story, then exclaimed, "Why, sir, 'tis surely
Woodyates you be talking about!"

"That's the name!  That's the name," he cried.  "Woodyyates-
how did I ever forget it!  You knew it then--where was it?"

"I'll just show you," said the old man, proud at having
guessed rightly, and turning started slowly hobbling along
till he got to the end of the lane.

There was an opening there and a view of the valley with
trees, blue in the distance, at the furthest visible point.
"Do you see them trees?" he said.  "That's where Harping is;
'tis two miles or, perhaps, a little more from Thorpe.
There's a church tower among them trees, but you can't see it
because 'tis hid.  You go by the road till you comes to the
church, then you go on by the water, maybe a quarter of a
mile, and you comes to Woodyates.  You won't see no difference
in it; I've knowed it since I were a boy, but 'tis in Harping
parish, not in Thorpe."

Now he remembered the name--Harping, near Thorpe--only Thorpe
was the more important village where the inn was and the
shops.

In less than an hour after leaving his informant he was at
Woodyates, feasting his eyes on the old house of his dreams
and of his exiled father's before him, inexpressibly glad to
recognize it as the very house he had loved so long--that he
had been deceived by no false image.

For some days he haunted the spot, then became a lodger at the
farm-house, and now after making some inquiries he had found
that the owner was willing to sell the place for something
more than its market value, and he was going up to London
about it.

At Waterloo I wished him happiness in his old home found again
after so many years, then watched him as he walked briskly
away--as commonplace-looking a man as could be seen on that
busy crowded platform, in his suit of rough grey tweeds, thick
boots, and bowler hat.  Yet one whose fortune might be envied
by many even among the successful--one who had cherished a
secret thought and feeling, which had been to him like the
shadow of a rock and like a cool spring in a dry and thirsty
land.

And in that host of undistinguished Colonials and others of
British race from all regions of the earth, who annually visit
these shores on business or for pleasure or some other object,
how many there must be who come with some such memory or dream
or aspiration in their hearts!  A greater number probably than
we imagine.  For most of them there is doubtless
disappointment and disillusion: it is a matter of the heart, a
sentiment about which some are not given to speak.  He too, my
fellow-passenger, would no doubt have held his peace had his
dream not met with so perfect a fulfilment.  As it was he had
to tell his joy to some one, though it were to a stranger.




Chapter Fifteen: Summer Days on the Otter


The most characteristic district of South Devon, the greenest,
most luxuriant in its vegetation, and perhaps the hottest in
England, is that bit of country between the Exe and the Axe
which is watered by the Clyst, the Otter, and the Sid.  In any
one of a dozen villages found beside these pretty little
rivers a man might spend a month, a year, a lifetime, very
agreeably, ceasing not to congratulate himself on the good
fortune which first led him into such a garden.  Yet after a
week or two in this luxurious land I began to be dissatisfied
with my surroundings.  It was June; the weather was
exceptionally dry and sultry.  Vague thoughts, or "visitings"
of mountains and moors and coasts would intrude to make the
confinement of deep lanes seem increasingly irksome.  Each day
I wandered miles in some new direction, never knowing whither
the devious path would lead me, never inquiring of any person,
nor consulting map or guide, since to do that is to deprive
oneself of the pleasure of discovery; always with a secret
wish to find some exit as it were--some place beyond the
everlasting wall of high hedges and green trees, where there
would be a wide horizon and wind blowing unobstructed over
leagues of open country to bring me back the sense of lost
liberty.  I found only fresh woods and pastures new that were
like the old; other lanes leading to other farm-houses, each
in its familiar pretty setting of orchard and garden; and,
finally, other ancient villages, each with its ivy-grown grey
church tower looking down on a green graveyard and scattered
cottages, mostly mud-built and thatched with straw.  Finding
no outlook on any side I went back to the streams, oftenest to
the Otter, where, lying by the hour on the bank, I watched the
speckled trout below me and the dark-plumaged dipper with
shining white breast standing solitary and curtseying on a,
stone in the middle of the current.  Sometimes a kingfisher
would flash by, and occasionally I came upon a lonely grey
heron; but no mammal bigger than a watervole appeared,
although I waited and watched for the much bigger beast that
gives the river its name.  Still it was good to know that he
was there, and had his den somewhere in the steep rocky bank
under the rough tangle of ivy and bramble and roots of
overhanging trees.  One was shot by a farmer during my stay,
but my desire was for the living, not a dead otter.
Consequently, when the otter-hunt came with blaze of scarlet
coats and blowing of brass horns and noise of barking hounds
and shouts of excited people, it had no sooner got half a mile
above Ottery St. Mary, where I had joined the straggling
procession, than, falling behind, the hunting fury died out of
me and I was relieved to hear that no quarry had been found.
The frightened moorhen stole back to her spotty eggs, the
dipper returned to his dipping and curtseying to his own image
in the stream, and I to my idle dreaming and watching.

The watching was not wholly in vain, since there were here
revealed to me things, or aspects of things, that were new.  A
great deal depends on atmosphere and the angle of vision.  For
instance, I have often looked at swans at the hour of sunset,
on the water and off it, or flying, and have frequently had
them between me and the level sun, yet never have I been
favoured with the sight of the rose-coloured, the red, and the
golden-yellow varieties of that majestic waterfowl, whose
natural colour is white.  On the other hand, who ever saw a
carrion-crow with crimson eyes?  Yet that was one of the
strange things I witnessed on the Otter.

Game is not everywhere strictly preserved in that part of
Devon, and the result is that the crow is not so abhorred and
persecuted a fowl as in many places, especially in the home
counties, where the cult of the sacred bird is almost
universal.  At one spot on the stream where my rambles took me
on most days a pair of crows invariably greeted my approach
with a loud harsh remonstrance, and would keep near me, flying
from tree to tree repeating their angry girdings until I left
the place.  Their nest was in a large elm, and after some days
I was pleased to see that the young had been safely brought
off.  The old birds screamed at me no more; then I came on one
of their young in the meadow near the river.  His curious
behaviour interested me so much that I stood and watched him
for half an hour or longer.  It was a hot, windless day, and
the bird was by himself among the tall flowering grasses and
buttercups of the meadow--a queer gaunt unfinished
hobbledehoy-looking fowl with a head much too big for his
body, a beak that resembled a huge nose, and a very monstrous
mouth.  When I first noticed him he was amusing himself by
picking off the small insects from the flowers with his big
beak, a most unsuitable instrument, one would imagine, for so
delicate a task.  At the same time he was hungering for more
substantial fare, and every time a rook flew by over him on
its way to or from a neighbouring too populous rookery, the
young crow would open wide his immense red mouth and emit his
harsh, throaty hunger-call.  The rook gone, he would drop once
more into his study of the buttercups, to pick from them
whatever unconsidered trifle in the way of provender he could
find.  Once a small bird, a pied wagtail, flew near him, and
he begged from it just as he had done from the rooks: the
little creature would have run the risk of being itself
swallowed had it attempted to deliver a packet of flies into
that cavernous mouth.  I went nearer, moving cautiously, until
I was within about four yards of him, when, half turning, he
opened his mouth and squawked, actually asking me to feed him;
then, growing suspicious, he hopped awkwardly away in the
grass.  Eventually he permitted a nearer approach, and slowly
stooping I was just on the point of stroking his back when,
suddenly becoming alarmed, he swung himself into the air and
flapped laboriously off to a low hawthorn, twenty or thirty
yards away, into which he tumbled pell-mell like a bundle of
old black rags.

Then I left him and thought no more about the crows except
that their young have a good deal to learn upon first coming
forth into an unfriendly world.  But there was a second nest
and family close by all the time.  A day or two later I
discovered it accidentally in a very curious way.

There was one spot where I was accustomed to linger for a few
minutes, sometimes for half an hour or so, during my daily
walks.  Here at the foot of the low bank on the treeless side
of the stream there was a scanty patch of sedges, a most
exposed and unsuitable place for any bird to breed in, yet a
venturesome moorhen had her nest there and was now sitting on
seven eggs.  First I would take a peep at the eggs, for the
bird always quitted the nest on my approach; then I would gaze
into the dense tangle of tree, bramble, and ivy springing out
of the mass 'of black rock and red clay of the opposite bank.
In the centre of this rough tangle which overhung the stream
there grew an old stunted and crooked fir tree with its tufted
top so shut out from the light by the branches and foliage
round it that it looked almost black.  One evening I sat down
on the green bank opposite this tangle when the low sun behind
me shone level into the mass of rock and rough boles and
branches, and fixing my eyes on the black centre of the mass I
encountered a pair of crimson eyes staring back into mine.  A
level ray of light had lit up that spot which I had always
seen in deep shadow, revealing its secret.  After gazing
steadily for some time I made out a crow's nest in the dwarf
pine top and the vague black forms of three young fully
fledged crows sitting or standing in it.  The middle bird had
the shining crimson eyes; but in a few moments the illusory
colour was gone and the eyes were black.

It was certainly an extraordinary thing: the ragged-looking
black-plumaged bird on its ragged nest of sticks in the deep
shade, with one ray of intense sunlight on its huge nose-like
beak and blood-red eyes, a sight to be remembered for a
lifetime!  It recalled Zurbaran's picture of the "Kneeling
Monk," in which the man with everything about him is steeped
in the deepest gloom except his nose, on which one ray of
strong light has fallen.  The picture of the monk is gloomy
and austere in a wonderful degree: the crow in his interior
with sunlit big beak and crimson eyes looked nothing less than
diabolical.

I paid other visits to the spot at the same hour, and sat long
and watched the crows while they watched me, occasionally
tossing pebbles on to them to make them shift their positions,
but the magical effect was not produced again.

As to the cause of that extraordinary colour in the crow's
eyes, one might say that it was merely the reflected red light
of the level sun.  We are familiar with the effect when
polished and wet surfaces, such as glass, stone, and water,
shine crimson in the light of a setting sun; but there is also
the fact, which is not well known, that the eye may show its
own hidden red--the crimson colour which is at the back of the
retina and which is commonly supposed to be seen only with the
ophthalmoscope.  Nevertheless I find on inquiry among friends
and acquaintances that there are instances of persons in which
the iris when directly in front of the observer with the light
behind him, always looks crimson, and in several of these
cases.  the persons exhibiting this colour, or danger signal,
as it may be called, were subject to brain trouble.  It is
curious to find that the crimson colour or light has also been
observed in dogs: one friend has told me of a pet King
Charles, a lively good-tempered little dog with brown eyes
like any other dog, which yet when they looked up, into yours
in a room always shone ruby-red instead of hyaline blue, or
green, as is usually the case.  From other friends I heard of
many other cases: one was of a child, an infant in arms, whose
eyes sometimes appeared crimson, another of a cat with yellow
eyes which shone crimson-red in certain lights.  Of human
adults, I heard of two men great in the world of science, both
dead now, in whose eyes the red light had been seen just
before and during attacks of nervous breakdown.  I heard also
of four other persons, not distinguished in any way, two of
them sisters, who showed the red light in the eyes: all of
them suffered, from brain trouble and two of them ended their
lives in asylums for the insane.

Discussing these cases with my informants, we came to the
conclusion that the red light in the human eye is probably
always a pathological condition, a danger signal; but it is
not perhaps safe to generalize on these few instances, and I
must add that all the medical men I have spoken to on the
subject shake their heads.  One great man, an eye specialist,
went so far as to say that it is impossible, that the red
light in the eye was not seen by my informants but only
imagined.  The ophthalmoscope, he said, will show you the
crimson at the back of the eye, but the colour is not and
cannot be reflected on the surface of the iris.




Chapter Sixteen: In Praise of the Cow


In spite of discontents I might have remained to this day by
the Otter, in the daily and hourly expectation of seeing some
new and wonderful thing in Nature in that place where a
crimson-eyed carrion-crow had been revealed to me, had not a
storm of thunder and rain broken over the country to shake me
out of a growing disinclination to move.  We are, body and
mind, very responsive to atmospheric changes; for every storm
in Nature there is a storm in us--a change physical and
mental.  We make our own conditions, it is true, and these
react and have a deadening effect on us in the long run, but
we are never wholly deadened by them--if we be not indeed
dead, if the life we live can be called life.  We are told
that there are rainless zones on the earth and regions of
everlasting summer: it is hard to believe that the dwellers in
such places can ever think a new thought or do a new thing.
The morning rain did not last very long, and before it had
quite ceased I took up my knapsack and set off towards the
sea, determined on this occasion to make my escape.

Three or four miles from Ottery St. Mary I overtook a cowman
driving nine milch cows along a deep lane and inquired my way
of him.  He gave me many and minute directions, after which we
got into conversation, and I walked some distance with him.
The cows he was driving were all pure Devons, perfect beauties
in their bright red coats in that greenest place where every
rain-wet leaf sparkled in the new sunlight.  Naturally we
talked about the cows, and I soon found that they were his own
and the pride and joy of his life.  We walked leisurely, and
as the animals went on, first one, then another would stay for
a mouthful of grass, or to pull down half a yard of green
drapery from the hedge.  It was so lavishly decorated that the
damage they did to it was not noticeable.  By and by we went
on ahead of the cows, then, if one stayed too long or strayed
into some inviting side-lane, he would turn and utter a long,
soft call, whereupon the straggler would leave her browsing
and hasten after the others.


He was a big, strongly built man, a little past middle life
and grey-haired, with rough-hewn face--unprepossessing one
would have pronounced him until the intelligent, kindly
expression of the eyes was seen and the agreeable voice was
heard.  As our talk progressed and we found how much in
sympathy we were on the subject, I was reminded of that
Biblical expression about the shining of a man's face: "Wine
that maketh glad the heart of man"--I hope the total
abstainers will pardon me--"and oil that maketh his face to
shine," we have in one passage.  This rather goes against our
British ideas, since we rub no oil or unguents on our skin,
but only soap which deprives it of its natural oil and too
often imparts a dry and hard texture.  Yet in that, to us,
disagreeable aspect of the skin caused by foreign fats, there
is a resemblance to the sudden brightening and glory of the
countenance in moments of blissful emotion or exaltation.  No
doubt the effect is produced by the eyes, which are the
mirrors of the mind, and as they are turned full upon us they
produce an illusion, seeming to make the whole face shine.

In our talk I told him of long rambles on the Mendips, along
the valley of the Somerset Axe, where I had lately been, and
where of all places, in this island, the cow should be most
esteemed and loved by man.  Yet even there, where, standing on
some elevation, cows beyond one's power to number could be
seen scattered far and wide in the green vales beneath, it had
saddened me to find them so silent.  It is not natural for
them to be dumb; they have great emotions and mighty voices
--the cattle on a thousand hills.  Their morning and evening
lowing is more to me than any other natural sound--the melody
of birds, the springs and dying gales of the pines, the wash
of waves on the long shingled beach.  The hills and valleys of
that pastoral country flowing with milk and honey should be
vocal with it, echoing and re-echoing the long call made
musical by distance.  The cattle are comparatively silent in
that beautiful district, and indeed everywhere in England,
because men have made them so.  They have, when deprived of
their calves, no motive for the exercise of their voices.  For
two or three days after their new-born calves have been taken
from them they call loudly and incessantly, day and night,
like Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be
comforted; grief and anxiety inspires that cry--they grow
hoarse with crying; it is a powerful, harsh, discordant sound,
unlike the long musical call of the cow that has a calf, and
remembering it, and leaving the pasture, goes lowing to give
it suck.

I also told him of the cows of a distant country where I had
lived, that had the maternal instinct so strong that they
refused to yield their milk when deprived of their young.
They "held it back," as the saying is, and were in a sullen
rage, and in a few days their fountains dried up, and there
was no more milk until calving-time came round once more.

He replied that cows of that temper were not unknown in South
Devon.  Very proudly he pointed to one of the small herd that
followed us as an example.  In most cases, he said, the calf
was left from two or three days to a week, or longer, with the
mother to get strong, and then taken away.  This plan could
not be always followed; some cows were so greatly distressed
at losing the young they had once suckled that precautions had
to be taken and the calf smuggled away as quietly as possible
when dropped--if possible before the mother had seen it.  Then
there were the extreme cases in which the cow refused to be
cheated.  She knew that a calf had been born; she had felt it
within her, and had suffered pangs in bringing it forth; if it
appeared not on the grass or straw at her side then it must
have been snatched away by the human creatures that hovered
about her, like crows and ravens round a ewe in travail on
some lonely mountain side.

That was the character of the cow he had pointed out; even
when she had not seen the calf of which she had been deprived
she made so great an outcry and was thrown into such a rage
and fever, refusing to be milked that, finally, to save her,
it was thought necessary to give her back the calf.  Now, he
concluded, it was not attempted to take it away: twice a day
she was allowed to have it with her and suckle it, and she was
a very happy animal.

I was glad to think that there was at least one completely
happy cow in Devonshire.

After leaving the cowkeeper I had that feeling of revulsion
very strongly which all who know and love cows occasionally
experience at the very thought of beef.  I was for the moment
more than tolerant of vegetarianism, and devoutly hoped that
for many days to come I should not be sickened with the sight
of a sirloin on some hateful board, cold, or smoking hot,
bleeding its red juices into the dish when gashed with a
knife, as if undergoing a second death.  We do not eat
negroes, although their pigmented skins, flat feet, and woolly
heads proclaim them a different species; even monkey's flesh
is abhorrent to us, merely because we fancy that that creature
in its ugliness resembles some old men and some women and
children that we know.  But the gentle large-brained social
cow that caresses our hands and faces with her rough blue
tongue, and is more like man's sister than any other non-human
being--the majestic, beautiful creature with the juno eyes,
sweeter of breath than the rosiest virgin--we slaughter and
feed on her flesh--monsters and cannibals that we are!

But though cannibals, it is very pleasant to find that many
cowmen love their cows.  Walking one afternoon by a high
unkept hedge near Southampton Water, I heard loud shouts at
intervals issuing from a point some distance ahead, and on
arriving at the spot found an old man leaning idly over a
gate, apparently concerned about nothing.  "What are you
shouting about?" I demanded.  "Cows," he answered, with a
glance across the wide green field dotted with a few big furze
and bramble bushes.  On its far side half a dozen cows were,
quietly grazing.  "They came fast enough when I was a-feeding
of 'em," he presently added; "but now they has to find for
theirselves they don't care how long they keeps me."  I was
going to suggest that it would be a considerable saving of
time if he went for them, but his air of lazy contentment as
he leant on the gate showed that time was of no importance to
him.  He was a curious-looking old man, in old frayed clothes,
broken boots, and a cap too small for him.  He had short legs,
broad chest, and long arms, and a very big head, long and
horselike, with a large shapeless nose and grizzled beard and
moustache.  His ears, too, were enormous, and stood out from
the head like the handles of a rudely shaped terra-cotta vase
or jar.  The colour of his face, the ears included, suggested
burnt clay.  But though Nature had made him ugly, he had an
agreeable expression, a sweet benign look in his large dark
eyes, which attracted me, and I stayed to talk with him.

It has frequently been said that those who are much with cows,
and have an affection for them, appear to catch something of
their expression--to look like cows; just as persons of
sympathetic or responsive nature, and great mobility of face,
grow to be like those they live and are in sympathy with.
The cowman who looks like a cow may be more bovine than his
fellows in his heavier motions and slower apprehensions, but
he also exhibits some of the better qualities--the repose and
placidity of the animal.

He said that he was over seventy, and had spent the whole of
his life in the neighbourhood, mostly with cows, and had never
been more than a dozen miles from the spot where we were
standing.  At intervals while we talked he paused to utter one
of his long shouts, to which the cows paid no attention.  At
length one of the beasts raised her head and had a long look,
then slowly crossed the field to us, the others following at
some distance.  They were shorthorns, all but the leader, a
beautiful young Devon, of a uniform rich glossy red; but the
silky hair on the distended udder was of an intense chestnut,
and all the parts that were not clothed were red too--the
teats, the skin round the eyes, the moist embossed nose; while
the hoofs were like polished red pebbles, and even the shapely
horns were tinged with that colour.  Walking straight up to
the old man, she began deliberately licking one of his ears
with her big rough tongue, and in doing so knocked off his old
rakish cap.  Picking it up he laughed like a child, and
remarked, "She knows me, this one does--and she loikes me."




Chapter Seventeen: An Old Road Leading Nowhere


So many and minute were the directions I received about the
way from the blessed cowkeeper, and so little attention did I
give them, my mind being occupied with other things, that they
were quickly forgotten.  Of half a hundred things I remembered
only that I had to "bear to the left."  This I did, although
it seemed useless, seeing that my way was by lanes, across
fields, and through plantations.  At length I came to a road,
and as it happened to be on my left hand I followed it.  It
was narrow, worn deep by traffic and rains; and grew deeper,
rougher, and more untrodden as I progressed, until it was
like the dry bed of a mountain torrent, and I walked on
boulder-stones between steep banks about fourteen feet high.
Their sides were clothed with ferns, grass and rank moss;
their summits were thickly wooded, and the interlacing
branches of the trees above, mingled with long rope-like
shoots of bramble and briar, formed so close a roof that I
seemed to be walking in a dimly lighted tunnel.  At length,
thinking that I had kept long enough to a road which had
perhaps not been used for a century, also tired of the
monotony of always bearing to the left, I scrambled out on the
right-hand side.  For some time past I had been ascending a
low, broad, flat-topped hill, and on forcing my way through
the undergrowth into the open I found myself on the level
plateau, an unenclosed spot overgrown with heather and
scattered furze bushes, with clumps of fir and birch trees.
Before me and on either hand at this elevation a vast extent
of country was disclosed.  The surface was everywhere broken,
but there was no break in the wonderful greenness, which the
recent rain had intensified.  There is too much green, to my
thinking, with too much uniformity in its soft, bright tone,
in South Devon.  After gazing on such a landscape the brown,
harsh, scanty vegetation of the hilltop seemed all the more
grateful.  The heath was an oasis and a refuge; I rambled
about in it until my feet and legs were wet; then I sat
down to let them dry and altogether spent several agreeable
hours at that spot, pleased at the thought that no human
fellow-creature would intrude upon me.  Feathered companions
were, however, not wanting.  The crowing of cock pheasants
from the thicket beside the old road warned me that I was on
preserved grounds.  Not too strictly preserved, however, for
there was my old friend the carrion-crow out foraging for his
young.  He dropped down over the trees, swept past me, and was
gone.  At this season, in the early summer, he may be easily
distinguished, when flying, from his relation the rook.  When
on the prowl the crow glides smoothly and rapidly through the
air, often changing his direction, now flying close to the
surface, anon mounting high, but oftenest keeping nearly on a
level with the tree tops.  His gliding and curving motions are
somewhat like those of the herring-gull, but the wings in
gliding are carried stiff and straight, the tips of the long
flight-feathers showing a slight upward curve.  But the
greatest difference is in the way the head is carried.  The
rook, like the heron and stork, carries his beak pointing
lance-like straight before him.  He knows his destination, and
makes for it; he follows his nose, so to speak, turning
neither to the right nor the left.  The foraging crow
continually turns his head, gull-like and harrier-like, from
side to side, as if to search the ground thoroughly or to
concentrate his vision on some vaguely seen object.

Not only the crow was there: a magpie chattered as I came from
the brake, but refused to show himself; and a little later a
jay screamed at me, as only a jay can.  There are times when I
am intensely in sympathy with the feeling expressed in this
ear-splitting sound, inarticulate but human.  It is at the
same time warning and execration, the startled solitary's
outburst of uncontrolled rage at the abhorred sight of a
fellow-being in his woodland haunt.

Small birds were numerous at that spot, as if for them also
its wildness and infertility had an attraction.  Tits,
warblers, pipits, finches, all were busy ranging from place to
place, emitting their various notes now from the tree-tops,
then from near the ground; now close at hand, then far off;
each change in the height, distance, and position of the
singer giving the sound a different character, so that the
effect produced was one of infinite variety.  Only the
yellow-hammer remained constant in one spot, in one position,
and the song at each repetition was the same.  Nevertheless
this bird is not so monotonous a singer as he is reputed.  A
lover of open places, of commons and waste lands, with a bush
or dwarf tree for tower to sit upon, he is yet one of the most
common species in the thickly timbered country of the Otter,
Clyst, and Sid, in which I had been rambling, hearing him
every day and all day long.  Throughout that district, where
the fields are small, and the trees big and near together, he
has the cirl-bunting's habit of perching to sing on the tops
of high hedgerow elms and oaks.

By and by I had a better bird to listen to--a redstart.  A
female flew down within fifteen yards of me; her mate followed
and perched on a dry twig, where he remained a long time for
so shy and restless a creature.  He was in perfect plumage,
and sitting there, motionless in the strong sunlight, was
wonderfully conspicuous, the gayest, most exotic-looking bird
of his family in England.  Quitting his perch, he flew up into
a tree close by and began singing; and for half an hour
thereafter I continued intently listening to his brief strain,
repeated at short intervals--a song which I think has never
been perfectly described.  "Practice makes perfect" is an
axiom that does not apply to the art of song in the bird
world; since the redstart, a member of a highly melodious
family, with a good voice to start with, has never attained to
excellence in spite of much practising.  The song is
interesting both on account of its exceptional inferiority and
of its character.  A distinguished ornithologist has said that
little birds have two ways of making themselves attractive--by
melody and by bright plumage; and that most species excel in
one or the other way; and that the acquisition of gay colours
by a species of a sober-coloured melodious family will cause
it to degenerate as a songster.  He is speaking of the
redstart.  Unfortunately for the rule there are too many
exceptions.  Thus confining ourselves to a single family--that
of the finches--in our own islands, the most modest coloured
have the least melody, while those that have the gayest
plumage are the best singers--the goldfinch, chaffinch,
siskin, and linnet.  Nevertheless it is impossible to listen
for any length of time to the redstart, and to many redstarts,
without feeling, almost with irritation, that its strain is
only the prelude of a song--a promise never performed; that
once upon a time in the remote past it was a sweet, copious,
and varied singer, and that only a fragment of its melody now
remains.  The opening rapidly warbled notes are so charming
that the attention is instantly attracted by them.  They are
composed of two sounds, both beautiful--the bright pure
gushing robin-like note, and the more tender expressive
swallow-like note.  And that is all; the song scarcely begins
before it ends, or collapses; for in most cases the pure sweet
opening strain is followed by a curious little farrago of
gurgling and squeaking sounds, and little fragments of varied
notes, often so low as to be audible only at a few yards'
distance.  It is curious that these slight fragments of notes
at the end vary in different individuals, in strength and
character and in number, from a single faintest squeal to half
a dozen or a dozen distinct sounds.  In all cases they are
emitted with apparent effort, as if the bird strained its pipe
in the vain attempt to continue the song.

The statement that the redstart is a mimic is to be met with
in many books about birds.  I rather think that in jerking out
these various little broken notes which end its strain,
whether he only squeaks or succeeds in producing a pure sound,
he is striving to recover his own lost song rather than to
imitate the songs of other birds.

So much entertainment did I find at that spot, so grateful did
it seem in its openness after long confinement in the lower
thickly wooded country, that I practically spent the day
there.  At all events the best time for walking was gone when
I quitted it, and then I could think of no better plan than to
climb down into the old long untrodden road, or channel, again
just to see where it would lead me.  After all, I said, my
time is my own, and to abandon the old way I have walked in so
long without discovering the end would be a mistake.  So I
went on in it once more, and in about twenty minutes it came
to an end before a group of old farm buildings in a hollow in
the woods.  The space occupied by the buildings was quite
walled round and shut in by a dense growth of trees and
bushes; and there was no soul there and no domestic animal.
The place had apparently been vacant many years, and the
buildings were in a ruinous condition, with the roofs falling
in.

Now when I look back on that walk I blame myself for having
gone on my way without trying to find out something of the
history of that forsaken home to which the lonely old road had
led me.  Those ruinous buildings once inhabited, so wrapped
round and hidden away by trees, have now a strange look in
memory as if they had a story to tell, as if something
intelligent had looked from the vacant windows as I stood
staring at them and had said, We have waited these many years
for you to come and listen to our story and you are come at
last.

Something perhaps stirred in me in response to that greeting
and message, but I failed to understand it, and after standing
there awhile, oppressed by a sense of loneliness, I turned
aside, and creeping and pushing through a mass and tangle of
vegetation went on my way towards the coast.

Possibly that idea or fancy of a story to tell, a human
tragedy, came to me only because of another singular
experience I had that day when the afternoon sun had grown
oppressively hot--another mystery of a desolate but not in
this case uninhabited house.  The two places somehow became
associated together in my mind.

The place was a little farm-house standing some distance
from the road, in a lonely spot out of sight of any other
habitation, and I thought I would call and ask for a glass
of milk, thinking that if things had a promising look on my
arrival my modest glass of milk would perhaps expand to a
sumptuous five-o'clock tea and my short rest to a long and
pleasant one.

The house I found on coming nearer was small and mean-looking
and very old; the farm buildings in a dilapidated condition,
the thatch rotten and riddled with holes in which many
starlings and sparrows had their nests.  Gates and fences were
broken down, and the ground was everywhere overgrown with
weeds and encumbered with old broken and rusty implements, and
littered with rubbish.  No person could I see about the place,
but knew it was inhabited as there were some fowls walking
about, and some calves shut in a pen in one of the numerous
buildings were dolefully calling--calling to be fed.  Seeing a
door half open at one end of the house I went to it and rapped
on the warped paintless wood with my stick, and after about a
minute a young woman came from an inner room and asked me what
I wanted.  She was not disturbed or surprised at my sudden
appearance there: her face was impassive, and her eyes when
they met mine appeared to look not at me but at something
distant, and her words were spoken mechanically.

I said that I was hot and thirsty and tired and would be glad
of a glass of milk.

Without a word she turned and left me standing there, and
presently returned with a tumbler of milk which she placed on
a deal table standing near me.  To my remarks she replied in
monosyllables, and stood impassively, her hands at her side,
her eyes cast down, waiting for me to drink the milk and go.
And when I had finished it and set the glass down and thanked
her, she turned in silence and went back to that inner room
from which she first came.  And hot and tired as I had felt a
few moments before, and desirous of an interval of rest in the
cool shade, I was glad to be out in the burning sun once more,
for the sight of that young woman had chilled my blood and
made the heat out-of-doors seem grateful to me.

The sight of such a face in the midst of such surroundings had
produced a shock of surprise, for it was noble in shape, the
features all fine and the mouth most delicately chiselled, the
eyes dark and beautiful, and the hair of a raven blackness.
But it was a colourless face, and even the lips were pale.
Strongest of all was the expression, which had frozen there,
and was like the look of one on whom some unimaginable
disaster or some hateful disillusionment had come, not to
subdue nor soften, but to change all its sweet to sour, and
its natural warmth to icy cold.




Chapter Eighteen: Branscombe


Health and pleasure resorts and all parasitic towns in fact,
inland or on the sea, have no attractions for me and I was
more than satisfied with a day or two of Sidmouth.  Then one
evening I heard for the first time of a place called
Branscomb--a village near the sea, over by Beer and Seaton,
near the mouth of the Axe, and the account my old host gave me
seemed so attractive that on the following day I set out to
find it.  Further information about the unknown village came
to me in a very agreeable way in the course of my tramp.  A
hotter walk I never walked--no, not even when travelling
across a flat sunburnt treeless plain, nearer than Devon by
many degrees to the equator.  One wonders why that part of
Devon which lies between the Exe and the Axe seems actually
hotter than other regions which undoubtedly have a higher
temperature.  After some hours of walking with not a little of
uphill and downhill, I began to find the heat well-nigh
intolerable.  I was on a hard dusty glaring road, shut in by
dusty hedges on either side.  Not a breath of air was
stirring; not a bird sang; on the vast sky not a cloud
appeared.  If the vertical sun had poured down water instead
of light and heat on me my clothing could not have clung to me
more uncomfortably.  Coming at length to a group of two or
three small cottages at the roadside, I went into one and
asked for something to quench my thirst--cider or milk.  There
was only water to be had, but it was good to drink, and the
woman of the cottage was so pretty and pleasant that I was
glad to rest an hour and talk with her in her cool kitchen.
There are English counties where it would perhaps be said of
such a woman that she was one in a thousand; but the Devonians
are a comely race.  In that blessed county the prettiest
peasants are not all diligently gathered with the dew on them
and sent away to supply the London flower-market.  Among the
best-looking women of the peasant class there are two distinct
types--the rich in colour and the colourless.  A majority are
perhaps intermediate, but the two extreme types may be found
in any village or hamlet; and when seen side by side--the lily
and the rose, not to say the peony--they offer a strange and
beautiful contrast.

This woman, in spite of the burning climate, was white as any
pale town lady; and although she was the mother of several
children, the face was extremely youthful in appearance; it
seemed indeed almost girlish in its delicacy and innocent
expression when she looked up at me with her blue eyes shaded
by her white sun-bonnet.  The children were five or six in
number, ranging from a boy of ten to a baby in her arms--all
clean and healthy looking, with bright, fun-loving faces.

I mentioned that I was on my way to Branscombe, and inquired
the distance.

"Branscomb--are you going there?  Oh, I wonder what you will
think of Branscombe!" she exclaimed, her white cheeks
flushing, her innocent eyes sparkling with excitement.

What was Branscombe to her, I returned with indifference; and
what did it matter what any stranger thought of it?

"But it is my home!" she answered, looking hurt at my careless
words.  "I was born there, and married there, and have always
lived at Branscombe with my people until my husband got work
in this place; then we had to leave home and come and live in
this cottage."

And as I began to show interest she went on to tell me that
Branscombe was, oh, such a dear, queer, funny old place!  That
she had been to other villages and towns--Axmouth, and Seaton,
and Beer, and to Salcombe Regis and Sidmouth, and once to
Exeter; but never, never had she seen a place like Branscombe
--not one that she liked half so well.  How strange that I had
never been there--had never even heard of it!  People that
went there sometimes laughed at it at first, because it was
such a funny, tumbledown old place; but they always said
afterwards that there was no sweeter spot on the earth.

Her enthusiasm was very delightful; and, when baby cried, in
the excitement of talk she opened her breast and fed it before
me.  A pretty sight!  But for the pure white, blue-veined skin
she might have been taken for a woman of Spain--the most
natural, perhaps the most lovable, of the daughters of earth.
But all at once she remembered that I was a stranger, and with
a blush turned aside and covered her fair skin.  Her shame,
too, like her first simple unconscious action, was natural;
for we live in a cooler climate, and are accustomed to more
clothing than the Spanish; and our closer covering "has
entered the soul," as the late Professor Kitchen Parker would
have said; and that which was only becoming modesty in the
English woman would in the Spanish seem rank prudishness.

In the afternoon I came to a slender stream, clear and swift,
running between the hills that rose, round and large and high,
on either hand, like vast downs, some grassy, others wooded.
This was the Branscombe, and, following it, I came to the
village; then, for a short mile my way ran by a winding path
with the babbling stream below me on one side, and on the
other the widely separated groups and little rows of thatched
cottages.

Finally, I came to the last and largest group of all, the end
of the village nearest to the sea, within ten minutes' walk of
the shingly beach.  Here I was glad to rest.  Above, on the
giant downs, were stony waste places, and heather and gorse,
where the rabbits live, and had for neighbours the adder,
linnet, and wheatear, and the small grey titlark that soared
up and dropped back to earth all day to his tinkling little
tune.  On the summit of the cliff I had everything I wanted
and had come to seek--the wildness and freedom of untilled
earth; an unobstructed prospect, hills beyond hills of
malachite, stretching away along the coast into infinitude,
long leagues of red sea-wall and the wide expanse and
everlasting freshness of ocean.  And the village itself, the
little old straggling place that had so grand a setting, I
quickly found that the woman in the cottage had not succeeded
in giving me a false impression of her dear home.  It was just
such a quaint unimproved, old-world, restful place as she had
painted.  It was surprising to find that there were many
visitors, and one wondered where they could all stow
themselves.  The explanation was that those who visited
Branscombe knew it, and preferred its hovels to the palaces
of the fashionable seaside town.  No cottage was too mean to
have its guest.  I saw a lady push open the cracked and
warped door of an old barn and go in, pulling the door to
after her--it was her bed-sitting-room.  I watched a party of
pretty merry girls marching, single file, down a narrow path
past a pig-sty, then climb up a ladder to the window of a loft
at the back of a stone cottage and disappear within.  It was
their bedroom.  The relations between the villagers and their
visitors were more intimate and kind than is usual.  They
lived more together, and were more free and easy in company.
The men were mostly farm labourers, and after their day's work
they would sit out-of-doors on the ground to smoke their
pipes; and where the narrow crooked little street was
narrowest--at my end of the village--when two men would sit
opposite each other, each at his own door, with legs stretched
out before them, their boots would very nearly touch in the
middle of the road.  When walking one had to step over their
legs; or, if socially inclined, one could stand by and join in
the conversation.  When daylight faded the village was very
dark--no lamp for the visitors--and very silent, only the low
murmur of the sea on the shingle was audible, and the gurgling
sound of a swift streamlet flowing from the hill above and
hurrying through the village to mingle with the Branscombe
lower down in the meadows.  Such a profound darkness and quiet
one expects in an inland agricultural village; here, where
there were visitors from many distant towns, it was novel and
infinitely refreshing.

No sooner was it dark than all were in bed and asleep; not one
square path of yellow light was visible.  To enjoy the
sensation I went out and sat down, and listened alone to the
liquid rippling, warbling sound of the swift-flowing
streamlet--that sweet low music of running water to which the
reed-warbler had listened thousands of years ago, striving to
imitate it, until his running rippling song was perfect.

A fresh surprise and pleasure awaited me when I explored the
coast east of the village; it was bold and precipitous in
places, and from the summit of the cliff a very fine view of
the coast-line on either hand could be obtained.  Best of all,
the face of the cliff itself was the breeding-place of some
hundreds of herring-gulls.  The eggs at the period of my visit
were not yet hatched, but highly incubated, and at that stage
both parents are almost constantly at home, as if in a state
of anxious suspense.  I had seen a good many colonies of this
gull before at various breeding stations on the coast--south,
west, and east--but never in conditions so singularly favourable
as at this spot.  From the vale where the Branscombe pours its
clear waters through rough masses of shingle into the sea the
ground to the east rises steeply to a height of nearly five
hundred feet; the cliff is thus not nearly so high as many
another, but it has features of peculiar interest.  Here, in
some former time, there has been a landslip, a large portion
of the cliff at its highest part falling below and forming a
sloping mass a chalky soil mingled with huge fragments of rock,
which lies like a buttress against the vertical precipice and
seems to lend it support.  The fall must have occurred a very
long time back, as the vegetation that overspreads the rude
slope--hawthorn, furze, and ivy--has an ancient look.  Here
are huge masses of rock standing isolated, that resemble in
their forms ruined castles, towers, and churches, some of them
completely overgrown with ivy.  On this rough slope, under the
shelter of the cliff, with the sea at its feet, the villagers
have formed their cultivated patches.  The patches, wildly
irregular in form, some on such steeply sloping ground as to
suggest the idea that they must have been cultivated on all
fours, are divided from each other by ridges and by masses of
rock, deep fissures in the earth, strips of bramble and thorn
and furze bushes.  Altogether the effect was very singular
the huge rough mass of jumbled rock and soil, the ruin wrought
by Nature in one of her Cromwellian moods, and, scattered
irregularly about its surface, the plots or patches of
cultivated smoothness--potato rows, green parallel lines
ruled on a grey ground, and big, blue-green, equidistant
cabbage-globes--each plot with its fringe of spike-like onion
leaves, crinkled parsley, and other garden herbs.  Here the
villagers came by a narrow, steep, and difficult path they had
made, to dig in their plots; while, overhead, the gulls,
careless of their presence, pass and repass wholly occupied
with their own affairs.

I spent hours of rare happiness at this spot in watching the
birds.  I could not have seen and heard them to such advantage
if their breeding-place had been shared with other species.
Here the herring-gulls had the rock to themselves, and looked
their best in their foam-white and pearl-grey plumage and
yellow legs and beaks.  While I watched them they watched me;
not gathered in groups, but singly or in pairs, scattered up
and down all over the face of the precipice above me, perched
on ledges and on jutting pieces of rock.  Standing motionless
thus, beautiful in form and colour, they looked like
sculptured figures of gulls, set up on the projections against
the rough dark wall of rock, just as sculptured figures of
angels and saintly men and women are placed in niches on a
cathedral front.  At first they appeared quite indifferent to
my presence, although in some instances near enough for their
yellow irides to be visible.  While unalarmed they were very
silent, standing in that clear sunshine that gave their
whiteness something of a crystalline appearance; or flying to
and fro along the face of the cliff, purely for the delight of
bathing in the warm lucent air.  Gradually a change came over
them.  One by one those that were on the wing dropped on to
some projection, until they had all settled down, and, letting
my eyes range up and down over the huge wall of rock, it was
plain to see that all the birds were watching me.  They had
made the discovery that I was a stranger.  In my rough old
travel-stained clothes and tweed hat I might have passed for a
Branscombe villager, but I did no hoeing and digging in one of
the cultivated patches; and when I deliberately sat down on a
rock to watch them, they noticed it and became suspicious; and
as time went on and I still remained immovable, with my eyes
fixed on them, the suspicion and anxiety increased and turned
to fear; and those that were sitting on their nests got up and
came close to the edge of the rock, to gaze with the others
and join in the loud chorus of alarm.  It was a wonderful
sound.  Not like the tempest of noise that may be heard at the
breeding-season at Lundy Island, and at many other stations
where birds of several species mix their various voices--the
yammeris and the yowlis, and skrykking, screeking, skrymming
scowlis, and meickle moyes and shoutes, of old Dunbar's
wonderful onomatopoetic lines.  Here there was only one
species, with a clear resonant cry, and as every bird uttered
that one cry, and no other, a totally different effect was
produced.  The herring-gull and lesser black-backed gull
resemble each other in language as they do in general
appearance; both have very powerful and clear voices unlike
the guttural black-headed and common gull.  But the
herring-gull has a shriller, more piercing voice, and
resembles the black-backed species just as, in human voices, a
boy's clear treble resembles a baritone.  Both birds have a
variety of notes; and both, when the nest is threatened with
danger, utter one powerful importunate cry, which is repeated
incessantly until the danger is over.  And as the birds breed
in communities, often very populous, and all clamour together,
the effect of so many powerful and unisonant voices is very
grand; but it differs in the two species, owing to the quality
of their voices being different; the storm of sound produced
by the black-backs is deep and solemn, while that of the
herring-gulls has a ringing sharpness almost metallic.

It is probable that in the case I am describing the effect of
sharpness and resonance was heightened by the position of the
birds, perched motionless, scattered about on the face of the
perpendicular wall of rock, all with their beaks turned in
my direction, raining their cries upon me.  It was not a
monotonous storm of cries, but rose and fell; for after two or
three minutes the excitement would abate somewhat and the
cries grow fewer and fewer; then the infection would spread
again, bird after bird joining the outcry; and after a while
there would be another lull, and so on, wave following wave of
sound.  I could have spent hours, and the hours would have
seemed like minutes, listening to that strange chorus of
ringing chiming cries, so novel was its effect, and unlike
that of any other tempest of sound produced by birds which
I had ever heard.  When by way of a parting caress and
benediction (given and received) I dipped my hands in
Branscombe's clear streamlet it was with a feeling of tender
regret that was almost a pain.  For who does not make a little
inward moan, an Eve's Lamentation, an unworded, "Must I leave
thee, Paradise?" on quitting any such sweet restful spot,
however brief his stay in it may have been?  But when I had
climbed to the summit of the great down on the east side of
the valley and looked on the wide land and wider sea flashed
with the early sunlight I rejoiced full of glory at my
freedom.  For invariably when the peculiar character and charm
of a place steals over and takes possession of me I begin to
fear it, knowing from long experience that it will be a
painful wrench to get away and that get away sooner or later I
must.  Now I was free once more, a wanderer with no ties, no
business to transact in any town, no worries to make me
miserable like others, nothing to gain and nothing to lose.

Pausing on the summit to consider which way I should go,
inland, towards Axminister, or along the coast by Beer, Seton,
Axmouth, and so on to Lyme Regis, I turned to have a last look
and say a last good-bye to Branscombe and could hardly help
waving my hand to it.

Why, I asked myself, am I not a poet, or verse-maker, so as to
say my farewell in numbers?  My answer was, Because I am too
much occupied in seeing.  There is no room and time for
'tranquillity,' since I want to go on to see something else.
As Blake has it:  "Natural objects always did and do, weaken,
deaden and obliterate imagination in me."

We know however that they didn't quite quench it in him.




Chapter Nneteen: Abbotsbury


Abbotsbury is an old unspoilt village, not on but near the
sea, divided from it by half a mile of meadowland where all
sorts of meadow and water plants flourish, and where there are
extensive reed and osier beds, the roosting-place in autumn
and winter of innumerable starlings.  I am always delighted to
come on one of these places where starlings congregate, to
watch them coming in at day's decline and listen to their
marvellous hubbub, and finally to see their aerial evolutions
when they rise and break up in great bodies and play at clouds
in the sky.  When the people of the place, the squire and
keepers and others who have an interest in the reeds and
osiers, fall to abusing them on account of the damage they do,
I put my fingers in my ears.  But at Abbotsbury I did not do
so, but listened with keen pleasure to the curses they vented
and the story they told.  This was that when the owner of
Abbotsbury came down for the October shooting and found the
starlings more numerous than ever, he put himself into a fine
passion and reproached his keepers and other servants for not
having got rid of the birds as he had desired them to do.
Some of them ventured to say that it was easier said than
done, whereupon the great man swore that he would do it
himself without assistance from any one, and getting out a big
duck-gun he proceeded to load it with the smallest shot and
went down to the reed bed and concealed hiniself among the
bushes at a suitable distance.  The birds were pouring in, and
when it was growing dark and they had settled down for the
night he fired his big piece into the thick of the crowd, and
by and by when the birds after wheeling about for a minute or
two settled down again in the same place he fired again.  Then
he went home, and early next morning men and boys went into
the reeds and gathered a bushel or so of dead starlings.  But
the birds returned in their thousands that evening, and his
heart being still hot against them he went out a second time
to slaughter them wholesale with his big gun.  Then when he
had blazed into the crowd once more, and the dead and wounded
fell like rain into the water below, the revulsion came and he
was mad with himself for having done such a thing, and on his
return to the house, or palace, he angrily told his people to
"let the starlings alone" for the future--never to molest them
again!

I thought it one of the loveliest stories I had ever heard;
there is no hardness comparable to that of the sportsman, yet
here was one, a very monarch among them, who turned sick at
his own barbarity and repented.

Beyond the flowery wet meadows, favored by starlings and a
breeding-place of swans, is the famous Chesil Bank, one of the
seven wonders of Britain.  And thanks to this great bank, a
screen between sea and land extending about fourteen miles
eastward from Portland, this part of the coast must remain
inviolate from the speculative builder of seaside holiday
resorts or towns of lodging-houses.

Every one has heard of the Fleet in connection with the famous
swannery of Abbotsbury, the largest in the land.  I had heard
so much about the swannery that it had but little interest for
me.  The only thing about it which specially attracted my
attention was seeing a swan rise up and after passing over my
head as I stood on the bank fly straight out over the sea.  I
watched him until he had diminished to a small white spot
above the horizon, and then still flying he faded from sight.
Do these swans that fly away over the sea, and others which
appear in small flocks or pairs at Poole Harbour and at other
places on the coast, ever return to the Fleet?  Probably some
do, but, I fancy some of these explorers must settle down in
waters far from home, to return no more.

The village itself, looked upon from this same elevation, is
very attractive.  Life seems quieter, more peaceful there out
of sight of the ocean's turbulence, out of hearing of its
"accents disconsolate."  The cottages are seen ranged in a
double line along the narrow crooked street, like a procession
of cows with a few laggards scattered behind the main body.
One is impressed by its ancient character.  The cottages are
old, stone-built and thatched; older still is the church with
its grey square tower, and all about are scattered the
memorials of antiquity--the chantry on the hill, standing
conspicuous alone, apart, above the world; the vast old abbey
barn, and, rough thick stone walls, ivy-draped and crowned
with beautiful valerian, and other fragments that were once
parts of a great religious house.

Looking back at the great round hill from the village it is
impossible not to notice the intense red colour of the road
that winds over its green slope.  One sometimes sees on a
hillside a ploughed field of red earth which at a distance
might easily be taken for a field of blossoming trifolium.
Viewed nearer the crimson of the clover and red of the earth
are very dissimilar; distance appears to intensify the red of
the soil and to soften that of the flower until they are very
nearly of the same hue.  The road at Abbotsbury was near and
looked to me more intensely red than any ordinary red earth,
and the sight was strangely pleasing.  These two complementary
colours, red and green, delight us most when seen thus--a
little red to a good deal of green, and the more luminous the
red and vivid the green the better they please us.  We see
this in flowers--in the red geranium, for example--where there
is no brown soil below, but green of turf or herbage.  I
sometimes think the red campions and ragged-robins are our
most beautiful wild flowers when the sun shines level on the
meadow and they are like crimson flowers among the tall
translucent grasses.  I remember the joy it was in boyhood in
early spring when the flowers were beginning to bloom, when in
our gallops over the level grass pampas we came upon a patch
of scarlet verbenas.  The first sight of the intense blooms
scattered all about the turf would make us wild with delight,
and throwing ourselves from our ponies we would go down among
the flowers to feast on the sight.

Green is universal, but the red earth which looks so pleasing
amid the green is distributed very partially, and it may be
the redness of the soil and the cliffs in Devon have given
that county a more vivid personality, so to speak, than most
others.  Think of Kent with its white cliffs, chalk downs, and
dull-coloured clays in this connection!

The humble subterraneous mole proves himself on occasions a
good colourist when he finds a soil of the proper hue to
burrow in, and the hillocks he throws up from numberless
irregular splashes of bright red colour on a green sward.  The
wild animals that strike us as most beautiful, when seen
against a green background, are those which bear the reddest
fur--fox, squirrel, and red deer.  One day, in a meadow a few
miles from Abbotsbury, I came upon a herd of about fifty milch
cows scattered over a considerable space of ground, some lying
down, others standing ruminating, and still others moving
about and cropping the long flowery grasses.  All were of that
fine rich red colour frequently seen in Dorset and Devon
cattle, which is brighter than the reds of other red animals
in this country, wild and domestic, with the sole exception of
a rare variety of the collie dog.  The Irish setter and red
chouchou come near it.  So beautiful did these red cows look
in the meadow that I stood still for half an hour feasting my
eyes on the sight.

No less was the pleasure I experienced when I caught sight of
that road winding over the hill above the village.  On going
to it I found that it had looked as red as rust simply because
it was rust-earth made rich and beautiful in colour with iron,
its red hue variegated with veins and streaks of deep purple
or violet.  I was told that there were hundreds of acres of
this earth all round the place--earth so rich in iron that
many a man's mouth had watered at the sight of it; also that
every effort had been made to induce the owner of Abbotsbury
to allow this rich mine to be worked.  But, wonderful to
relate, he had not been persuaded.

A hard fragment of the red stuff, measuring a couple of inches
across and weighing about three ounces avoirdupois, rust-red
in colour with purple streaks and yellow mottlings, is now
lying before me.  The mineralogist would tell me that its
commercial value is naught, or something infinitesimal; which
is doubtless true enough, as tens of thousands of tons of the
same material lie close to the surface under the green turf
and golden blossoming furze at the spot where I picked up my
specimen.  The lapidary would not look at it; nevertheless, it
is the only article of jewellery I possess, and I value it
accordingly.  And I intend to keep this native ruby by me for
as long as the lords of Abbotsbury continue in their present
mind.  The time may come when I shall be obliged to throw it
away.  That any millionaire should hesitate for a moment to
blast and blacken any part of the earth's surface, howsoever
green and refreshing to the heart it may be, when by so doing
he might add to his income, seems like a fable, or a tale of
fairyland.  It is as if one had accidentally discovered the
existence of a little fantastic realm, a survival from a
remote past, almost at one's doors; a small independent
province, untouched by progress, asking to be conquered and
its antediluvian constitution taken from it.

From the summit of that commanding hill, over which the red
path winds, a noble view presents itself of the Chesil Bank,
or of about ten miles of it, running straight as any Roman
road, to end beneath the rugged stupendous cliffs of Portland.
The ocean itself, and not conquering Rome, raised this
artificial-looking wall or rampart to stay its own proud
waves.  Formed of polished stones and pebbles, about two
hundred yards in width, flat-topped, with steeply sloping
sides, at this distance it has the appearance of a narrow
yellow road or causeway between the open sea on one hand and
the waters of the Fleet, a narrow lake ten miles long, on the
other.

When the mackerel visit the coast, and come near enough to be
taken in a draw-net, every villager who owns a share (usually
a tenth) in a fishing-boat throws down his spade or whatever
implement he happens to have in his hand at the moment, and
hurries away to the beach to take his share in the fascinating
task.  At four o'clock one morning a youth, who had been down
to the sea to watch, came running into the village uttering
loud cries which were like excited yells--a sound to rouse the
deepest sleeper.  The mackerel had come!  For the rest of the
day there was a pretty kind of straggling procession of those
who went and came between the beach and the village--men in
blue cotton shirts, blue jerseys, blue jackets, and women in
grey gowns and big white sun-bonnets.  During the latter part
of the day the proceedings were peculiarly interesting to me,
a looker-on with no share in any one of the boats, owing to
the catches being composed chiefly of jelly-fish.  Some
sympathy was felt for the toilers who strained their muscles
again and again only to be mocked in the end; still, a draught
of jelly-fish was more to my taste than one of mackerel.  The
great weight of a catch of this kind when the net was full was
almost too much for the ten or twelve men engaged in drawing
it up; then (to the sound of deep curses from those of the men
who were not religious) the net would be opened and the great
crystalline hemispheres, hyaline blue and delicate salmon-pink
in colour, would slide back into the water.  Such rare and
exquisite colours have these great glassy flowers of ocean
that to see them was a feast; and every time a net was hauled
up my prayer--which I was careful not to repeat aloud--was,
Heaven send another big draught of jelly-fish!

The sun, sinking over the hills towards Swyre and Bridport,
turned crimson before it touched the horizon.  The sky became
luminous; the yellow Chesil Bank, stretching long leagues
away, and the hills behind it, changed their colours to
violet.  The rough sea near the beach glittered like gold; the
deep green water, flecked with foam, was mingled with fire;
the one boat that remained on it, tossing up and down near the
beach, was like a boat of ebony in a glittering fiery sea.  A
dozen men were drawing up the last net; but when they gathered
round to see what they had taken--mackerel or jelly-fish--I
cared no longer to look with them.  That sudden, wonderful
glory which had fallen on the earth and sea had smitten me as
well and changed me; and I was like some needy homeless tramp
who has found a shilling piece, and, even while he is
gloating over it, all at once sees a great treasure before
him--glittering gold in heaps, and all rarest sparkling gems,
more than he can gather up.

But it is a poor simile.  No treasures in gold and gems,
though heaped waist-high all about, could produce in the
greediest man, hungry for earthly pleasures, a delight, a
rapture, equal to mine.  For this joy was of another and
higher order and very rare, and was a sense of lightness and
freedom from all trammels as if the body had become air,
essence, energy, or soul, and of union with all visible
nature, one with sea and land and the entire vast overarching
sky.

We read of certain saints who were subject to experiences of
this kind that they were "snatched up" into some supramundane
region, and that they stated on their return to earth that it
was not lawful for them to speak of the things they had
witnessed.  The humble naturalist and nature-worshipper can
only witness the world glorified--transfigured; what he finds
is the important thing.  I fancy the mystics would have been
nearer the mark if they had said that their experiences during
their period of exaltation could not be reported, or that it
would be idle to report them, since their questioners lived on
the ground and would be quite incapable on account of the
mind's limitations of conceiving a state above it and outside
of its own experience.

The glory passed and with it the exaltation: the earth and sea
turned grey; the last boat was drawn up on the slope and the
men departed slowly: only one remained, a rough-looking youth,
about fifteen years old.  Some important matter which he was
revolving in his mind had detained him alone on the darkening
beach.  He sat down, then stood up and gazed at the rolling
wave after wave to roar and hiss on the shingle at his feet;
then he moved restlessly about, crunching pebbles beneath his
thick boots; finally, making up his mind, he took off his
coat, threw it down, and rolled up his shirt-sleeves, with the
resolute air of a man about to engage in a fight with an
adversary nearly as big as himself.  Stepping back a little
space, he made a rush at the sea, not to cast himself in it,
but only, as it turned out, with the object of catching some
water in the hollow of his hands from the top of an incoming
wave.  He only succeeded in getting his legs wet, and in
hastily retreating he fell on his back.  Nothing daunted, he
got up and renewed the assault, and when he succeeded in
catching water in his hands he dashed it on and vigorously
rubbed it over his dirty face.  After repeating the operation
about a dozen times, receiving meanwhile several falls and
wettings, he appeared satisfied, put on his coat and marched
away homewards with a composed air.




Chapter Twenty: Salisbury Revisited


Since that visit to Salisbury, described in a former chapter,
when I watched and listened to the doves in those cold days in
early spring, I have been there a good many times, but never
at the time when the bird colony is most interesting to
observe, just before and during the early part of the
breeding-season.  At length, in the early days of June, 1908,
the wished opportunity was mine--wished yet feared, seeing
that it was possible some disaster had fallen upon that unique
colony of stock-doves.  It is true they appeared to be long
established and well able to maintain their foothold on the
building in spite of malicious persecuting daws, but there was
nothing to show that they had been long there, seeing that it
had been observed by no person but myself that the cathedral
doves were stock-doves and not the domestic pigeon found on
other large buildings.  Great was my happiness to find them
still there, as well as the daws and all the other feathered
people who make this great building their home; even the
kestrels were not wanting.  There were three there one
morning, quarrelling with the daws in the old way in the old
place, halfway up the soaring spire.  The doves were somewhat
diminished in number, but there were a good many pairs still,
and I found no dead young ones lying about, as they were now
probably grown too large to be ejected, but several young
daws, about a dozen I think, fell to the ground during my
stay.  Undoubtedly they were dragged out of their nests and
thrown down, perhaps by daws at enmity with their parents, or
it may be by the doves, who are not meek-spirited, as we have
seen, or they would not be where they are, and may on occasion
retaliate by invading their black enemies' nesting-holes.

Swallows, martins, and swifts were numerous, the martins
especially, and it was beautiful to see them for ever wheeling
about in a loose swarm about the building.  They reminded me
of bees and flies, and sometimes with a strong light on them
they were like those small polished black and silvery-white
beetles (Gyrinus) which we see in companies on the surface of
pools and streams, perpetually gliding and whirling about in a
sort of complicated dance.  They looked very small at a height
of a couple of hundred feet from the ground, and their
smallness and numbers and lively and eccentric motions made
them very insect-like.

The starlings and sparrows were in a small minority among the
breeders, but including these there were seven species in all,
and as far as I could make out numbered about three hundred
and fifty birds--probably the largest wild bird colony on any
building in England.

Nor could birds in all this land find a more beautiful
building to nest on, unless I except Wells Cathedral solely on
account of its west front, beloved of daws, and where their
numerous black company have so fine an appearance.  Wells has
its west front; Salisbury, so vast in size, is yet a marvel of
beauty in its entirety; and seeing it as I now did every day
and wanting nothing better, I wondered at my want of
enthusiasm on a previous visit.  Still, to me, the bird
company, the sight of their airy gambols and their various
voices, from the deep human-like dove tone to the perpetual
subdued rippling, running-water sound of the aerial martins,
must always be a principal element in the beautiful effect.
Nor do I know a building where Nature has done more in
enhancing the loveliness of man's work with her added
colouring.  The way too in which the colours are distributed
is an example of Nature's most perfect artistry; on the lower,
heavier buttressed parts, where the darkest hues should be, we
find the browns and rust-reds of the minute aerial alga, mixed
with the greys of lichen, these darker stainings extending
upwards to a height of fifty or sixty feet, in places higher,
then giving place to more delicate hues, the pale tender
greens and greenish greys, in places tinged with yellow, the
colours always appearing brightest on the smooth surface
between the windows and sculptured parts.  The effect depends
a good deal on atmosphere and weather: on a day of flying
clouds and a blue sky, with a brillaint sunshine on the vast
building after a shower, the colouring is most beautiful.  It
varies more than in the case of colour in the material itself
or of pigments, because it is a "living" colour, as Crabbe
rightly says in his lumbering verse:

   The living stains, which Nature's hand alone,
   Profuse of life, pours out upon the stone.

Greys, greens, yellows, and browns and rust-reds are but the
colours of a variety of lowly vegetable forms, mostly lichens
and the aerial alga called iolithus.

Without this colouring, its "living stains," Salisbury would
not have fascinated me as it did during this last visit.  It
would have left me cold though all the architects and artists
had assured me that it was the most perfectly beautiful
building on earth.

I also found an increasing charm in the interior, and made the
discovery that I could go oftener and spend more hours in this
cathedral without a sense of fatigue or depression than in any
other one known to me, because it has less of that peculiar
character which we look for and almost invariably find in our
cathedrals.  It has not the rich sombre majesty, the dim
religious light and heavy vault-like atmosphere of the other
great fanes.  So airy and light is it that it is almost like
being out of doors.  You do not experience that instantaneous
change, as of a curtain being drawn excluding the light and
air of day and of being shut in, which you have on entering
other religious houses.  This is due, first, to the vast size
of the interior, the immense length of the nave, and the
unobstructed view one has inside owing to the removal by the
"vandal" Wyatt of the old ponderous stone screen--an act for
which I bless while all others curse his memory; secondly, to
the comparatively small amount of stained glass there is to
intercept the light.  So graceful and beautiful is the
interior that it can bear the light, and light suits it best,
just as a twilight best suits Exeter and Winchester and other
cathedrals with heavy sculptured roofs.  One marvels at a
building so vast in size which yet produces the effect of a
palace in fairyland, or of a cathedral not built with hands
but brought into existence by a miracle.

I began to think it not safe to stay in that place too long
lest it should compel me to stay there always or cause me to
feel dissatisfied and homesick when away.

But the interior of itself would never have won me, as I had
not expected to be won by any building made by man; and from
the inside I would pass out only to find a fresh charm in that
part where Nature had come more to man's aid.

Walking on the cathedral green one morning, glancing from time
to time at the vast building and its various delicate shades
of colour, I asked myself why I kept my eyes as if on purpose
away from it most of the time, now on the trees, then on the
turf, and again on some one walking there--why, in fact, I
allowed myself only an occasional glance at the object I was
there solely to look at.  I knew well enough, but had never
put it into plain words for my own satisfaction.

We are all pretty familiar from experience with the
limitations of the sense of smell and the fact that agreeable
odours please us only fitfully; the sensation comes as a
pleasing shock, a surprise, and is quickly gone.  If we
attempt to keep it for some time by deliberately smelling a
fragrant flower or any perfume, we begin to have a sense of
failure as if we had exhausted the sense, keen as it was a
moment ago.

There must be an interval of rest for the nerve before the
sensation can be renewed in its first freshness.  Now it is
the same, though in a less degree, with the more important
sense of sight.  We look long and steadily at a thing to know
it, and the longer and more fixedly we look the better, if it
engages the reasoning faculties; but an aesthetic pleasure
cannot be increased or retained in that way.  We must look,
merely glancing as it were, and look again, and then again,
with intervals, receiving the image in the brain even as we
receive the "nimble emanation" of a flower, and the image is
all the brighter for coming intermittently.  In a large
prospect we are not conscious of this limitation because of
the wideness of the field and the number and variety of
objects or points of interest in it; the vision roams hither
and thither over it and receives a continuous stream or series
of pleasing impressions; but to gaze fixedly at the most
beautiful object in nature or art does but diminish the
pleasure.  Practically it ceases to be beautiful and only
recovers the first effect after we have given the mind an
interval of rest.

Strolling about the green with this thought in my mind, I
began to pay attention to the movements of a man who was
manifestly there with the same object as myself--to look at
the cathedral.  I had seen him there for quite half an hour,
and now began to be amused at the emphatic manner in which he
displayed his interest in the building.  He walked up and down
the entire length and would then back away a distance of a
hundred yards from the walls and stare up at the spire, then
slowly approach, still gazing up, until coming to a stop when
quite near the wall he would remain with his eyes still fixed
aloft, the back of his head almost resting on his back between
his shoulders.  His hat somehow kept on his head, but his
attitude reminded me of a saying of the Arabs who, to give an
idea of the height of a great rock or other tall object, say
that to look up at it causes your turban to fall off.  The
Americans, when they were chewers of tobacco, had a different
expression; they said that to look up at so tall a thing
caused the tobacco juice to run down your throat.

His appearance when I approached him interested me too.  His
skin was the color of old brown leather and he had a big
arched nose, clear light blue very shrewd eyes, and a big
fringe or hedge of ragged white beard under his chin; and he
was dressed in a new suit of rough dark brown tweeds,
evidently home-made.  When I spoke to him, saying something
about the cathedral, he joyfully responded in broadest Scotch.
It was, he said, the first English cathedral he had ever seen
and he had never seen anything made by man to equal it in
beauty.  He had come, he told me, straight from his home and
birthplace, a small village in the north of Scotland, shut
out from the world by great hills where the heather grew
knee-deep.  He had never been in England before, and had come
directly to Salisbury on a visit to a relation.

"Well," I said, "now you have looked at it outside come in
with me and see the interior."

But he refused: it was enough for one day to see the outside
of such a building: he wanted no more just then.  To-morrow
would be soon enough to see it inside; it would be the Sabbath
and he would go and worship there.

"Are you an Anglican?" I asked.

He replied that there were no Anglicans in his village.  They
had two Churches--the Church of Scotland and the Free Church.

"And what," said I, "will your minister say to your going to
worship in a cathedral?  We have all denominations here in
Salisbury, and you will perhaps find a Presbyterian place to
worship in."

"Now it's strange your saying that!" he returned, with a dry
little laugh.  "I've just had a letter from him the morning
and he writes on this varra subject.  'Let me advise you,' he
tells me in the letter, 'to attend the service in Salisbury
Cathedral.  Nae doot,' he says, 'there are many things in it
you'll disapprove of, but not everything perhaps, and I'd like
ye to go.'"

I was a little sorry for him next day when we had an
ordination service, very long, complicated, and, I should
imagine, exceedingly difficult to follow by a wild
Presbyterian from the hills.  He probably disapproved of most
of it, but I greatly admired him for refusing to see anything
more of the cathedral than the outside on the first day.  His
method was better than that of an American (from Indiana, he
told me) I met the following day at the hotel.  He gave two
hours and a half, including attendance at the morning service,
to the cathedral, inside and out, then rushed off for an hour
at Stonehenge, fourteen miles away, on a hired bicycle.  I
advised him to take another day--I did not want to frighten
him by saying a week--and he replied that that would make him
miss Winchester.  After cycling back from Stonehenge he would
catch a train to Winchester and get there in time to have some
minutes in the cathedral before the doors closed.  He was due
in London next morning.  He had already missed Durham
Cathedral in the north through getting interested in and
wasting too much time over some place when he was going there.
Again, he had missed Exeter Cathedral in the south, and it
would be a little too bad to miss Winchester too!




Chapter Twenty-One: Stonehenge


That American from Indiana!  As it was market day at Salisbury
I asked him before we parted if he had seen the market, also
if they had market days in the country towns in his State?  He
said he had looked in at the market on his way back from the
cathedral.  No, they had nothing of the kind in his State.
Indiana was covered with a network of railroads and electric
tram lines, and all country produce, down to the last new-laid
egg, was collected and sent off and conveyed each morning to
the towns, where it was always market day.

How sad! thought I.  Poor Indiana, that once had wildness and
romance and memories of a vanished race, and has now only its
pretty meaningless name!

"I suppose," he said, before getting on his bicycle, "there's
nothing beside the cathedral and Stonehenge to see in
Wiltshire?"

"No, nothing," I returned, "and you'll think the time wasted
in seeing Stonehenge."

"Why?"

"Only a few old stones to see."

But he went, and I have no doubt did think the time wasted,
but it would be some consolation to him, on the other side, to
be able to say that he had seen it with his own eyes.

How did these same "few old stones" strike me on a first
visit?  It was one of the greatest disillusionments I ever
experienced.  Stonehenge looked small--pitiably small!  For it
is a fact that mere size is very much to us, in spite of all
the teachings of science.  We have heard of Stonehenge in our
childhood or boyhood--that great building of unknown origin
and antiquity, its circles of stones, some still standing,
others lying prostrate, like the stupendous half-shattered
skeleton of a giant or monster whose stature reached to the
clouds.  It stands, we read or were told, on Salisbury Plain.
To my uninformed, childish mind a plain anywhere was like the
plain on which I was born--an absolutely level area stretching
away on all sides into infinitude; and although the effect is
of a great extent of earth, we know that we actually see very
little of it, that standing on a level plain we have a very
near horizon.  On this account any large object appearing on
it, such as a horse or tree or a big animal, looks very much
bigger than it would on land with a broken surface.

Oddly enough, my impossible Stonehenge was derived from a
sober description and an accompanying plate in a sober work
--a gigantic folio in two volumes entitled "A New System of
Geography", dated some time in the eighteenth century.  How
this ponderous work ever came to be out on the pampas, over
six thousand miles from the land of its origin, is a thing to
wonder at.  I remember that the Stonehenge plate greatly
impressed me and that I sacrilegiously cut it out of the book
so as to have it!

Now we know, our reason tells us continually, that the mental
pictures formed in childhood are false because the child and
man have different standards, and furthermore the child mind
exaggerates everything; nevertheless, such pictures persist
until the scene or object so visualized is actually looked
upon and the old image shattered.  This refers to scenes
visualized with the inner eye, but the disillusion is almost
as great when we return to a home left in childhood or boyhood
and look on it once more with the man's eyes.  How small it
is!  How diminished the hills, and the trees that grew to such
a vast height, whose tops once seemed "so close against the
sky"--what poor little trees they now are!  And the house
itself, how low it is; and the rooms that seemed so wide and
lofty, where our footfalls and childish voices sounded as in
some vast hall, how little and how mean they look!

           Children, they are very little,

the poet says, and they measure things by their size; but it
seems odd that unless we grow up amid the scenes where our
first impressions were received they should remain unaltered
in the adult mind.  The most amusing instance of a false
picture of something seen in childhood and continuing through
life I have met was that of an Italian peasant I knew in South
America.  He liked to talk to me about the cranes, those great
and wonderful birds he had become acquainted with in childhood
in his home on the plains of Lombardy.  The birds, of course,
only appeared in autumn and spring when migrating, and passed
over at a vast height above the earth.  These birds, he said,
were so big and had such great wings that if they came down on
the flat earth they would be incapable of rising, hence they
only alighted on the tops of high mountains, and as there was
nothing for them to eat in such places, it being naked rock
and ice, they were compelled to subsist on each other's
droppings.  Now it came to pass that one year during his
childhood a crane, owing to some accident, came down to the
ground near his home.  The whole population of the village
turned out to see so wonderful a bird, and were amazed at its
size; it was, he said, the strangest sight he had ever looked
on.  How big was it?  I asked him; was it as big as an
ostrich?  An ostrich, he said, was nothing to it; I might as
well ask him how it compared with a lapwing.  He could give me
no measurements: it happened when he was a child; he had
forgotten the exact size, but he had seen it with his own eyes
and he could see it now in his mind--the biggest bird in the
world.  Very well, I said, if he could see it plainly in his
mind he could give some rough idea of the wing-spread--how
much would it measure from tip to tip?  He said it was perhaps
fifty yards--perhaps a good deal more!

A similar trick was played by my mind about Stonehenge.  As
a child I had stood in imagination before it, gazing up
awestruck on those stupendous stones or climbing and crawling
like a small beetle on them.  And what at last did I see with
my physical eyes?  Walking over the downs, miscalled a plain,
anticipating something tremendous, I finally got away from the
woods at Amesbury and spied the thing I sought before me far
away on the slope of a green down, and stood still and then
sat down in pure astonishment.  Was this Stonehenge--this
cluster of poor little grey stones, looking in the distance
like a small flock of sheep or goats grazing on that immense
down!  How incredibly insignificant it appeared to me, dwarfed
by its surroundings--woods and groves and farmhouses, and by
the vast extent of rolling down country visible at that point.
It was only when I had recovered from the first shock, when I
had got to the very place and stood among the stones, that I
began to experience something of the feeling appropriate to
the occasion.

The feeling, however, must have been very slight, since it
permitted me to become interested in the appearance and
actions of a few sparrows inhabiting the temple.  The common
sparrow is parasitical on man, consequently but rarely found
at any distance from human habitations, and it seemed a little
strange to find them at home at Stonehenge on the open plain.
They were very active carrying up straws and feathers to the
crevices on the trioliths where the massive imposts rest on
the upright stones.  I noticed the birds because of their
bright appearance: they were lighter coloured than any
sparrows I have ever seen, and one cock bird when flying to
and fro in the sunlight looked almost white.  I formed the
idea that this small colony of about a dozen birds had been
long established at that place, and that the change in their
colouring was a direct result of the unusual conditions in
which they existed, where there was no shade and shelter of
trees and bushes, and they were perpetually exposed for
generations to the full light of the wide open sky.

On revisiting Stonehenge after an interval of some years I
looked for my sparrows and failed to find them.  It was at the
breeding-season, when they would have been there had they
still existed.  No doubt the little colony had been extirpated
by a sparrow-hawk or by the human guardians of "The Stones,"
as the temple is called by the natives.

It remains to tell of my latest visit to "The Stones."  I had
resolved to go once in my life with the current or crowd to
see the sun rise on the morning of the longest day at that
place.  This custom or fashion is a declining one: ten or
twelve years ago, as many as one or two thousand persons would
assemble during the night to wait the great event, but the
watchers have now diminished to a few hundreds, and on some
years to a few scores.  The fashion, no doubt, had its origin
when Sir Norman Lockyer's theories, about Stonehenge as a Sun
Temple placed so that the first rays of sun on the longest day
of the year should fall on the centre of the so-called altar
or sacrificial stone placed in the middle of the circle, began
to be noised about the country, and accepted by every one as
the true reading of an ancient riddle.  But I gather from
natives in the district that it is an old custom for people to
go and watch for sunrise on the morning of June 21.  A dozen
or a score of natives, mostly old shepherds and labourers who
lived near, would go and sit there for a few hours and after
sunrise would trudge home, but whether or not there is any
tradition or belief associated with the custom I have not
ascertained.  "How long has the custom existed?" I asked a
field labourer.  "From the time of the old people--the
Druids," he answered, and I gave it up.

To be near the spot I went to stay at Shrewton, a downland
village four miles from "The Stones"; or rather a group of
five pretty little villages, almost touching but distinct,
like five flowers or five berries on a single stem, each with
its own old church and individual or parish life.  It is a
pretty tree-shaded place, full of the crooning sound of
turtle-doves, hidden among the wide silent open downs and
watered by a clear swift stream, or winter bourne, which dries
up during the heats of late summer, and flows again after the
autumn rains, "when the springs rise" in the chalk hills.
While here, I rambled on the downs and haunted "The Stones."
The road from Shrewton to Amesbury, a straight white band
lying across a green country, passes within a few yards of
Stonehenge: on the right side of this narrow line the land is
all private property, but on the left side and as far as one
can see it mostly belongs to the War Office and is dotted over
with camps.  I roamed about freely enough on both sides,
sometimes spending hours at a stretch, not only on Government
land but "within bounds," for the pleasure of spying on the
military from a hiding-place in some pine grove or furze
patch.  I was seldom challenged, and the sentinels I came
across were very mild-mannered men; they never ordered me
away; they only said, or hinted, that the place I was in was
not supposed to be free to the public.

I come across many persons who lament the recent great change
on Salisbury Plain.  It is hateful to them; the sight of the
camp and troops marching and drilling, of men in khaki
scattered about everywhere over a hundred square leagues of
plain; the smoke of firing and everlasting booming of guns.
It is a desecration; the wild ancient charm of the land has
been destroyed in their case, and it saddens and angers them.
I was pretty free from these uncomfortable feelings.

It is said that one of the notions the Japanese have about the
fox--a semi-sacred animal with them--is that, if you chance
to see one crossing your path in the morning, all that comes
before your vision on that day will be illusion.  As an
illustration of this belief it is related that a Japanese who
witnessed the eruption of Krakatoa, when the heavens were
covered with blackness and kindled with intermitting flashes
and the earth shaken by the detonations, and when all others,
thinking the end of the world had come, were swooning with
extreme fear, veiwed it without a tremor as a very sublime but
illusory spectacle.  For on that very morning he had seen a
fox cross his path.

A somewhat similar effect is produced on our minds if we have
what may be called a sense of historical time--a consciousness
of the transitoriness of most things human--if we see
institutions and works as the branches on a pine or larch,
which fail and die and fall away successively while the tree
itself lives for ever, and if we measure their duration not by
our own few swift years, but by the life of nations and races
of men.  It is, I imagine, a sense capable of cultivation, and
enables us to look upon many of man's doings that would
otherwise vex and pain us, and, as some say, destroy all the
pleasure of our lives, not exactly as an illusion, as if we
were Japanese and had seen a fox in the morning, but at all
events in what we call a philosophic spirit.

What troubled me most was the consideration of the effect of
the new conditions on the wild life of the plain--or of a very
large portion of it.  I knew of this before, but it was
nevertheless exceedingly unpleasant when I came to witness it
myself when I took to spying on the military as an amusement
during my idle time.  Here we have tens of thousands of very
young men, boys in mind, the best fed, healthiest, happiest
crowd of boys in all the land, living in a pure bracing
atmosphere, far removed from towns, and their amusements and
temptations, all mad for pleasure and excitement of some kind
to fill their vacant hours each day and their holidays.
Naturally they take to birds'-nesting and to hunting every
living thing they encounter during their walks on the downs.
Every wild thing runs and flies from them, and is chased or
stoned, the weak-winged young are captured, and the nests
picked or kicked up out of the turf.  In this way the
creatures are being extirpated, and one can foresee that when
hares and rabbits are no more, and even the small birds of the
plain, larks, pipits, wheatears, stonechats, and whincats,
have vanished, the hunters in khaki will take to the chase
of yet smaller creatures--crane-flies and butterflies and
dragon-flies, and even the fantastic, elusive hover-flies
which the hunters of little game will perhaps think the most
entertaining fly of all.

But it would be idle to grieve much at this small incidental
and inevitable result of making use of the plain as a military
camp and training-ground.  The old god of war is not yet dead
and rotting on his iron hills; he is on the chalk hills with
us just now, walking on the elastic turf, and one is glad to
mark in his brown skin and sparkling eyes how thoroughly alive
he is.

A little after midnight on the morning of June 21, 1908, a
Shrewton cock began to crow, and that trumpet sound, which I
never hear without a stirring of the blood, on account of old
associations, informed me that the late moon had risen or was
about to rise, linking the midsummer evening and morning
twilights, and I set off to Stonehenge.  It was a fine still
night, without a cloud in the pale, dusky blue sky, thinly
sprinkled with stars, and the crescent moon coming up above
the horizon.  After the cock ceased crowing a tawny owl began
to hoot, and the long tremulous mellow sound followed me for
some distance from the village, and then there was perfect
silence, broken occasionally by the tinkling bells of a little
company of cyclists speeding past towards "The Stones." I was
in no hurry: I only wished I had started sooner to enjoy
Salisbury Plain at its best time, when all the things which
offend the lover of nature are invisible and nonexistent.
Later, when the first light began to appear in the east before
two o'clock, it was no false dawn, but insensibly grew
brighter and spread further, until touches of colour, very
delicate, palest amber, then tender yellow and rose and
purple, began to show.  I felt then as we invariably feel
on such occasions, when some special motive has called us
forth in time to witness this heavenly change, as of a new
creation--

          The miracle of diuturnity
          Whose instancy unbeds the lark,

that all the days of my life on which I had not witnessed it
were wasted days!

O that unbedding of the lark!  The world that was so still
before now all at once had a sound; not a single song and not
in one place, but a sound composed of a thousand individual
sounds, rising out of the dark earth at a distance on my right
hand and up into the dusky sky, spreading far and wide even as
the light was spreading on the opposite side of the heavens--a
sound as of multitudinous twanging, girding, and clashing
instruments, mingled with shrill piercing voices that were not
like the voices of earthly beings.  They were not human nor
angelic, but passionless, and it was as if the whole visible
world, the dim grassy plain and the vast pale sky sprinkled
with paling stars, moonlit and dawnlit, had found a voice to
express the mystery and glory of the morning.

It was but eight minutes past two o'clock when this "unbedding
of the lark" began, and the heavenly music lasted about
fourteen minutes, then died down to silence, to recommence
about half an hour later.  At first I wondered why the sound
was at a distance from the road on my right hand and not on my
left hand as well.  Then I remembered what I had seen on that
side, how the "boys" at play on Sundays and in fact every day
hunt the birds and pull their nests out, and I could only
conclude that the lark has been pretty well wiped out from all
that part of the plain over which the soldiers range.

At Stonehenge I found a good number of watchers, about a
couple of hundred, already assembled, but more were coming in
continually, and a mile or so of the road to Amesbury visible
from "The Stones" had at times the appearance of a ribbon of
fire from the lamps of this continuous stream of coming
cyclists.  Altogether about five to six hundred persons
gathered at "The Stones," mostly young men on bicycles who
came from all the Wiltshire towns within easy distance, from
Salisbury to Bath.  I had a few good minutes at the ancient
temple when the sight of the rude upright stones looking black
against the moonlit and star-sprinkled sky produced an
unexpected feeling in me: but the mood could not last; the
crowd was too big and noisy, and the noises they made too
suggestive of a Bank Holiday crowd at the Crystal Palace.

At three o'clock a ribbon of slate-grey cloud appeared above
the eastern horizon, and broadened by degrees, and pretty soon
made it evident that the sun would be hidden at its rising at
a quarter to four.  The crowd, however, was not down-hearted;
it sang and shouted; and by and by, just outside the
barbed-wire enclosure a rabbit was unearthed, and about three
hundred young men with shrieks of excitement set about its
capture.  It was a lively scene, a general scrimmage, in which
everyone was trying to capture an elusive football with ears
and legs to it, which went darting and spinning about hither
and thither among the multitudinous legs, until earth
compassionately opened and swallowed poor distracted bunny up.
It was but little better inside the enclosure, where the big
fallen stones behind the altar-stone, in the middle, on which
the first rays of sun would fall, were taken possession of by
a crowd of young men who sat and stood packed together like
guillemots on a rock.  These too, cheated by that rising cloud
of the spectacle they had come so far to see, wanted to have a
little fun, and began to be very obstreperous.  By and by they
found out an amusement very much to their taste.

Motor-cars were now arriving every minute, bringing important-
looking persons who had timed their journeys so as to come
upon the scene a little before 3:45, when the sun would show
on the horizon; and whenever one of these big gentlemen
appeared within the circle of stones, especially if he was big
physically and grotesque-looking in his motorist get-up, he
was greeted with a tremendous shout.  In most cases he would
start back and stand still, astonished at such an outburst,
and then, concluding that the only way to save his dignity was
to face the music, he would step hurriedly across the green
space to hide himself behind the crowd.

The most amusing case was that of a very tall person adorned
with an exceedingly long, bright red beard, who had on a
Glengarry cap and a great shawl over his overcoat.  The
instant this unfortunate person stepped into the arena a
general wild cry of "Scotland for ever!" was raised, followed
by such cheers and yells that the poor man actually staggered
back as if he had received a blow, then seeing there was no
other way out of it, he too rushed across the open space to
lose himself among the others.

All this proved very entertaining, and I was glad to laugh
with the crowd, thinking that after all we were taking a very
mild revenge on our hated enemies, the tyrants of the roads.

The fun over, I went soberly back to my village, and finding
it impossible to get to sleep I went to Sunday-morning service
at Shrewton Church.  It was strangely restful there after that
noisy morning crowd at Stonehenge.  The church is white stone
with Norman pillars and old oak beams laid over the roof
painted or distempered blue--a quiet, peaceful blue.  There
was also a good deal of pleasing blue colour in the glass of
the east window.  The service was, as I almost invariably find
it in a village church, beautiful and impressive.  Listening
to the music of prayer and praise, with some natural outdoor
sound to fill up the pauses--the distant crow of a cock or
the song of some bird close by--a corn-bunting or wren or
hedge-sparrow--and the bright sunlight filling the interior, I
felt as much refreshed as if kind nature's sweet restorer,
balmy sleep, had visited me that morning.  The sermon was
nothing to me; I scarcely heard it, but understood that it was
about the Incarnation and the perfection of the plan of
salvation and the unreasonableness of the Higher Criticism and
of all who doubt because they do not understand.  I remembered
vaguely that on three successive Sundays in three village
churches in the wilds of Wiltshire I had heard sermons
preached on and against the Higher Criticism.  I thought it
would have been better in this case if the priest had chosen
to preach on Stonehenge and had said that he devoutly wished
we were sun-worshippers, like the Persians, as well as
Christians; also that we were Buddhists, and worshippers of
our dead ancestors like the Chinese, and that we were pagans
and idolaters who bow down to sticks and stones, if all these
added cults would serve to make us more reverent.  And I wish
he could have said that it was as irreligious to go to
Stonehenge, that ancient temple which man raised to the
unknown god thousands of years ago, to indulge in noise and
horseplay at the hour of sunrise, as it would be to go to
Salisbury Cathedral for such a purpose.




Chapter Twenty-Two: The Village and "The Stones"


My experiences at "The Stones" had left me with the idea that
but for the distracting company the hours I spent there would
have been very sweet and precious in spite of the cloud in the
east.  Why then, I asked, not go back on another morning, when
I would have the whole place to myself?  If a cloud did not
matter much it would matter still less that it was not the day
of the year when the red disc flames on the watcher's sight
directly over that outstanding stone and casts first a shadow
then a ray of light on the altar.  In the end I did not say
good-bye to the village on that day, but settled down to
listen to the tales of my landlady, or rather to another
instalment of her life-story and to further chapters in the
domestic history of those five small villages in one.  I had
already been listening to her every evening, and at odd times
during the day, for over a week, at first with interest, then
a little impatiently.  I was impatient at being kept in, so to
speak.  Out-of-doors the world was full of light and heat,
full of sounds of wild birds and fragrance of flowers and
new-mown hay; there were also delightful children and some
that were anything but delightful--dirty, ragged little
urchins of the slums.  For even these small rustic villages
have their slums; and it was now the time when the young birds
were fluttering out of their nests--their hunger cries could
be heard everywhere; and the ragged little barbarians were
wild with excitement, chasing and stoning the flutterers to
slay them; or when they succeeded in capturing one without
first having broken its wings or legs it was to put it in a
dirty cage in a squalid cottage to see it perish miserably in
a day or two.  Perhaps I succeeded in saving two or three
threatened lives in the lanes and secret green places by the
stream; perhaps I didn't; but in any case it was some
satisfaction to have made the attempt.

Now all this made me a somewhat impatient listener to the
village tales--the old unhappy things, for they were mostly
old and always unhappy; yet in the end I had to listen.  It
was her eyes that did it.  At times they had an intensity in
their gaze which made them almost uncanny, something like the
luminous eyes of an animal hungrily fixed on its prey.  They
held me, though not because they glittered: I could have gone
away if I had thought proper, and remained to listen only
because the meaning of that singular look in her grey-green
eyes, which came into them whenever I grew restive, had dawned
on my careless mind.

She was an old woman with snow-white hair, which contrasted
rather strangely with her hard red colour; but her skin was
smooth, her face well shaped, with fine acquiline features.
No doubt it had been a very handsome face though never
beautiful, I imagine; it was too strong and firm and resolute;
too like the face of some man we see, which, though we have
but a momentary sight of it in a passing crowd, affects us
like a sudden puff of icy-cold air--the revelation of a
singular and powerful personality.  Yet she was only a poor
old broken-down woman in a Wiltshire village, held fast in her
chair by a hopeless infirmity.  With her legs paralysed she
was like that prince in the Eastern tale on whom an evil spell
had been cast, turning the lower half of his body into marble.
But she did not, like the prince, shed incessant tears and
lament her miserable destiny with a loud voice.  She was
patient and cheerful always, resigned to the will of Heaven,
and--a strange thing this to record of an old woman in a
village!--she would never speak of her ailments.  But though
powerless in body her mind was vigorous and active teeming
with memories of all the vicissitudes of her exceedingly
eventful, busy life, from the time when she left her village
as a young girl to fight her way in the great world to her
return to end her life in it, old and broken, her fight over,
her children and grandchildren dead or grown up and scattered
about the earth.

Chance having now put me in her way, she concluded after a few
preliminary or tentative talks that she had got hold of an
ideal listener; but she feared to lose me--she wanted me to go
on listening for ever.  That was the reason of that painfully
intense hungry look in her eyes; it was because she discovered
certain signs of lassitude or impatience in me, a desire to
get up and go away and refresh myself in the sun and wind.
Poor old woman, she could not spring upon and hold me fast
when I attempted to move off, or pluck me back with her claws;
she could only gaze with fiercely pleading eyes and say
nothing; and so, without being fascinated, I very often sat on
listening still when I would gladly have been out-of-doors.

She was a good fluent talker; moreover, she studied her
listener, and finding that my interest in her own interminable
story was becoming exhausted she sought for other subjects,
chiefly the strange events in the lives of men and women who
had lived in the village and who had long been turned to dust.
They were all more or less tragical in character, and it
astonished me to think that I had stayed in a dozen or twenty,
perhaps forty, villages in Wiltshire, and had heard stories
equally strange and moving in pretty well every one of them.

If each of these small centres possessed a scribe of genius,
or at any rate one with a capacity for taking pains, who would
collect and print in proper form these remembered events,
every village would in time have its own little library of
local history, the volumes labelled respectively, "A Village
Tragedy", "The Fields of Dulditch", "Life's Little Ironies",
"Children's Children", and various others whose titles every
reader will be able to supply.

The effect of a long spell of listening to these unwritten
tragedies was sometimes strong enough to cloud my reason, for
on going directly forth into the bright sunshine and listening
to the glad sounds which filled the air, it would seem that
this earth was a paradise and that all creation rejoiced in
everlasting happiness excepting man alone who--mysterious
being!--was born to trouble and disaster as the sparks fly
upwards.  A pure delusion, due to our universal and
ineradicable passion for romance and tragedy.  Tell a man of a
hundred humdrum lives which run their quiet contented course
in this village, and the monotonous unmoving story, or hundred
stories, will go in at one ear and out at the other. Therefore
such stories are not told and not remembered.  But that which
stirs our pity and terror--the frustrate life, the glorious
promise which was not fulfilled, the broken hearts and broken
fortunes, and passion, crime, remorse, retribution--all this
prints itself on the mind, and every such life is remembered
for ever and passed on from generation to generation.  But it
would really form only one brief chapter in the long, long
history of the village life with its thousand chapters.

The truth is, if we live in fairly natural healthy condition,
we are just as happy as the lower animals.  Some philosopher
has said that the chief pleasure in a man's life, as in that
of a cow, consists in the processes of mastication,
deglutition, and digestion, and I am very much inclined to
agree with him.  The thought of death troubles us very little
--we do not believe in it.  A familiar instance is that of the
consumptive, whose doctor and friends have given him up and
wait but to see the end, while he, deluded man, still sees
life, an illimitable, green, sunlit prospect, stretching away
to an infinite distance before him.

Death is a reality only when it is very near, so close on us
that we can actually hear its swift stoaty feet rustling over
the dead leaves, and for a brief bitter space we actually know
that his sharp teeth will presently be in our throat.

Out in the blessed sunshine I listen to a blackcap warbling
very beautifully in a thorn bush near the cottage; then to the
great shout of excited joy of the children just released from
school, as they rush pell-mell forth and scatter about the
village, and it strikes me that the bird in the thorn is not
more blithe-hearted than they.  An old rook--I fancy he is
old, a many-wintered crow--is loudly caw-cawing from the elm
tree top; he has been abroad all day in the fields and has
seen his young able to feed themselves; and his own crop full,
and now he is calling to the others to come and sit there to
enjoy the sunshine with him.  I doubt if he is happier than
the human inhabitants of the village, the field labourers and
shepherds who have been out toiling since the early hours, and
are now busy in their own gardens and allotments or placidly
smoking their pipes at their cottage doors.

But I could not stay longer in that village of old unhappy
memories and of quiet, happy, uninteresting lives that leave
no memory, so after waiting two more days I forced myself to
say good-bye to my poor old landlady.  Or rather to say "Good
night," as I had to start at one o'clock in the morning so as
to have a couple, of hours before sunrise at "The Stones"
on my way to Salisbury.  Her latest effort to detain me a day
longer had been made and there was no more to say.

"Do you know," she said in a low mysterious voice, "that it is
not safe to be alone at midnight on this long lonely road--the
loneliest place in all Salisbury Plain?"  "The safest," I
said.  "Safe as the Tower of London--the protectors of all
England are there."  "Ah, there's where the danger is!" she
returned.  "If you meet some desperate man, a deserter with
his rifle in his hand perhaps, do you think he would hesitate
about knocking you over to save himself and at the same time
get a little money to help him on his way?"

I smiled at her simulated anxiety for my safety, and set forth
when it was very dark but under a fine starry sky.  The
silence, too, was very profound: there was no good-bye from
crowing cock or hooting owl on this occasion, nor did any
cyclist pass me on the road with a flash of light from his
lamp and a tinkle from his bell.  The long straight road on
the high down was a dim grey band visible but a few yards
before me, lying across the intense blackness of the earth.
By day I prefer as a rule walking on the turf, but this road
had a rare and peculiar charm at this time.  It was now the
season when the bird's-foot-trefoil, one of the commonest
plants of the downland country, was in its fullest bloom, so
that in many places the green or grey-green turf as far as one
could see on every side was sprinkled and splashed with
orange-yellow.  Now this creeping, spreading plant, like most
plants that grow on the close-cropped sheep-walks, whose
safety lies in their power to root themselves and live very
close to the surface, yet must ever strive to lift its flowers
into the unobstructed light and air and to overtop or get away
from its crowding neighbours.  On one side of the road, where
the turf had been cut by the spade in a sharp line, the plant
had found a rare opportunity to get space and light and had
thrust out such a multitude of bowering sprays, projecting
them beyond the turf, as to form a close band or rope of
orange-yellow, which divided the white road from the green
turf, and at one spot extended unbroken for upwards of a mile.
The effect was so singular and pretty that I had haunted this
road for days for the pleasure of seeing that flower border
made by nature.  Now all colour was extinguished: beneath and
around me there was a dimness which at a few yards' distance
deepened to blackness, and above me the pale dim blue sky
sprinkled with stars; but as I walked I had the image of that
brilliant band of yellow colour in my mind.

By and by the late moon rose, and a little later the east
began to grow lighter and the dark down to change
imperceptibly to dim hoary green.  Then the exquisite colours
of the dawn once more, and the larks rising in the dim
distance--a beautiful unearthly sound--and so in the end I
came to "The Stones," rejoicing, in spite of a cloud which now
appeared on the eastern horizon to prevent the coming sun from
being seen, that I had the place to myself.  The rejoicing
came a little too soon; a very few minutes later other
visitors on foot and on bicycles began to come in, and we all
looked at each other a little blankly.  Then a motorcar
arrived, and two gentlemen stepped out and stared at us, and
one suddenly burst out laughing.

"I see nothing to laugh at!" said his companion a little
severely.

The other in a low voice made some apology or explanation
which I failed to catch.  It was, of course, not right; it was
indecent to laugh on such an occasion, for we were not of the
ebullient sort who go to "The Stones" at three o'clock in the
morning "for a lark"; but it was very natural in the
circumstances, and mentally I laughed myself at the absurdity
of the situation.  However, the laugher had been rebuked for
his levity, and this incident over, there was nothing further
to disturb me or any one in our solemn little gathering.

It was a very sweet experience, and I cannot say that my early
morning outing would have been equally good at any other
lonely spot on Salisbury Plain or anywhere else with a wide
starry sky above me, the flush of dawn in the east, and the
larks rising heavenward out of the dim misty earth.  Those
rudely fashioned immemorial stones standing dark and large
against the pale clear moonlit sky imparted something to the
feeling.  I sat among them alone and had them all to myself,
as the others, fearing to tear their clothes on the barbed
wire, had not ventured to follow me when I got through the
fence.  Outside the enclosure they were some distance from me,
and as they talked in subdued tones, their voices reached me
as a low murmur--a sound not out of harmony with the silent
solitary spirit of the place; and there was now no other sound
except that of a few larks singing fitfully a long way off.

Just what the element was in that morning's feeling which
Stonehenge contributed I cannot say.  It was too vague and
uncertain, too closely interwoven with the more common feeling
for nature.  No doubt it was partly due to many untraceable
associations, and partly to a thought, scarcely definite
enough to be called a thought, of man's life in this land from
the time this hoary temple was raised down to the beginning of
history.  A vast span, a period of ten or more, probably of
twenty centuries, during which great things occurred and great
tragedies were enacted, which seem all the darker and more
tremendous to the mind because unwritten and unknown.  But
with the mighty dead of these blank ages I could not commune.
Doubtless they loved and hated and rose and fell, and there
were broken hearts and broken lives; but as beings of flesh
and blood we cannot visualize them, and are in doubt even as
to their race.  And of their minds, or their philosophy of
life, we know absolutely nothing.  We are able, as Clifford
has said in his Cosmic Emotion, to shake hands with the
ancient Greeks across the great desert of centuries which
divides our day from theirs; but there is no shaking hands
with these ancients of Britain--or Albion, seeing that we are
on the chalk.  To our souls they are as strange as the
builders of Tiuhuanaco, or Mitla and Itzana, and the cyclopean
ruins of Zimbabwe and the Carolines.

It is thought by some of our modern investigators of psychic
phenomena that apparitions result from the coming out of
impressions left in the surrounding matter, or perhaps in the
ether pervading it, especially in moments of supreme agitation
or agony.  The apparition is but a restored picture, and
pictures of this sort are about us in millions; but for our
peace they are rarely visible, as the ability to see them is
the faculty of but a few persons in certain moods and certain
circumstances.  Here, then, if anywhere in England, we, or the
persons who are endowed with this unpleasant gift, might look
for visions of the time when Stonehenge was the spiritual
capital, the Mecca of the faithful (when all were that), the
meeting-place of all the intellect, the hoary experience, the
power and majesty of the land.

But no visions have been recorded.  It is true that certain
stories of alleged visions have been circulated during the
last few years.  One, very pretty and touching, is of a child
from the London slums who saw things invisible to others.
This was one of the children of the very poor, who are taken
in summer and planted all about England in cottages to have a
week or a fortnight of country air and sunshine.  Taken to
Stonehenge, she had a vision of a great gathering of people,
and so real did they seem that she believed in the reality
of it all, and so beautiful did they appear to her that she
was reluctant to leave, and begged to be taken back to see
it all again.  Unfortunately it is not true.  A full and
careful inquiry has been made into the story, of which there
are several versions, and its origin traced to a little
story-telling Wiltshire boy who had read or heard of the
white-robed priests of the ancient days at "The Stones," and
who just to astonish other little boys naughtily pretended
that he had seen it all himself!




Chapter Twenty-Three: Following a River


The stream invites us to follow: the impulse is so common that
it might be set down as an instinct; and certainly there is no
more fascinating pastime than to keep company with a river
from its source to the sea.  Unfortunately this is not easy in
a country where running waters have been enclosed, which
should be as free as the rain and sunshine to all, and were
once free, when England was England still, before landowners
annexed them, even as they annexed or stole the commons and
shut up the footpaths and made it an offence for a man to go
aside from the road to feel God's grass under his feet.  Well,
they have also got the road now, and cover and blind and choke
us with its dust and insolently hoot-hoot at us.  Out of the
way, miserable crawlers, if you don't want to be smashed!

Sometimes the way is cut off by huge thorny hedges and fences
of barbed wire--man's devilish improvement on the bramble
--brought down to the water's edge.  The river-follower must
force his way through these obstacles, in most cases greatly
to the detriment of his clothes and temper; or, should they
prove impassable, he must undress and go into the water.
Worst of all is the thought that he is a trespasser.  The
pheasants crow loudly lest he should forget it.  Occasionally,
too, in these private places he encounters men in velveteens
with guns under their arms, and other men in tweeds and
knickerbockers, with or without guns, and they all stare at
him with amazement in their eyes, like disturbed cattle in a
pasture; and sometimes they challenge him.  But I must say
that, although I have been sharply spoken to on several
occasions, always, after a few words, I have been permitted to
keep on my way.  And on that way I intend to keep until I have
no more strength to climb over fences and force my way through
hedges, but like a blind and worn-out old badger must take to
my earth and die.

I found the Exe easy to follow at first.  Further on
exceedingly difficult in places; but I was determined to keep
near it, to have it behind me and before me and at my side,
following, leading, a beautiful silvery serpent that was my
friend and companion.  For I was following not the Exe only,
but a dream as well, and a memory.  Before I knew it the Exe
was a beloved stream.  Many rivers had I seen in my
wanderings, but never one to compare with this visionary
river, which yet existed, and would be found and followed at
last.  My forefathers had dwelt for generations beside it,
listening all their lives long to its music, and when they
left it they still loved it in exile, and died at last with
its music in their ears.  Nor did the connection end there;
their children and children's children doubtless had some
inherited memory of it; or how came I to have this feeling,
which made it sacred, and drew me to it?  We inherit not from
our ancestors only, but, through them, something, too, from
the earth and place that knew them.

I sought for and found it where it takes its rise on open
Exmoor; a simple moorland stream, not wild and foaming and
leaping over rocks, but flowing gently between low peaty
banks, where the little lambs leap over it from side to side
in play.  Following the stream down, I come at length to
Exford.  Here the aspect of the country begins to change; it
is not all brown desolate heath; there are green flowery
meadows by the river, and some wood.  A little further down
and the Exe will be a woodland stream; but of all the rest of
my long walk I shall only say that to see the real beauty of
this stream one must go to Somerset.  From Exford to Dulverton
it runs, singing aloud, foam-flecked, between high hills
clothed to their summits in oak woods: after its union with
the Barle it enters Devonshire as a majestic stream, and flows
calmly through a rich green country; its wild romantic charm
has been left behind.

The uninformed traveller, whose principle it is never to look
at a guide-book, is surprised to find that the small village
of Exford contains no fewer than half a dozen inns.  He asks
how they are kept going; and the natives, astonished at his
ignorance, proceed to enlighten him.  Exford is the
headquarters of the stag-hunt: thither the hunters flock in
August, and spend so much money during thir brief season that
the innkeepers grow rich and fat, and for the rest of the year
can afford to doze peacefully behind their bars.  Here are the
kennels, and when I visited them they contained forty or fifty
couples of stag-hounds.  These are gigantic foxhounds,
selected for their great size from packs all over the country.
When out exercising these big vari-coloured dogs make a fine
show.  It is curious to find that, although these individual
variations are continually appearing--very large dogs born of
dogs of medium size--others cannot be bred from them; the
variety cannot be fixed.

The village is not picturesque.  Its one perennial charm is
the swift river that flows through it, making music on its
wide sandy and pebbly floor.  Hither and thither flit the
wagtails, finding little half-uncovered stones in the current
to perch upon.  Both the pied and grey species are there; and,
seeing them together, one naturally wishes to resettle for
himself the old question as to which is the prettiest and most
graceful.  Now this one looks best and now that; but the
delicately coloured grey and yellow bird has the longest tail
and can use it more prettily.  Her tail is as much to her,
both as ornament and to express emotions, as a fan to any
flirtatious Spanish senora.  One always thinks of these dainty
feathered creatures as females.  It would seem quite natural
to call the wagtail "lady-bird," if that name had not been
registered by a diminutive podgy tortoise-shaped black and red
beetle.

So shallow is the wide stream in the village that a little
girl of about seven came down from a cottage, and to cool her
feet waded out into the middle, and there she stood for some
minutes on a low flat stone, looking down on her own wavering
image broken by a hundred hurrying wavelets and ripples.  This
small maidie, holding up her short, shabby frock with her
wee hands, her bright brown hair falling over her face as she
bent her head down and laughed to see her bare little legs and
their flickering reflection beneath, made a pretty picture.
Like the wagtails, she looked in harmony with her
surroundings.

So many are the villages, towns, and places of interest seen,
so many the adventures met with in this walk, starting with
the baby streamlet beyond Simonsbath, and following it down to
Exeter and Exmouth, that it would take half a volume to
describe them, however briefly.  Yet at the end I found that
Exford had left the most vivid and lasting impression, and was
remembered with most pleasure.  It was more to me than
Winsford, that fragrant, cool, grey and green village, the
home of immemorial peace, second to no English village in
beauty; with its hoary church tower, its great trees, its old
stone, thatched cottages draped in ivy and vine, its soothing
sound of running waters.  Exeter itself did not impress me so
strongly, in spite of its cathedral.  The village of Exford
printed itself thus sharply on my mind because I had there
been filled with wonder and delight at the sight of a face
exceeding in loveliness all the faces seen in that West
Country--a rarest human gem, which had the power of imparting
to its setting something of its own wonderful lustre.  The
type was a common Somerset one, but with marked differences in
some respects, else it could not have been so perfect.

The type I speak of is a very distinct one: in a crowd in a
London street you can easily spot a Somerset man who has this
mark on his countenance, but it shows more clearly in the
woman.  There are more types than one, but the variety is less
than in other places; the women are more like each other, and
differ more from those that are outside their borders than is
the case in other English counties.  A woman of this prevalent
type, to be met with anywhere from Bath and Bedminster to the
wilds of Exmoor, is of a good height, and has a pleasant,
often a pretty face; regular features, the nose straight,
rather long, with thin nostrils; eyes grey-blue; hair brown,
neither dark nor light, in many cases with a sandy or sunburnt
tint.  Black, golden, reds, chestnuts are rarely seen.  There
is always colour in the skin, but not deep; as a rule it is a
light tender brown with a rosy or reddish tinge.  Altogether
it is a winning face, with smiling eyes; there is more in it
of that something we can call "refinement" than is seen in
women of the same class in other counties.  The expression is
somewhat infantile; a young woman, even a middle-aged woman,
will frequently remind you of a little girl of seven or eight
summers.  The innocent eyes and mobile mouth are singularly
childlike.  This peculiarity is the more striking when we
consider the figure.  This is not fully developed according to
the accepted standards the hips are too small, the chest too
narrow and flat, the arms too thin.  True or false, the idea
is formed of a woman of a childlike, affectionate nature, but
lacking in passion, one to be chosen for a sister rather than
a wife.  Something in us--instinct or tradition--will have it
that the well-developed woman is richest in the purely womanly
qualities--the wifely and maternal feelings.  The luxuriant
types that abound most in Devonshire are not common here.

It will be understood that the women described are those that
live in cottages.  Here, as elsewhere, as you go higher in the
social scale--further from the soil as it were--the type
becomes less and less distinct.  Those of the "higher class,"
or "better class," are few, and always in a sense foreigners.




Chapter Twenty-Four: Troston


I doubt if the name of this small Suffolk village, remote from
towns and railroads, will have any literary associations for
the reader, unless he be a person of exceptionally good
memory, who has taken a special interest in the minor poets of
the last century; or that it would help him if I add the names
of Honington and Sapiston, two other small villages a couple
of miles from Troston, with the slow sedgy Little Ouse, or a
branch of it, flowing between them.  Yet Honington was the
birthplace of Robert Bloomfield, known as "the Suffolk poet"
in the early part of the last century (although Crabbe was
living then and was great, as he is becoming again after many
years); while at Sapiston, the rustic village on the other
side of the old stone bridge, he acquired that love of nature
and intimate knowledge of farm life and work which came out
later in his Farmer's Boy.  Finally, Troston, the little
village in which I write, was the home of Capel Lofft, a
person of importance in his day, who discovered Bloomfield,
found a publisher for his poems, and boomed it with amazing
success.

I dare say it will only provoke a smile of amusement in
readers of literary taste when I confess that Bloomfield's
memory is dear to me; that only because of this feeling for
the forgotten rustic who wrote rhymes I am now here, strolling
about in the shade of the venerable trees in Troston Park-the
selfsame trees which the somewhat fantastic Capel knew in his
day as "Homer," "Sophocles," "Virgil," "Milton," and by other
names, calling each old oak, elm, ash, and chestnut after one
of the immortals.

I can even imagine that the literary man, if he chanced to be
a personal friend, would try to save me from myself by begging
me not to put anything of this sort into print.  He would warn
me that it matters nothing that Bloomfield's verse was
exceedingly popular for a time, that twenty-five or thirty
editions of his Farmer's Boy were issued within three years of
its publication in 1800 that it continued to be read for half
a century afterwards.  There are other better tests.  Is it
alive to-day?  What do judges of literature say of it now?
Nothing!  They smile and that's all.  The absurdity of his
popularity was felt in his own day.  Byron laughed at it;
Crabbe growled and Charles Lamb said he had looked at the
Farmer's Boy and it made him sick.  Well, nobody wants to look
at it now.

Much more might be said very easily on this side; nevertheless,
I think I shall go on with my plea for the small verse-maker
who has long fallen out; and though I may be unable to make a
case out, the kindly critic may find some circumstance to
extenuate my folly--to say, in the end, that this appears to
be one of the little foolishnesses which might be forgiven.

I must confess at starting that the regard I have for one of
his poems, the Farmer's Boy, is not wholly a matter of
literary taste or the critical faculty; it is also, to some
extent, a matter of association,--and as the story of how this
comes about is rather curious, I will venture to give it.

In the distant days of my boyhood and early youth my chief
delight was in nature, and when I opened a book it was to find
something about nature in it, especially some expression of
the feeling produced in us by nature, which was, in my case,
inseparable from seeing and hearing, and was, to me, the most
important thing in life.  For who could look on earth, water,
sky, on living or growing or inanimate things, without
experiencing that mysterious uplifting gladness in him!  In
due time I discovered that the thing I sought for in printed
books was to be found chiefly in poetry, that half a dozen
lines charged with poetic feeling about nature often gave me
more satisfaction than a whole volume of prose on such
subjects. Unfortunately this kind of literature was not
obtainable in my early home on the then semi-wild pampas.
There were a couple of hundred volumes on the shelves
--theology, history, biography, philosophy, science, travels,
essays, and some old forgotten fiction; but no verse was
there, except Shenstone, in a small, shabby, coverless volume.
This I read and re-read until I grew sick of bright Roxana
tripping o'er the green, or of gentle Delia when a tear bedews
her eye to think yon playful kid must die.  To my uncultivated
mind--for I had never been at school, and lived in the open
air with the birds and beasts--this seemed intolerably
artificial; for I was like a hungry person who has nothing but
kickshaws put before him, and eats because he is hungry until
he loathes a food which in its taste confounds the appetite.
Never since those distant days have I looked at a Shenstone or
even seen his name in print or heard it spoken, without a
slight return of that old sensation of nausea.  If Shenstone
alone had come to me, the desire for poetry would doubtless
have been outlived early in life; but there were many
passages, some very long, from the poets in various books on
the shelves, and these kept my appetite alive.  There was
Brown's Philosophy, for example; and Brown loved to illustrate
his point with endless poetic quotations, the only drawback in
my case being that they were almost exclusively drawn from
Akenside, who was not "rural."  But there were other books in
which other poets were quoted, and of all these the passages
which invariably pleased me most were the descriptions of
rural sights and sounds.

One day, during a visit to the city of Buenos Ayres, I
discovered in a mean street, in the southern part of the town,
a second-hand bookshop, kept by an old snuffy spectacled
German in a long shabby black coat.  I remember him well
because he was a very important person to me.  It was the
first shop of the kind I had seen--I doubt if there was
another in the town; and to be allowed to rummage by the hour
among this mass of old books on the dusty shelves and heaped
on the brick floor was a novel and delightful experience.  The
books were mostly in Spanish, French, and German, but there
were some in English, and among them I came upon Thomson's
Seasons.  I remember the thrill of joy I experienced when I
snatched up the small thin octavo in its smooth calf binding.
It was the first book in English I ever bought, and to this
day when I see a copy of the Seasons on a bookstall, which is
often enough, I cannot keep my fingers off it and find it hard
to resist the temptation to throw a couple of shillings away
and take it home.  If shillings had not been wanted for bread
and cheese I should have had a roomful of copies by now.

Few books have given me more pleasure, and as I still return
to it from time to time I do not suppose I shall ever outgrow
the feeling, in spite of its having been borne in on me, when
I first conversed with readers of poetry in England, that
Thomson is no longer read--that he is unreadable.

After such a find I naturally went back many times to burrow
in that delightful rubbish heap, and was at length rewarded by
the discovery of yet another poem of rural England--the
Farmer's Boy.  I was prepared to like it, for although I did
not know anything about the author's early life, the few
passages I had come across in quotations in James Rennie's and
other old natural history compilations had given me a strong
desire to read the whole poem.  I certainly did like it--this
quiet description in verse of a green spot in England, my
spiritual country which so far as I knew I was never destined
to see; and that I continue to like it is, as I have said, the
reason of my being in this place.

While thus freely admitting that the peculiar circumstances
of the case caused me to value this poem, and, in fact, made
it very much more to me than it could be to persons born in
England with all its poetical literature to browse on, I am
at the same time convinced that this is not the sole reason
for my regard.

I take it that the Farmer's Boy is poetry, not merely
slightly poetized prose in the form of verse, although it is
undoubtedly poetry of a very humble order.

Mere descriptions of rural scenes do not demand the higher
qualities of the poet--imagination and passion.  The lower
kind of inspiration is, in fact, often better suited to such
themes and shows nature by the common light of day, as it
were, instead of revealing it as by a succession of lightning
flashes.  Even among those who confine themselves to this
lower plane, Bloomfield is not great: his small flame is
constantly sinking and flickering out.  But at intervals it
burns up again and redeems the work from being wholly
commonplace and trivial.  He is, in fact, no better than many
another small poet who has been devoured by Time since his
day, and whose work no person would now attempt to bring back.
It is probable, too, that many of these lesser singers whose
fame was brief would in their day have deeply resented being
placed on a level with the Suffolk peasant-poet.  In spite of
all this, and of the impossibility of saving most of the verse
which is only passably good from oblivion, I still think the
Farmer's Boy worth preserving for more reasons than one, but
chiefly because it is the only work of its kind.

There is no lack of rural poetry--the Seasons to begin with
and much Thomsonian poetry besides, treating of nature in a
general way; then we have innumerable detached descriptions of
actual scenes, such as we find scattered throughout Cowper's
Task, and numberless other works.  Besides all this there are
the countless shorter poems, each conveying an impression of
some particular scene or aspect of nature; the poet of the
open air, like the landscape painter, is ever on the look out
for picturesque "bits" and atmospheric effects as a subject.
In Bloomfield we get something altogether different--a simple,
consistent, and fairly complete account of the country
people's toilsome life in a remote agricultural district in
England--a small rustic village set amid green and arable
fields, woods and common lands.  We have it from the inside by
one who had part in it, born and bred to the humble life he
described; and, finally, it is not given as a full day-to-day
record--photographed as we may say--with all the minute
unessential details and repetitions, but as it appeared when
looked back upon from a distance, reliving it in memory, the
sights and sounds and events which had impressed the boy's
mind standing vividly out.  Of this lowly poem it may be truly
said that it is "emotion recollected in tranquillity," to use
the phrase invented by Wordsworth when he attempted a
definition of poetry generally and signally failed, as
Coleridge demonstrated.

It will be said that the facts of Bloomfield's life--that he
was a farmer's boy whose daily tasks were to scare the crows,
feed the pigs, and forty things besides, and that later, when
learning the shoemaker's trade in a London garret, he put
these memories together and made them into a poem--are wholly
beside the question when we come to judge the work as
literature.  A peasant poet may win a great reputation in his
own day on account of the circumstances of the case, but in
the end his work must be tried by the same standards applied
in other and in all cases.

There is no getting away from this, and all that remains is to
endeavour to show that the poem, although poor as a whole, is
not altogether bad, but contains many lines that glow with
beautiful poetic feeling, and many descriptive passages which
are admirable.  Furthermore, I will venture to say that
despite the feebleness of a large part of the work (as poetry)
it is yet worth preserving in its entirety on account of its
unique character.  It may be that I am the only person in
England able to appreciate it so fully owing to the way in
which it first came to my notice, and the critical reader can,
if he thinks proper, discount what I am now saying as mere
personal feeling.  But the case is this: when, in a distant
region of the world, I sought for and eagerly read anything I
could find relating to country scenes and life in England
--the land of my desire--I was never able to get an extended
and congruous view of it, with a sense of the continuity in
human and animal life in its relation to nature.  It was all
broken up into pieces or "bits"; it was in detached scenes,
vividly reproduced to the inner eye in many cases, but
unrelated and unharmonized, like framed pictures of rural
subjects hanging on the walls of a room.  Even the Seasons
failed to supply this want, since Thomson in his great work is
of no place and abides nowhere, but ranges on eagle's wings
over the entire land, and, for the matter of that, over the
whole globe.  But I did get it in the Farmer's Boy.  I
visualized the whole scene, the entire harmonious life; I was
with him from morn till eve always in that same green country
with the same sky, cloudy or serene, above me; in the rustic
village, at the small church with a thatched roof where the
daws nested in the belfry, and the children played and shouted
among the gravestones in the churchyard; in woods and green
and ploughed fields and the deep lanes--with him and his
fellow-toilers, and the animals, domestic and wild, regarding
their life and actions from day to day through all the
vicissitudes of the year.

The poem, then, appears to fill a place in our poetic
literature, or to fill a gap; at all events from the point of
view of those who, born and living in distant parts of the
earth, still dream of the Old Home.  This perhaps accounts for
the fact, which I heard at Honington, that most of the
pilgrims to Bloomfield's birthplace are Americans.

Bloomfield followed his great example in dividing his poem
into the four seasons, and he begins, Thomson-like, with an
invitation to the Muse:--

   O come, blest spirit, whatsoe'er thou art,
   Thou kindling warmth that hov'rest round my heart.

But happily he does not attempt to imitate the lofty diction
of the Seasons or Windsor Forest, the noble poem from which, I
imagine, Thomson derived his sonorous style.  He had a humble
mind and knew his limitations, and though he adopted the
artificial form of verse which prevailed down to his time he
was still able to be simple and natural.

"Spring" does not contain much of the best of his work, but
the opening is graceful and is not without a touch of pathos
in his apologetic description of himself, as Giles, the
farmer's boy.

   Nature's sublimer scenes ne'er charmed my eyes
   Nor Science led me . . .
   From meaner objects far my raptures flow . . .
   Quick-springing sorrows, transient as the dew,
   Delight from trifles, trifles ever new.
   'Twas thus with Giles; meek, fatherless, and poor,
   Labour his portion . . .
   His life was cheerful, constant servitude . . .
   Strange to the world, he wore a bashful look,
   The fields his study, Nature was his book.

The farm is described, the farmer, his kind, hospitable
master; the animals, the sturdy team, the cows and the small
flock of fore-score ewes. Ploughing, sowing, and harrowing are
described, and the result left to the powers above:

   Yet oft with anxious heart he looks around,
   And marks the first green blade that breaks the ground;
   In fancy sees his trembling oats uprun,
   His tufted barley yellow with the sun.

While his master dreams of what will be, Giles has enough to
do protecting the buried grain from thieving rooks and crows;
one of the multifarious tasks being to collect the birds that
have been shot, for although--

   Their danger well the wary plunderers know
   And place a watch on some conspicuous bough,
   Yet oft the skulking gunner by surprise
   Will scatter death among them as they rise.

'Tis useless, he tells us, to hang these slain robbers about
the fields, since in a little while they are no more regarded
than the men of rags and straw with sham rifles in their
hands.  It was for him to shift the dead from place to place,
to arrange them in dying attitudes with outstretched wings.
Finally, there was the fox, the stealer of dead crows, to be
guarded against; and again at eventide Giles must trudge round
to gather up his dead and suspend them from twigs out of reach
of hungry night-prowlers.  Called up at daybreak each morning,
he would take his way through deep lanes overarched with oaks
to "fields remote from home" to redistribute his dead birds,
then to fetch the cows, and here we have an example of his
close naturalist-like observation in his account of the
leading cow, the one who coming and going on all occasions is
allowed precedence, who maintains her station, "won by many a
broil," with just pride.  A picture of the cool dairy and its
work succeeds, and a lament on the effect of the greed and
luxury of the over-populous capital which drains the whole
country-side of all produce, which makes the Suffolk
dairy-wives run mad for cream, leaving nothing but the
"three-times skimmed sky-blue" to make cheese for local
consumption.  What a cheese it is, that has the virtue of a
post, which turns the stoutest blade, and is at last flung in
despair into the hog-trough, where

                 It rests in perfect spite,
   Too big to swallow and too hard to bite!

We then come to the sheep, "for Giles was shepherd too," and
here there is more evidence of his observant eye when he
describes the character of the animals, also in what follows
about the young lambs, which forms the best passage in this
part.  I remember that, when first reading it, being then
little past boyhood myself, how much I was struck by the vivid
beautiful description of a crowd of young lambs challenging
each other to a game, especially at a spot where they have a
mound or hillock for a playground which takes them with a sort
of goatlike joyous madness.  For how often in those days I
used to ride out to where the flock of one to two thousand
sheep were scattered on the plain, to sit on my pony and watch
the glad romps of the little lambs with keenest delight!  I
cannot but think that Bloomfield's fidelity to nature in such
pictures as these does or should count for something in
considering his work.  He concludes:-

   Adown the slope, then up the hillock climb,
   Where every mole-hill is a bed of thyme,
   Then panting stop; yet scarcely can refrain;
   A bird, a leaf, will set them off again;
   Or if a gale with strength unusual blow,
   Scattering the wild-briar roses into snow,
   Their little limbs increasing efforts try,
   Like a torn rose the fair assemblage fly.

This image of the wind-scattered petals of the wild rose reminds
him bitterly of the destined end of these joyous young lives--his
white-fleeced little fellow-mortals.  He sees the murdering
butcher coming in his cart to demand the firstlings of the flock;
he cannot suppress a cry of grief and indignation--he can only
strive to shut out the shocking image from his soul!

"Summer" opens with some reflections on the farmer's life in a
prosy Crabbe-like manner; and here it may be noted that as a
rule Bloomfield no sooner attempts to rise to a general view
than he grows flat; and in like manner he usually fails when
he attempts wide prospects and large effects.  He is at his
best only when describing scenes and incidents at the farm in
which he himself is a chief actor, as in this part when, after
the sowing of the turnip seed, he is sent out to keep the
small birds from the ripening corn:

   There thousands in a flock, for ever gay,
   Loud chirping sparrows welcome on the day,
   And from the mazes of the leafy thorn
   Drop one by one upon the bending corn.

Giles trudging along the borders of the field scares them with
his brushing-pole, until, overcome by fatigue and heat, he
takes a rest by the brakes and lying, half in sun and half in
shade, his attention is attracted to the minute insect life
that swarms about him:

   The small dust-coloured beetle climbs with pain
   O'er the smooth plantain leaf, a spacious plain!
   Then higher still by countless steps conveyed,
   He gains the summit of a shivering blade,
   And flirts his filmy wings and looks around,
   Exulting in his distance from the ground.

It is one of his little exquisite pictures.  Presently his
vision is called to the springing lark:

   Just starting from the corn, he cheerly sings,
   And trusts with conscious pride his downy wings;
   Still louder breathes, and in the face of day
   Mounts up and calls on Giles to mark his way.
   Close to his eye his hat he instant bends
   And forms a friendly telescope that lends
   Just aid enough to dull the glaring light
   And place the wandering bird before his sight,
   That oft beneath a light cloud sweeps along;
   Lost for a while yet pours a varied song;
   The eye still follows and the cloud moves by,
   Again he stretches up the clear blue sky,
   His form, his motions, undistinguished quite,
   Save when he wheels direct from shade to light.

In the end he falls asleep, and waking refreshed picks up his
poles and starts again brushing round.

Harvesting scenes succeed, with a picture of Mary, the village
beauty, taking her share in the work, and how the labourers in
their unwonted liveliness and new-found wit

          Confess the presence of a pretty face.

She is very rustic herself in her appearance:--

   Her hat awry, divested of her gown,
   Her creaking stays of leather, stout and brown:
   Invidious barrier!  why art thou so high,
   When the slight covering of her neck slips by,
   Then half revealing to the eager sight
   Her full, ripe bosom, exquisitely white?

The leather stays have no doubt gone the way of many other
dreadful things, even in the most rustic villages in the land;
not so the barbarous practice of docking horses' tails,
against which he protests in this place when describing the
summer plague of flies and the excessive sufferings of the
domestic animals, especially of the poor horses deprived of
their only defence against such an enemy.  At his own little
farm there was yet another plague in the form of an old
broken-winged gander, "the pest and tryant of the yard," whose
unpleasant habit it was to go for the beasts and seize them by
the fetlocks.  The swine alone did not resent the attacks but
welcomed them, receiving the assaults as caresses, and
stretching themselves out and lying down and closing their
pigs' eyes, they would emit grunts of satisfaction, while the
triumphant bird, followed by the whole gabbling flock, would
trample on the heads of their prostrate foes.

"Autumn" opens bravely:

   Again the year's decline, 'midst storms and floods,
   The thund'ring chase, the yellow fading woods
   Invite my song.

It contains two of the best things in the poem, the first in
the opening part, describing the swine in the acorn season, a
delightful picture which must be given in full:--

   No more the fields with scattered grain supply
   The restless tenants of the sty;
   From oak to oak they run with eager haste,
   And wrangling share the first delicious taste
   Of fallen acorns; yet but thinly found
   Till a strong gale has shook them to the ground.
   It comes; and roaring woods obedient wave:
   Their home well pleased the joint adventurers leave;
   The trudging sow leads forth her numerous young,
   Playful, and white, and clean, the briars among,
   Till briars and thorns increasing fence them round,
   Where last year's mould'ring leaves bestrew the ground,
   And o'er their heads, loud lashed by furious squalls,
   Bright from their cups the rattling treasure falls;
   Hot thirsty food; whence doubly sweet and cool
   The welcome margin of some rush-grown pool,
   The wild duck's lonely haunt, whose jealous eye
   Guards every point; who sits prepared to fly,
   On the calm bosom of her little lake,
   Too closely screened for ruffian winds to shake;
   And as the bold intruders press around,
   At once she starts and rises with a bound;
   With bristles raised the sudden noise they hear,
   And ludicrously wild and winged with fear,
   The herd decamp with more than swinish speed,
   And snorting dash through sedge and rush and reed;
   Through tangled thickets headlong on they go,
   Then stop and listen for their fancied foe;
   The hindmost still the growing panic spreads,
   Repeated fright the first alarm succeeds,
   Till Folly's wages, wounds and thorns, they reap;
   Yet glorying in their fortunate escape,
   Their groundless terrors by degrees soon cease,
   And Night's dark reign restores their peace.
   For now the gale subsides, and from each bough
   The roosting pheasant's short but frequent crow
   Invites to rest, and huddling side by side
   The herd in closest ambush seek to hide;
   Seek some warm slope with shagged moss o'erspread,
   Dried leaves their copious covering and their bed.
   In vain may Giles, through gathering glooms that fall,
   And solemn silence, urge his piercing call;
   Whole days and nights they tarry 'midst their store,
   Nor quit the woods till oaks can yield no more.

It is a delightful passage to one that knows a pig--the animal
we respect for its intelligence, holding it in this respect
higher, more human, than the horse, and at the same time laugh
at on account of certain ludicrous points about it, as for
example its liability to lose its head.  Thousands of years of
comfortable domestic life have failed to rid it of this
inconvenient heritage from the time when wild in woods it ran.
Yet in this particular instance the terror of the swine does
not seem wholly inexcusable, if we know a wild duck as well as
a pig, especially the duck that takes to haunting a solitary
woodland pool, who, when intruded on, springs up with such a
sudden tremendous splash and flutter of wings and outrageous
screams, that man himself, if not prepared for it, may be
thrown off his balance.

Passing over other scenes, about one hundred and fifty lines,
we come to the second notable passage, when after the sowing
of the winter wheat, poor Giles once more takes up his old
occupation of rook-scaring.  It is now as in spring and
summer--

   Keen blows the blast and ceaseless rain descends;
   The half-stripped hedge a sorry shelter lends,

and he thinks it would be nice to have a hovel, no matter how
small, to take refuge in, and at once sets about its
construction.

   In some sequestered nook, embanked around,
   Sods for its walls and straw in burdens bound;
   Dried fuel hoarded is his richest store,
   And circling smoke obscures his little door;
   Whence creeping forth to duty's call he yields,
   And strolls the Crusoe of the lonely fields.
   On whitehorn tow'ring, and the leafless rose,
   A frost-nipped feast in bright vermilion glows;
   Where clust'ring sloes in glossy order rise,
   He crops the loaded branch, a cumbrous prize;
   And on the flame the splutt'ring fruit he rests,
   Placing green sods to seat the coming guests;
   His guests by promise; playmates young and gay;
   But ah! fresh pastures lure their steps away!
   He sweeps his hearth, and homeward looks in vain,
   Till feeling Disappointment's cruel pain
   His fairy revels are exchanged for rage,
   His banquet marred, grown dull his hermitage,
   The field becomes his prison, till on high
   Benighted birds to shades and coverts fly.

"The field becomes his prison," and the thought of this trival
restraint, which is yet felt so poignantly, brings to mind an
infinitely greater one.  Look, he says--

   From the poor bird-boy with his roasted sloes

to the miserable state of those who are confined in dungeons,
deprived of daylight and the sight of the green earth, whose
minds perpetually travel back to happy scenes,

   Trace and retrace the beaten worn-out way,

whose chief bitterness it is to be forgotten and see no
familiar friendly face.

"Winter" is, I think, the best of the four parts it gives the
idea that the poem was written as it stands, from "Spring"
onwards, that by the time he got to the last part the writer
had acquired a greater ease and assurance.  At all events it
is less patchy and more equal.  It is also more sober in tone,
as befits the subject, and opens with an account of the
domestic animals on the farm, their increased dependence on
man and the compassionate feelings they evoke in us.  He is,
we feel, dealing with realities, always from the point of view
of a boy of sensitive mina and tender heart--one taken in
boyhood from this life before it had wrought any change in
him.  For in due time the farm boy, however fine his spirit
may be, must harden and grow patient and stolid in heat and
cold and wet, like the horse that draws the plough or cart;
and as he hardens he grows callous.  In his wretched London
garret if any change came to him it was only to an increased
love and pity for the beasts he had lived among, who looked
and cried to him to be fed.  He describes it well, the frost
and bitter cold, the hungry cattle following the cart to the
fields, the load of turnips thrown out on the hard frozen
ground; but the turnips too are frozen hard and they cannot
eat them until Giles, following with his beetle, splits them
up with vigorous blows, and the cows gather close round him,
sending out a cloud of steam from their nostrils.

The dim short winter day soon ends, but the sound of the
flails continues in the barns till long after dark before the
weary labourers end their task and trudge home.  Giles, too,
is busy at this time taking hay to the housed cattle, many a
sweet mouthful being snatched from the load as he staggers
beneath it on his way to the racks.  Then follow the
well-earned hours of "warmth and rest" by the fire in the big
old kitchen which he describes:--

   For the rude architect, unknown to fame,
   (Nor symmetry nor elegance his aim),
   Who spread his floors of solid oak on high,
   On beams rough-hewn from age to age that lie,
   Bade his wide fabric unimpaired sustain
   The orchard's store, and cheese, and golden grain;
   Bade from its central base, capacious laid,
   The well-wrought chimney rear its lofty head
   Where since hath many a savoury ham been stored,
   And tempests howled and Christmas gambols roared.

The tired ploughman, steeped in luxurious heat, by and by
falls asleep and dreams sweetly until his chilblains or the
snapping fire awakes him, and he pulls himself up and goes
forth yawning to give his team their last feed, his lantern
throwing a feeble gleam on the snow as he makes his way to the
stable.  Having completed his task, he pats the sides of those
he loves best by way of good-night, and leaves them to their
fragrant meal.  And this kindly action on his part suggests
one of the best passages of the poem.  Even old well-fed
Dobbin occasionally rebels against his slavery, and released
from his chains will lift his clumsy hoofs and kick,
"disdainful of the dirty wheel."  Short-sighted Dobbin!

   Thy chains were freedom, and thy toils repose,
   Could the poor post-horse tell thee all his woes;
   Show thee his bleeding shoulders, and unfold
   The dreadful anguish he endures for gold;
   Hired at each call of business, lust, or rage,
   That prompts the traveller on from stage to stage.
   Still on his strength depends their boasted speed;
   For them his limbs grow weak, his bare ribs bleed;
   And though he groaning quickens at command,
   Their extra shilling in the rider's hand
   Becomes his bitter scourge . . . .

The description, too long to quote, which follows of the
tortures inflicted on the post-horse a century ago, is almost
incredible to us, and we flatter ourselves that such things
would not be tolerated now.  But we must get over the ground
somehow, and I take it that but for the invention of other
more rapid means of transit the present generation would be as
little concerned at the pains of the post-horse as they are at
the horrors enacted behind the closed doors of the
physiological laboratories, the atrocity of the steel trap,
the continual murdering by our big game hunters of all the
noblest animals left on the globe, and finally the annual
massacre of millions of beautiful birds in their breeding time
to provide ornaments for the hats of our women.

"Come forth he must," says Bloomfield, when he describes how
the flogged horse at length gains the end of the stage and,
"trembling under complicated pains," when "every nerve a
separate anguish knows," he is finally unharnessed and led to
the stable door, but has scarcely tasted food and rest before
he is called for again.

                     Though limping, maimed and sore;
   He hears the whip; the chaise is at the door . . .
   The collar tightens and again he feels
   His half-healed wounds inflamed; again the wheels
   With tiresome sameness in his ears resound
   O'er blinding dust or miles of flinty ground.

This is over and done with simply because the post-horse is no
longer wanted, and we have to remember that no form of cruelty
inflicted, whether for sport or profit or from some other
motive, on the lower animals has ever died out of itself in
the land.  Its end has invariably been brought about by
legislation through the devotion of men who were the "cranks,"
the "faddists," the "sentimentalists," of their day, who were
jeered and laughed at by their fellows, and who only succeeded
by sheer tenacity and force of character after long fighting
against public opinion and a reluctant Parliament, in finally
getting their law.

Bloomfield's was but a small voice crying in the wilderness,
and he was indeed a small singer in the day of our greatest
singers.  As a poet he was not worthy to unloose the buckles
of their shoes; but he had one thing in common with the best
and greatest, the feeling of tender love and compassion for
the lower animals which was in Thomson and Cowper, but found
its highest expression in his own great contemporaries,
Coleridge, Shelley, and Wordsworth.  In virtue of this feeling
he was of their illustrious brotherhood.

In conclusion, I will quote one more passage.  From the
subject of horses he passes to that of dogs and their
occasional reversion to wildness, when the mastiff or cur, the
"faithful" house-dog by day, takes to sheep-killing by night.
As a rule he is exceedingly cunning, committing his
depredations at a distance frown home, and after getting his
fill of slaughter he sneaks home in the early hours to spend
the day in his kennel "licking his guilty paws."  This is an
anxious time for shepherds and farmers, and poor Giles is
compelled to pay late evening visits to his small flock of
heavy-sided ewes penned in their distant fold.  It is a
comfort to him to have a full moon on these lonely
expeditions, and despite his tremors he is able to appreciate
the beauty of the scene.

   With saunt'ring steps he climbs the distant stile,
   Whilst all around him wears a placid smile;
   There views the white-robed clouds in clusters driven
   And all the glorious pageantry of heaven.
   Low on the utmost bound'ry of the sight
   The rising vapours catch the silver light;
   Thence fancy measures as they parting fly
   Which first will throw its shadow on the eye,
   Passing the source of light; and thence away
   Succeeded quick by brighter still than they.
   For yet above the wafted clouds are seen
   (In a remoter sky still more serene)
   Others detached in ranges through the air,
   Spotless as snow and countless as they're fair;
   Scattered immensely wide from east to west
   The beauteous semblance of a flock at rest.

This is almost the only passage in the poem in which something
of the vastness of visible nature is conveyed.  He saw the
vastness only in the sky on nights with a full moon or when he
made a telescope of his hat to watch the flight of the lark.
It was not a hilly country about his native place, and his
horizon was a very limited one, usually bounded by the
hedgerow timber at the end of the level field.  The things he
depicts were seen at short range, and the poetry, we see, was
of a very modest kind.  It was a "humble note" which pleased
me in the days of long ago when I was young and very ignorant,
and as it pleases me still it may be supposed that mentally I
have not progressed with the years.  Nevertheless, I am not
incapable of appreciating the greater music; all that is said
in its praise, even to the extremest expressions of admiration
of those who are moved to a sense of wonder by it, find an
echo in me.  But it is not only a delight to me to listen to
the lark singing at heaven's gate and to the vesper
nightingale in the oak copse--the singer of a golden throat
and wondrous artistry; I also love the smaller vocalists--the
modest shufewing and the lesser whitethroat and the
yellowhammer with his simple chant.  These are very dear to
me: their strains do not strike me as trivial; they have a
lesser distinction of their own and I would not miss them from
the choir.  The literary man will smile at this and say that
my paper is naught but an idle exercise, but I fancy I shall
sleep the better tonight for having discharged this ancient
debt which has been long on my conscience.




Chapter Twenty-Five: My Friend Jack


My friend rack is a retriever--very black, very curly, perfect
in shape, but just a retriever; and he is really not my
friend, only he thinks he is, which comes to the same thing.
So convinced is he that I am his guide, protector, and true
master, that if I were to give him a downright scolding or
even a thrashing he would think it was all right and go on
just the same.  His way of going on is to make a companion of
me whether I want him or not.  I do not want him, but his idea
is that I want him very much.  I bitterly blame myself for
having made the first advances, although nothing came of it
except that he growled.  I met him in a Cornish village in a
house where I stayed.  There was a nice kennel there, painted
green, with a bed of clean straw and an empty plate which had
contained his dinner, but on peeping in I saw no dog.  Next
day it was the same, and the next, and the day after that;
then I inquired about it--Was there a dog in that house or
not?  Oh, yes, certainly there was: Jack, but a very
independent sort of dog.  On most days he looked in, ate his
dinner and had a nap on his straw, but he was not what you
would call a home-keeping dog.

One day I found him in, and after we had looked for about a
minute at each other, I squatting before the kennel, he with
chin on paws pretending to be looking through me at something
beyond, I addressed a few kind words to him, which he received
with the before-mentioned growl.  I pronounced him a surly
brute and went away.  It was growl for growl.  Nevertheless I
was well pleased at having escaped the consequences in
speaking kindly to him.  I am not a "doggy" person nor even a
canophilist.  The purely parasitic or degenerate pet dog moves
me to compassion, but the natural vigorous outdoor dog I fear
and avoid because we are not in harmony; consequently I suffer
and am a loser when he forces his company on me.  The outdoor
world I live in is not the one to which a man goes for a
constitutional, with a dog to save him from feeling lonely,
or, if he has a gun, with a dog to help him kill something.
It is a world which has sound in it, distant cries and
penetrative calls, and low mysterious notes, as of insects
and corncrakes, and frogs chirping and of grasshopper
warblers--sounds like wind in the dry sedges.  And there are
also sweet and beautiful songs; but it is very quiet world
where creatures move about subtly, on wings, on polished
scales, on softly padded feet--rabbits, foxes, stoats,
weasels, and voles and birds and lizards and adders and
slow-worms, also beetles and dragon-flies.  Many are at enmity
with each other, but on account of their quietude there is no
disturbance, no outcry and rushing into hiding.  And having
acquired this habit from them I am able to see and be with
them.  The sitting bird, the frolicking rabbit, the basking
adder--they are as little disturbed at my presence as the
butterfly that drops down close to my feet to sun his wings on
a leaf or frond and makes me hold my breath at the sight of
his divine colour, as if he had just fluttered down from some
brighter realm in the sky.  Think of a dog in this world,
intoxicated with the odours of so many wild creatures, dashing
and splashing through bogs and bushes!  It is ten times worse
than a bull in a china-shop.  The bull can but smash a lot of
objects made of baked clay; the dog introduces a mad panic in
a world of living intelligent beings, a fairy realm of
exquisite beauty.  They scuttle away and vanish into hiding as
if a deadly wind had blown over the earth and swept them out
of existence.  Only the birds remain--they can fly and do not
fear for their own lives, but are in a state of intense
anxiety about their eggs and young among the bushes which he
is dashing through or exploring.

I had good reason, then, to congratulate myself on Jack's
surly behaviour on our first meeting.  Then, a few days later,
a curious thing happened.  Jack was discovered one morning in
his kennel, and when spoken to came or rather dragged himself
out, a most pitiable object.  He was horribly bruised and sore
all over; his bones appeared to be all broken; he was limp and
could hardly get on his feet, and in that miserable condition
he continued for some three days.

At first we thought he had been in a big fight--he was
inclined that way, his master said--but we could discover no
tooth marks or lacerations, nothing but bruises.  Perhaps, we
said, he had fallen into the hands of some cruel person in one
of the distant moorland farms, who had tied him up, then
thrashed him with a big stick, and finally turned him loose to
die on the moor or crawl home if he could.  His master looked
so black at this that we said no more about it.  But Jack was
a wonderfully tough dog, all gristle I think, and after three
days of lying there like a dead dog he quickly recovered,
though I'm quite sure that if his injuries had been
distributed among any half-dozen pampered or pet dogs it would
have killed them all.  A morning came when the kennel was
empty: Jack was not dead--he was well again, and, as usual,
out.

Just then I was absent for a week or ten days then, back
again, I went out one fine morning for a long day's ramble
along the coast.  A mile or so from home, happening to glance
back I caught sight of a black dog's face among the bushes
thirty or forty yards away gazing earnestly at me.  It was
Jack, of course, nothing but his head visible in an opening
among the bushes--a black head which looked as if carved in
ebony, in a wonderful setting of shining yellow furze
blossoms.  The beauty and singularity of the sight made it
impossible for me to be angry with him, though there's nothing
a man more resents than being shadowed, or secretly followed
and spied upon, even by a dog, so, without considering what I
was letting myself in for, I cried out "Jack" and instantly he
bounded out and came to my side, then flew on ahead, well
pleased to lead the way.

"I must suffer him this time," I said resignedly, and went on,
he always ahead acting as my scout and hunter--self-appointed,
of course, but as I had not ordered him back in trumpet tones
and hurled a rock at him to enforce the command, he took it
that he was appointed by me.  He certainly made the most of
his position; no one could say that he was lacking in zeal.
He scoured the country to the right and left and far in
advance of me, crashing through furze thickets and splashing
across bogs and streams, spreading terror where he went and
leaving nothing for me to look at.  So it went on until after
one o'clock when, tired and hungry, I was glad to go down into
a small fishing cove to get some dinner in a cottage I knew.
Jack threw himself down on the floor and shared my meal, then
made friends with the fisherman's wife and got a second meal
of saffron cake which, being a Cornish dog, he thoroughly
enjoyed.

The second half of the day was very much like the first,
altogether a blank day for me, although a very full one for
Jack, who had filled a vast number of wild creatures with
terror, furiously hunted a hundred or more, and succeeded in
killing two or three.

Jack was impossible, and would never be allowed to follow me
again.  So I sternly said and so thought, but when the time
came and I found him waiting for me his brown eyes bright with
joyful anticipation, I could not scowl at him and thunder out
No!  I could not help putting myself in his place.  For here
he was, a dog of boundless energy who must exercise his powers
or be miserable, with nothing in the village for him except to
witness the not very exciting activities of others; and that,
I dscovered, had been his life.  He was mad to do something,
and because there was nothing for him to do his time was
mostly spent in going about the village to keep an eye on
the movements of the people, especially of those who did
the work, always with the hope that his services might be
required in some way by some one.  He was grateful for the
smallest crumbs, so to speak.  House-work and work about the
house--milking, feeding the pigs and so on--did not interest
him, nor would he attend the labourers in the fields.  Harvest
time would make a difference; now it was ploughing, sowing,
and hoeing, with nothing for Jack.  But he was always down at
the fishing cove to see the boats go out or come in and join
in the excitement when there was a good catch.  It was still
better when the boat went with provisions to the lighthouse,
or to relieve the keeper, for then Jack would go too and if
they would not have him he would plunge into the waves and
swim after it until the sails were hoisted and it flew like a
great gull from him and he was compelled to swim back to land.
If there was nothing else to do he would go to the stone
quarry and keep the quarrymen company, sharing their dinner
and hunting away the cows and donkeys that came too near.
Then at six o'clock he would turn up at the cricket-field,
where a few young enthusiasts would always attend to practise
after working hours.

Living this way Jack was, of course, known to everybody--as
well known as the burly parson, the tall policeman, and the
lazy girl who acted as postman and strolled about the parish
once a day delivering the letters.  When Jack trotted down the
village street he received as many greetings as any human
inhabitant--"Hullo, Jack!" or "Morning, Jack," or "Where be
going, Jack?"

But all this variety, and all he could do to fit himself into
and be a part of the village life and fill up his time, did
not satisfy him.  Happiness for Jack was out on the moor--its
lonely wet thorny places, pregnant with fascinating scents,
not of flowers and odorous herbs, but of alert, warm-blooded,
and swift-footed creatures.  And I was going there--would I,
could I, be so heartless as to refuse to take him?

You see that Jack, being a dog, could not go there alone.  He
was a social being by instinct as well as training, dependent
on others, or on the one who was his head and master.  His
human master, or the man who took him out and spoke to him in
a tone of authority, represented the head of the pack--the
leading dog for the time being, albeit a dog that walked on
his hind legs and spoke a bow-wow dialect of his own.

I thought of all this and of many things besides.  The dog, I
remembered, was taken by man out of his own world and thrust
into one where he can never adapt himself perfectly to the
conditions, and it was consequently nothing more than simple
justice on my part to do what I could to satisfy his desire
even at some cost to myself.  But while I was revolving the
matter in my mind, feeling rather unhappy about it, Jack was
quite happy, since he had nothing to revolve.  For him it was
all settled and done with.  Having taken him out once, I must
go on taking him out always.  Our two lives, hitherto running
apart--his in the village, where he occupied himself with
uncongenial affairs, mine on the moor where, having but two
legs to run on, I could catch no rabbits--were now united in
one current to our mutual advantage.  His habits were altered
to suit the new life.  He stayed in now so as not to lose me
when I went for a walk, and when returning, instead of going
back to his kennel, he followed me in and threw himself down,
all wet, on the rug before the fire.  His master and mistress
came in and stared in astonishment.  It was against the rules
of the house!  They ordered him out and he looked at them
without moving.  Then they spoke again very sharply indeed,
and he growled a low buzzing growl without lifting his chin
from his paws, and they had to leave him!  He had transferred
his allegiance to a new master and head of the pack.  He was
under my protection and felt quite safe: if I had taken any
part in that scene it would have been to order those two
persons who had once lorded it over him out of the room!

I didn't really mind his throwing over his master and taking
possession of the rug in my sitting-room, but I certainly did
very keenly resent his behaviour towards the birds every
morning at breakfast-time.  It was my chief pleasure to feed
them during the bad weather, and it was often a difficult task
even before Jack came on the scene to mix himself in my
affairs.  The Land's End is, I believe, the windiest place in
the world, and when I opened the window and threw the scraps
out the wind would catch and whirl them away like so many
feathers over the garden wall, and I could not see what became
of them.  It was necessary to go out by the kitchen door at
the back (the front door facing the sea being impossible) and
scatter the food on the lawn, and then go into watch the
result from behind the window.  The blackbirds and thrushes
would wait for a lull to fly in over the wall, while the daws
would hover overhead and sometimes succeed in dropping down
and seizing a crust, but often enough when descending they
would be caught and whirled away by the blast.  The poor
magpies found their long tails very much against them in the
scramble, and it was even worse with the pied wagtail.  He
would go straight for the bread and get whirled and tossed
about the smooth lawn like a toy bird made of feathers, his
tail blown over his head.  It was bad enough, and then Jack,
curious about these visits to the lawn, came to investigate
and finding the scraps, proceeded to eat them all up.  I tried
to make him understand better by feeding him before I fed the
birds; then by scolding and even hitting him, but he would not
see it; he knew better than I did; he wasn't hungry and he
didn't want bread, but he would eat it all the same, every
scrap of it, just to prevent it from being wasted.  Jack was
doubtless both vexed and amused at my simplicity in thinking
that all this food which I put on the lawn would remain there
undevoured by those useless creatures the birds until it was
wanted.

Even this I forgave him, for I saw that he had not, that with
his dog mind he could not, understand me.  I also remembered
the words of a wise old Cornish writer with regard to the mind
of the lower animals: "But their faculties of mind are no less
proportioned to their state of subjection than the shape and
properties of their bodies.  They have knowledge peculiar to
their several spheres and sufficient for the under-part they
have to act."

Let me be free from the delusion that it is possible to raise
them above this level, or in other words to add an inch to
their mental stature.  I have nothing to forgive Jack after
all.  And so in spite of everything Jack was suffered at home
and accompanied me again and again in my walks abroad; and
there were more blank days, or if not altogether blank, seeing
that there was Jack himself to be observed and thought about,
they were not the kind of days I had counted on having.  My
only consolation was that Jack failed to capture more than
one out of every hundred, or perhaps five hundred, of the
creatures he hunted, and that I was even able to save a few of
these.  But I could not help admiring his tremendous energy
and courage, especially in cliff-climbing when we visited the
headlands--those stupendous masses and lofty piles of granite
which rise like castles built by giants of old.  He would
almost make me tremble for his life when, after climbing on to
some projecting rock, he would go to the extreme end and look
down over it as if it pleased him to watch the big waves break
in foam on the black rocks a couple of hundred feet below.
But it was not the big green waves or any sight in nature that
drew him--he sniffed and sniffed and wriggled and twisted his
black nose, and raised and depressed his ears as he sniffed,
and was excited solely because the upward currents of air
brought him tidings of living creatures that lurked in the
rocks below--badger and fox and rabbit.  One day when quitting
one of these places, on looking up I spied Jack standing on
the summit of a precipice about seventy-five feet high.  Jack
saw me and waved his tail, and then started to come straight
down to me!  From the top a faint rabbit track was, visible
winding downwards to within twenty-four feet of the ground;
the rest was a sheer wall of rock.  Down he dashed, faster and
faster as he got to where the track ended, and then losing his
footing he fell swiftly to the earth, but luckily dropped on a
deep spongy turf and was not hurt.  After witnessing this
reckless act I knew how he had come by those frightful bruises
on a former occasion.  He had doubtless fallen a long way down
a cliff and had been almost crushed on the stones.  But the
lesson was lost on Jack; he would have it that where rabbits
and foxes went he could go!

After all, the chief pleasure those blank bad days had for me
was the thought that Jack was as happy as he could well be.
But it was not enough to satisfy me, and by and by it came
into my mind that I had been long enough at that place.  It
was hard to leave Jack, who had put himself so entirely in my
hands, and trusted me so implicitly.  But--the weather was
keeping very bad: was there ever known such a June as this of
1907?  So wet and windy and cold!  Then, too, the bloom had
gone from the furze.  It was, I remembered, to witness this
chief loveliness that I came.  Looking on the wide moor and
far-off boulder-strewn hills and seeing how rusty the bushes
were, I quoted--

   The bloom has gone, and with the bloom go I,

and early in the morning, with all my belongings on my back, I
stole softly forth, glancing apprehensively in the direction
of the kennel, and out on to the windy road.  It was painful
to me to have to decamp in this way; it made me think meanly
of myself; but if Jack could read this and could speak his
mind I think he would acknowledge that my way of bringing the
connection to an end was best for both of us.  I was not the
person, or dog on two legs, he had taken me for, one with a
proper desire to kill things: I only acted according to my
poor lights.  Nothing, then, remains to be said except that
one word which it was not convenient to speak on the windy
morning of my departure--Good-bye Jack.









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