Field and Hedgerow Part 5

JUST BEFORE WINTER.

A rich tint of russet deepened on the forest top, and seemed to sink day by day deeper into the foliage like a stain; riper and riper it grew, as an apple colours. Broad acres these of the last crop, the crop of leaves; a thousand thousand quarters, the broad earth will be their barn. A warm red lies on the hill-side above the woods, as if the red dawn stayed there through the day; it is the heath and heather seeds; and higher still, a pale yellow fills the larches. The whole of the great hill glows with colour under the short hours of the October sun; and overhead, where the pine-cones hang, the sky is of the deepest azure. The conflagration of the woods burning luminously crowds into those short hours a brilliance the slow summer does not know.

The frosts and mists and battering rains that follow in quick succession after the equinox, the chill winds that creep about the fields, have ceased a little while, and there is a pleasant sound in the fir trees.

Everything is not gone yet. In the lanes that lead down to the 'shaws' in the dells, the 'gills,' as these wooded depths are called, buckler ferns, green, fresh, and elegantly fashioned, remain under the shelter of the hazel-lined banks. From the tops of the ash wands, where the linnets so lately sang, coming up from the stubble, the darkened leaves have been blown, and their much-divided branches stand bare like outstretched fingers. Black-spotted sycamore leaves are down, but the moss grows thick and deeply green; and the trumpets of the lichen seem to be larger, now they are moist, than when they were dry under the summer heat. Here is herb Robert in flower--its leaves are scarlet; a leaf of St. John's-wort, too, has become scarlet; the bramble leaves are many shades of crimson; one plant of tormentil has turned yellow. Furze bushes, grown taller since the spring, bear a second bloom, but not perhaps so golden as the first. It is the true furze, and not the lesser gorse; it is covered with half-opened buds; and it is clear, if the short hours of sun would but lengthen, the whole gorse hedge would become aglow again. Our trees, too, that roll up their buds so tightly, like a dragoon's cloak, would open them again at Christmas; and the sticky horse-chestnut would send forth its long ears of leaves for New Year's Day. They would all come out in leaf again if we had but a little more sun; they are quite ready for a second summer.

Brown lie the acorns, yellow where they were fixed in their cups; two of these cups seem almost as large as the great acorns from abroad. A red dead-nettle, a mauve thistle, white and pink bramble flowers, a white strawberry, a little yellow tormentil, a broad yellow dandelion, narrow hawkweeds, and blue scabious, are all in flower in the lane. Others are scattered on the mounds and in the meads adjoining, where may be collected some heath still in bloom, prunella, hyperic.u.m, white yarrow, some heads of red clover, some beautiful b.u.t.tercups, three bits of blue veronica, wild chamomile, tall yellowwood, pink centaury, succory, dock cress, daisies, fleabane, knapweed, and delicate blue harebells. Two York roses flower on the hedge: altogether, twenty-six flowers, a large bouquet for October 19, gathered, too, in a hilly country.

Besides these, note the broad hedge-parsley leaves, tunnelled by leaf-miners; bright ma.s.ses of haws gleaming in the sun; scarlet hips; great brown cones fallen from the spruce firs; black heart-shaped bindweed leaves here, and buff bryony leaves yonder; green and scarlet berries of white bryony hanging thickly on bines from which the leaves have withered; and bunches of gra.s.s, half yellow and half green, along the mound. Now that the leaves have been brushed from the beech saplings you may see how the leading stem rises in a curious wavy line; some of the leaves lie at the foot, washed in white dew, that stays in the shade all day; the wetness of the dew makes the brownish red of the leaf show clear and bright. One leaf falls in the stillness of the air slowly, as if let down by a cord of gossamer gently, and not as a stone falls--fate delayed to the last. A moth adheres to a bough, his wings half open, like a short brown cloak flung over his shoulders. Pointed leaves, some drooping, some horizontal, some fluttering slightly, still stay on the tall willow wands, like bannerets on the knights' lances, much torn in the late battle of the winds. There is a shower from a clear sky under the trees in the forest; brown acorns rattling as they fall, and rich coloured Spanish chestnuts thumping the sward, and sometimes striking you as you pa.s.s under; they lie on the ground in pocketfuls. Specks of brilliant scarlet dot the gra.s.s like some bright berries blown from the bushes; but on stooping to pick them, they are found to be the heads of a fungus. Near by lies a black magpie's feather, spotted with round dots of white.

At the edge of the trees stands an old timbered farmstead, whose gables and dark lines of wood have not been painted in the memory of man, dull and weather-beaten, but very homely; and by it rises the delicate cone of a new oast-house, the tiles on which are of the brightest red. Lines of bluish smoke ascend from among the bracken of the wild open ground, where a tribe of gipsies have pitched their camp. Three of the vans are time-stained and travel-worn, with dull red roofs; the fourth is brightly picked out with fresh yellow paint, and stands a marked object at the side. Orange-red beeches rise beyond them on the slope; two hoop-tents, or kibitkas, just large enough to creep into, are near the fires, where the women are cooking the gipsy's _bouillon_, that savoury stew of all things good: vegetables, meat, and sc.r.a.ps, and savouries, collected as it were in the stock-pot from twenty miles round. Hodge, the stay-at-home, st.u.r.dy carter, eats bread and cheese and poor bacon sometimes; he looks with true British scorn on all sc.r.a.ps and soups, and stock-pots and _bouillons_--not for him, not he; he would rather munch dry bread and cheese for every meal all the year round, though he could get bits as easy as the other and without begging. The gipsy is a cook. The man with a gold ring in his ear; the woman with a silver ring on her finger, coa.r.s.e black snaky hair like a horse's mane; the boy with naked olive feet; dark eyes all of them, and an Oriental, sidelong look, and a strange inflection of tone that turns our common English words into a foreign language--there they camp in the fern, in the sun, their Eastern donkeys of Syria scattered round them, their children rolling about like foals in the gra.s.s, a bit out of the distant Orient under our Western oaks.

It is the nature of the oak to be still, it is the nature of the hawk to roam with the wind. The Anglo-Saxon labourer remains in his cottage generation after generation, ploughing the same fields; the express train may rush by, but he feels no wish to rush with it; he scarcely turns to look at it; all the note he takes is that it marks the time to 'knock off' and ride the horses home. And if hard want at last forces him away, and he emigrates, he would as soon jog to the port in a waggon, a week on the road, as go by steam; as soon voyage in a sailing ship as by the swift Cunarder. The swart gipsy, like the hawk, for ever travels on, but, like the hawk, that seems to have no road, and yet returns to the same trees, so he, winding in circles of which we civilised people do not understand the map, comes, in his own times and seasons, home to the same waste spot, and cooks his savoury _bouillon_ by the same beech. They have camped here for so many years that it is impossible to trace when they did not; it is wild still, like themselves. Nor has their nature changed any more than the nature of the trees.

The gipsy loves the crescent moon, the evening star, the clatter of the fern-owl, the beetle's hum. He was born on the earth in the tent, and he has lived like a species of human wild animal ever since. Of his own free will he will have nothing to do with rites or litanies: he may perhaps be married in a place of worship--to make it legal, that is all. At the end, were it not for the law, he would for choice be buried beneath the 'fireplace' of their children's children. He will not dance to the pipe ecclesiastic, sound it who may--Churchman, Dissenter, priest, or laic.

Like the trees, he is simply indifferent. All the great wave of teaching and text and tracts and missions and the produce of the printing-press has made no impression upon his race any more than upon the red deer that roam in the forest behind his camp. The negroes have their fetich, every nation its idols; the gipsy alone has none--not even a superst.i.tious observance; they have no idolatry of the Past, neither have they the exalted thought of the Present, It is very strange that it should be so at this the height of our civilisation, and you might go many thousand miles and search from Africa to Australia before you would find another people without a Deity. That can only be seen under an English sky, under English oaks and beeches.

Are they the oldest race on earth? and have they worn out all the G.o.ds?

Have they worn out all the hopes and fears of the human heart in tens of thousands of years, and do they merely live, acquiescent to fate? For some have thought to trace in the older races an apathy as with the Chinese, a religion of moral maxims and some few joss-house superst.i.tions, which they themselves full well know to be nought, worshipping their ancestors, but with no vital living force, like that which drove Mohammed's bands to zealous fury, like that which sent our own Puritans over the sea in the _Mayflower_. No living faith. So old, so very, very old, older than the Chinese, older than the Copts of Egypt, older than the Aztecs; back to those dim Sanskrit times that seem like the clouds on the far horizon of human experience, where s.p.a.ce and chaos begin to take shape, though but of vapour. So old, they went through civilisation ten thousand years since; they have worn it all out, even hope in the future; they merely live acquiescent to fate, like the red deer. The crescent moon, the evening star, the clatter of the fern-owl, the red embers of the wood fire, the pungent smoke blown round about by the occasional puffs of wind, the shadowy trees, the sound of the horses cropping the gra.s.s, the night that steals on till the stubbles alone are light among the fields--the gipsy sleeps in his tent on mother earth; it is, you see, primeval man with primeval nature. One thing he gains at least--an iron health, an untiring foot, women whose haunches bear any burden, children whose naked feet are not afraid of the dew.

By sharp contrast, the Anglo-Saxon labourer who lives in the cottage close by and works at the old timbered farmstead is profoundly religious.

The gipsies return from their rambling soon after the end of hop-picking, and hold a kind of informal fair on the village green with c.o.c.kshies, swings, and all the clumsy games that extract money from clumsy hands. It is almost the only time of the year when the labouring people have any cash; their weekly wages are mortgaged beforehand; the hop-picking money comes in a lump, and they have something to spend. Hundreds of pounds are paid to meet the tally or account kept by the pickers, the old word tally still surviving, and this has to be charmed out of their pockets. Besides the gipsies' fair, the little shopkeepers in the villages send out circulars to the most outlying cottage announcing the annual sale at an immense sacrifice; anything to get the hop-pickers' cash; and the packmen come round, too, with jewelry and lace and finery. The village by the forest has been haunted by the gipsies for a century; its population in the last thirty years has much increased, and it is very curious to observe how the gipsy element has impregnated the place. Not only are the names gipsy, the faces are gipsy; the black coa.r.s.e hair, high cheek-bones, and peculiar forehead linger; even many of the shopkeepers have a distinct trace, and others that do not show it so much are known to be nevertheless related.

Until land became so valuable--it is now again declining--these forest grounds of heath and bracken were free to all comers, and great numbers of squatters built huts and inclosed pieces of land. They cleared away the gorse and heath and grubbed the fir-tree stumps, and found, after a while, that the apparently barren sand could grow a good sward. No one would think anything could flourish on such an arid sand, exposed at a great height on the open hill to the cutting winds. Contrary, however, to appearances, fair crops, and sometimes two crops of hay are yielded, and there is always a good bite for cattle. These squatters consequently came to keep cows, sometimes one and sometimes two--antic.i.p.ating the three acres and a cow; and it is very odd to hear the women at the hop-picking telling each other they are going to churn to-night. They have, in fact, little dairies. Such are the better cla.s.s of squatters. But others there are who have shown no industry, half-gipsies, who do anything but work--tramp, beg, or poach; st.u.r.dy fellows, stalking round with toy-brooms for sale, with all the blackguardism of both races. They keep just within the law; they do not steal or commit burglary; but decency, order, and society they set utterly at defiance. For instance, a gentleman pleased with the splendid view built a large mansion in one spot, never noticing that the entrance was opposite a row of cottages, or rather thinking no evil of it. The result was that neither his wife nor visitors could go in or out without being grossly insulted, without rhyme or reason, merely for the sake of blackguardism. Now, the pure gipsy in his tent or the Anglo-Saxon labourer would not do this; it was the half-breed. The original owner was driven from his premises; and they are said to have changed hands several times since from the same cause. All over the parish this half-breed element shows its presence by the extraordinary and unusual coa.r.s.eness of manner. The true English rustic is always civil, however rough, and will not offend you with anything unspeakable, so that at first it is quite bewildering to meet with such behaviour in the midst of green lanes. This is the explanation--the gipsy taint. Instead of the growing population obliterating the gipsy, the gipsy has saturated the English folk.

When people saw the red man driven from the prairies and backwoods of America, and whole states as large as Germany without a single Indian left, much was written on the extermination of the aborigines by the stronger Saxon. As the generations lengthen, the facts appear to wear another aspect. From the intermarriage of the lower orders with the Indian squaws the Indian blood has got into the Saxon veins, and now the cry is that the red man is exterminating the Saxon, so greatly has he leavened the population. The typical Yankee face, as drawn in _Punch_, is indeed the red Indian profile with a white skin and a chimney-pot hat.

Upon a small scale the same thing has happened in this village by the forest; the gipsy half-breed has stained the native blood. Perhaps races like the Jew and gipsy, so often quoted as instances of the permanency of type, really owe that apparent fixidity to their power of mingling with other nations. They are kept alive as races by mixing; otherwise one of two things would happen--the Jew and the gipsy must have died out, or else have supplanted all the races of the globe. Had the Jews been so fixed a type, by this time their offspring would have been more numerous than the Chinese. The reverse, however, is the case; and therefore we may suppose they must have become extinct, had it not been for fresh supplies of Saxon, Teuton, Spanish, and Italian blood. It is, in fact, the inter-marriages that have kept the falsely so-called pure races of these human parasites alive. The mixing is continually going on. The gipsies who still stay in their tents, however, look askance upon those who desert them for the roof. Two gipsy women, thorough-bred, came into a village shop and bought a variety of groceries, ending with a pound of biscuits and a Guy Fawkes mask for a boy. They were clad in dirty jackets and hats, draggle-tails, unkempt and unwashed, with orange and red kerchiefs round their necks (the gipsy colours). Happening to look out of window, they saw a young servant girl with a perambulator on the opposite side of the 'street;' she was tidy and decently dressed, looking after her mistress's children in civilised fashion; but they recognised her as a deserter from tribe, and blazed with contempt. 'Don't _she_ look a figure!' exclaimed these dirty creatures.

The short hours shorten, and the leaf-crop is gathered to the great barn of the earth; the oaks alone, more tenacious, retain their leaves, that have now become a colour like new leather. It is too brown for buff--it is more like fresh harness. The berries are red on the holly bushes and holly trees that grow, whole copses of them, on the forest slopes--'the Great Rough;' the half-wild sheep have polished the stems of these holly trees till they shine, by rubbing their fleeces against them. The farmers have been drying their damp wheat in the oast-houses over charcoal fires, and wages are lowered, and men discharged. Vast loads of brambles and thorns, dead firs, useless hop-poles and hop-bines, and gorse are drawn together for the great bonfire on the green. The 5th of November bonfires are still vital inst.i.tutions, and from the top of the hill you may see them burning in all directions, as if an enemy had set fire to the hamlets.

LOCALITY AND NATURE.

By the side of the rivers of Exmoor there grows a great leaf, so large it almost calls to mind those tropical leaves of which umbrellas and even tents are made. This is of a rounder shape than those of the palm, it is an elephant's ear among the foliage. The sweet river slips on with a murmuring song, for these are the rivers of the poets, and talk in verse for ever. Purple-tinted stones are strewn about the shallows flat like tiles, and out among the gra.s.s and the white orchis of the meadow. The floods carried them there and left them dry in the sun. Among these grows a thick bunch of mimulus or monkey-plant, well known in gardens, here flourishing alone beside the stream. These two plants greatly interested me: the last because it had long been a favourite in an old garden and I had not before seen it growing wild; the other because though I knew its large leaf by repute, this was the first time I had come upon it. Now that little spot in the bend of the river by means of these two plants is firmly impressed in my memory, and is a joy to me whenever I think of it.

The sunshine, the song of the water, the pleasant green gra.s.s, the white orchis, and the purplish stones were thereby rendered permanent to me.

Such is the wonderful power of plants. To any one who takes a delight in wild flowers some spot or other of the earth is always becoming consecrated.

There is, however, something curious about this b.u.t.terbur. It is related to the coltsfoot of the arable fields, and the coltsfoot sends up a stalk without a leaf, and flowers before any green appears. So, too, the b.u.t.terbur of the river flowers before its great leaf comes. Nothing is really common either, for everything is so local that you may spend years, and in fact a lifetime, in a district and never see a flower plentiful enough in another. Just where I am staying now the pennywort grows on every wall attached to the mortar between the cobbles. In some places you may search the roads in vain for this little plant, which has this merit, that its rounded leaf presents a fresh green in February. It does not die away, it appears as green as spring, and pieces of the wall are ornamented with it as thickly as the iron-headed nails in old doors.

One plant grows out of the hard stem of a hawthorn tree, as if it were a parasite like the mistletoe; probably there is some crack which the plant itself has hidden. If every plant and every flower were found in all places the charm of locality would not exist. Everything varies, and that gives the interest. These purplish stones, where they lie in the water, seem to have a kind of growth upon them--small k.n.o.bs on the surface. On examination each small roughness or k.n.o.b will be found composed of a number of very minute fragments of stone. It is a sort of cell, probably built by a species of caddis. There was hardly a stone in the rivers that was not dotted with these little habitations, so that it seemed difficult to overlook them; but upon showing one to a mighty hunter to know the local name, he declared he had never noticed it before, and added that he did not care for such little things. It is of such little things that great nature is made.

On the highest part of the Forest Ridge in Suss.e.x, where the soil is sandy and covered with heath, fern, and fir trees, there never seemed to be any rooks. These birds, so very characteristic of the country, appeared to be almost absent over several miles. They went by sometimes, sailing down into the vale, but never stopped on the hill, not even to walk the furrows behind the plough. This would seem to indicate a remarkable absence of the food they like, for it is very rare indeed for a piece of ground to be fresh ploughed without rooks coming to it. There were rookeries beneath in the plains where the elms and beeches grew tall, but the birds never came up to forage. Crows could be found, and stopped on the hill all the year. Wood-pigeons, like the rooks, went over, but did not stay. Starlings were not at all plentiful; blackbirds and thrushes were there, but not nearly so numerous as is usually the case; fieldfares and redwings drifted by in the winter, but never stopped. Slow-worms lived in the sand under the heath, and lizards, but no snakes and only a few adders. Inquiring of an old man if there were many snakes about, he said no; the soil was too poor for them; but in some places down in the vale he had dug up a gallon of snakes' eggs in the 'maxen.' The word was noticeable as a survival of the old English 'mixen' for manure heap. Swallows, martins, and swifts abounded; and as for insects, they were countless--honey-bees, wild bees, humble-bees, varieties of wasps, b.u.t.terflies--an endless list. So common a plant as the arum did not seem to exist; on the other hand, ferns literally made up the hedges, growing in such quant.i.ties as to take the place of the gra.s.ses. There was, too, a great variety of moss and fungi. The soil looked black and fertile, and new-comers thought they were going to have good crops, but when these failed they found, upon examining the earth, that it was little more than black sand, and the particles of silica glittered if a handful were held in the sun. Such a sand would give the impression of dryness, instead of which it was extremely damp--damp all the year round.

For contrast, a place on the coast just opposite, as it were, and almost within view, at the same time of year seemed to have no bees. A great field of clover in flower was silent; there was no hum, nor glistening of wings. b.u.t.terflies rarely came along. Swallows were not common. In the rich loam it was curious to note mussel-sh.e.l.ls, quite recent, in good preservation, and a geologist might wonder at the layers of them in such an earth; the farmer would smile, and say the mussels were carted there for manure. Another place, again, in the same county is full of rooks, and the arum is green on the banks. These items in a small area show how different places are, and if you move from locality to locality everything you have read about is by degrees seen in reality. In an old book, the History of Northampton, which I chanced to look at, among other curiosities, the author a hundred years ago mentioned a substance called star shot, which appeared in the meadows overnight, and seemed to have dropped from the sky. This I had not then seen, but many years afterwards came suddenly, by a copse, on a quant.i.ty of jelly-like substance with a most unpleasant aspect, but which did not in any other way offend the senses. It had shot up in the night, and was gone next day. It is a fungus unnoticed till it suddenly swells; I suppose this was the old chronicler's star shot. Nor do I think it too small a thing that the common snail makes a straight track over everything; if he comes to the wall of a house he goes straight up without the smallest hesitation, and explores a good height before he comes down again; if he finds a loaf of bread in the cellar he never thinks of going round it, but travels in a Roman road up and over. So do the armies of ants in warmer climates, and this proceeding in an invariable line irrespective of obstacles seems to be peculiar to many creatures, and is the reason why such 'plagues' were and are so dreaded. Nothing could divert the straight march of the locusts; nothing could divert the course of the millions of b.u.t.terflies that sometimes cross the Channel and arrive here from the Continent.

The tenacity of insects in anything they have once begun is shown in many ways; you cannot drive away a fly or a gnat, and if a colony of ants take up their home in the garden they will hardly move till all are destroyed.

Aristotle mentions the diseases of swine, so it will not be amiss to record that in the country swine are supposed to suffer from water-brash, and to relieve themselves by eating dry earth, for which purpose those that run loose are continually tearing up the ground. Human beings so affected show a similar tendency for dry food, as oatmeal. Sometimes the liver of calves and bullocks is small and dry, of very little use for food; this is found to be due to the neglect of providing them with dry standing-ground when fattening. To ensure their fattening properly they should stand on dry and high ground, and they should be plentifully supplied with dry litter. This fact may be of value to some suffering person; it points to the necessity of dry warm feet, dry subsoil, and drainage if the liver is to be in good order. Popular suspicion, if not science, attaches many other diseases besides those that actually consume that organ to the abnormal action of the liver, possibly lung disease.

Such trifling circ.u.mstances are not so trifling as they appear. A case came under my notice quite recently when a person had been helpless from paralysis for several years. Chance compelled removal to another house, and very soon the paralysis began to disappear. The first house may have been damp, or there may have been some minute conditions besides. It certainly is a marked fact that in the country, at all events, one house is noted for its healthiness and another close by for its unhealthiness, and the cause is not traceable to the usual and obvious reason of drainage or water. Any one who has noticed the remarkable influence of locality in the more evident vegetation--such, for instance, as lichens--will be able to suppose the possibility of minute organisms--microbe, bacteria, whatever you like to call them--being more persistent in one spot than in another. I have often thought of the half-magical art of the Chinese, Feng-shui, by which they discover if a place be fortunate and fit for a house. It seems to suggest something of this kind, and I think there is a great deal yet to be discovered by the diligent observation of localities. The experience of the rudest country rustic is not to be despised; an observation is an observation, whoever makes it; there has been an air of too much science in the affected derision of our forefathers' wisdom.

COUNTRY PLACES.

I.

High up and facing every one who enters a village there still remains an old notice-board with the following inscription:--'All persons found wandering abroad, lying, lodging, or being in any barn, outhouse, or in the open air, and not giving a good account of themselves, will be apprehended as rogues and vagabonds, and be either publicly whipt or sent to the house of correction, and afterwards disposed of according to law, by order of the magistrates. Any person who shall apprehend any rogue or vagabond will be ent.i.tled to a reward of ten shillings.' It very often happens that we cannot see the times in which we actually live. A thing must be gone by before you can see it, just as it must be printed before it is read. This little bit of weather-stained board may serve, perhaps, to throw up the present into a picture so that it may be visible. For this inhuman law still holds good, and is not obsolete or a mere relic of barbarism. The whipping, indeed, is abrogated for very shame's sake; so is the reward to the informer; but the magistrate and the imprisonment and the offence remain. You must not sleep in the open, either in a barn or a cart-house or in a shed, in the country, or on a door-step in a town, or in a boat on the beach; and if you have no coin in your pocket you are still more diabolically wicked--you are a vagrom man, and the cold cell is your proper place. This is the Jubilee year, too, of the mildest and best reign of the Christian era. Something in this weather-beaten board to be very proud of, is it not? Something human and comforting and a.s.suring to the mind that we have made so much progress.

The pagan Roman Empire reached from the wall of Severus in the north of England to Athens of the philosophers; it included our islands, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Austria, Greece, Turkey in Europe and Asia, Egypt--the whole world of those days. No one could escape from it, because it enclosed all; you could not take refuge in Spain on account of the absence of an extradition treaty; no forger, no thief, no political offender could get out of it. A crushing power this, quite unknown in our modern world, with all our engines, steamers, and telegraphs. A man may hide himself somewhere now, but from the power of old Rome there was no running away. And all this, too, was under the thumb of one irresponsible will, in an age when human life was of no value, and there was no State inst.i.tution preaching gentleness in every village. Yet even then there was no such law as this, and in this respect we are more brutal than was the case nineteen centuries ago. This weather-beaten board may also serve to remind us that in this Jubilee year the hateful workhouse still endures; that people are imprisoned for debt under the mockery of contempt of court; that a man's household goods, down to the bed on which he sleeps, and the tools warm from his hand, may be sold. In the West End of London a poor woman, an ironer, being in debt, her six children's clothes were seized. What a triumph for the Jubilee year! Instead of building a Church House to add another thousand tons to the enormous weight of ecclesiastical bricks and mortar that c.u.mbers the land, would it not be more human to signalise the time by the abolition of these cruel laws, and by the introduction of some system to gradually emanc.i.p.ate the poor from the workhouse, which is now their master?

In the gathering dusk of the afternoon I saw a mouse rush to a wall--a thick stone wall,--run up it a few inches, and disappear in a c.h.i.n.k under some grey lichen. The poor little biter, as the gipsies call the mouse, had a stronghold wherein to shelter himself, and close by there was a corn-rick from which he drew free supplies of food. A few minutes afterwards I was interested in the movements of a pair of wrens that were playing round the great trunk of an elm, flying from one to another of the little twigs standing out from the rough bark. First one said something in wren language, and then the other answered; they were husband and wife, and after a long consultation they flew to the corn-rick and crept into a warm hole under the thatch. So both these, the least of animals and the least of birds, have a resource, and man is the only creature that punishes his fellow for daring to lie down and sleep.

Up in the plain there were some mounds, or _tumuli_, about which nothing seemed to be known, though they had evidently been cut into and explored.

At last, however, a farmer--Mr. Nestor Hay, who knew everything--told me something about them. He cut them open. He had an old county history and several other volumes which had somehow acc.u.mulated in the Manor-house Farm, and, like many country people, he was extremely fond of studying the past. He fancied there might have been a battle in that locality, and hence these mounds, but could find no reference to them anywhere, so he dug through one or two of them himself, without success; the soil did not seem to have ever been disturbed, consequently they might have been natural. 'Perhaps I should have found out something though,' he said, with a smile,'if it had not been for that there old dog as we used to keep in the tub at the back of the house. Such a lot of folk used to come to our back door all day long after victuals, some out of the village, and some from the next parish, and some as went round regular, and gipsy chaps, and chaps as pretended to come from London--you never saw such a crowd,--just because the old man and the missus was rather good to 'em.

So there they was a-clacking at that door all day long. But this 'ere dog in the tub used to sarve 'em out sometimes if they didn't mind.

(Chuckle.) She never barked, or nothing of that sort, never let 'em know as there was a dog there at all; there she'd lie as quiet till they was just gone by a little--then out she'd slip without a word behind them, and solp 'em by the leg. Lord, how they did jump and holler! (Chuckle.) See, they had the pinch afore they knowed as she was there. Lord, what a lot she did bite to be sure! (thoughtfully); I can't tell 'e how many, her did it so neat. That kept folk away a little, else I suppose we shouldn't have had anything to eat ourselves. None of 'em never went wrong, you know, never went mad or anything of that sort--never had to send n.o.body to Paris in them days to be dog-vaccinated. Curious, wasn't it? Must have been something different about folk then. However, this here dog was desperate clever at it. As I was telling you, I dug through them mounds; couldn't find no coins or anything; so I heard of a big archaeologist chap that was writing a new book about the antiquities of the country, and I wrote to him about it, and he said he would come and see them. The day he come was rather roughish and cold: he seemed sort of bad when he come into the house, and had to have some brandy. By-and-by he got better, and out we started; but just as we was going through the yard this old dog nips him by the hand--took him right through his hand--made him look main straight. However, washed his hand and bound it up, and started out again. (Chuckle.) Hadn't gone very far, and was getting through a hedge, and dalled if he didn't fall into the pond, flop! (Chuckle.) I suppose he didn't like it, for he never said nothing about the mounds in his book when it come out--left'em out altogether.'

This pond still exists, and Mr. Nestor Hay had noted a curious thing about it. Across the middle of the pond a tree had fallen; it was just on a level with the surface of the water. A pair of water-rats always ate their food on this tree. They would go out into the gra.s.s of the meadow, bite off the vegetation that suited their taste, and carry it back in their mouths to the tree, and there eat it in safety, with water, as it were, all round them like a moat. This they did a hundred times--in fact, every day. 'But,' said Mr. Hay, 'you can't watch nothing now a minute without some great lout coming along with a stale baccy pipe in his mouth, making the air stink; they spoils everything, these here half-towny fellows; everybody got a neasty stale pipe in their mouths, and they gets over the hedges anywhere, and disturbs everything.' It is common on the banks of a stream or a pond to see half a dozen of these little beaver-like water-voles out feeding in the gra.s.s, and they eat it when they find it. At this particular pond the two rats diverged from the custom of their race, and always took their food to a place of safety first. If he is alarmed the water-rat instantly dives, and his idea of security is a spot where he can drop like a stone under the surface without a moment's reflection. Mr. Hay could not understand why the water-rats were so timid at this pond till he recollected that the preceding summer two schoolboys used to get up in an oak that overhung the water, each with a catapult, and, firing bullets from these india-rubber weapons on the water-rats underneath, slew nearly every one of them. The few left had evidently learnt extreme caution from the misfortune of their friends, and no longer trusted themselves away from the water, into which they could slip at the movement of a shadow.

Mr. Hay disliked to see the slouching fellows making tracks across his fields, every one of which he looked on with as much jealousy as if it had been a garden--a wild garden they were too, strewn sometimes with the white cotton of the plane tree, hung about with roses and sweet with mowing gra.s.s. Those who love fields and every briar in the hedge dislike to see them entered irreverently. I have just the same feeling myself even of fields and woods in which I have no personal interest; it jars upon me to see nature profaned. These fellows were a 'Black George' lot, in hamlet language. Nestor Hay knew everybody in the village round about, their fathers and grandfathers, their politics and religious opinions, and whether they were new folk or ancient inhabitants--an encyclopaedic knowledge not written, an Homeric memory. For I imagine in ancient days when books were scarce that was how men handed down the history of the chiefs of Troy. An Homeric memory for everything--superst.i.tions, traditions, anecdotes; the only difficulty was that you could not command it. You could not turn to letter A or B and demand information direct about this or that; you must wait till it came up incidentally in conversation. In one of the villages there was a young men's club, and, among other advantages, when they were married they could have a cradle for nothing. A cottager had a child troubled with a slight infirmity; the doctor ordered the mother to prepare a stew of mice and give him the gravy. There happened to be some threshing going on, and one of the men caught her nine mice, which she skinned and cooked. She did not much like the task, but she did it, and the child never knew but that it was beef gravy. It cured him completely. This is the second time I have come across this curious use of mice. I had heard of it as a traditional resource among the country people, but in this case it seemed to have been ordered by a medical pract.i.tioner. Perhaps, after all, there may be something in the strange remedies and strange mixtures of remedies so often described in old books, and what we now deride may not have been without its value. If an empirical remedy will cure you, it is of more use than a scientific composition which ought to cure you but does not.

How much depends on custom! The woman felt a repugnance to skinning the mice, yet they are the cleanest creatures, living on grain; she would have skinned a hare or rabbit without hesitation, and have cooked and eaten bacon, though the pig is not a cleanly feeder. It is a country remark that the pig's foot--often seen on the table--has as many bones as there are letters of the alphabet. The grapnel kept at every village draw-well is called the grabhook; the plant called honesty (because both sides of the flower are alike) is old woman's penny. If you lived in the country you might be alarmed late in the evening by hearing the tramp of feet round your house. But it is not burglars; it is young fellows with a large net and a lantern after the sparrows in the ivy. They have a prescriptive right to enter every garden in the village. They cry 'sparrow catchers' at the gate, and people sit still, knowing it is all right. In the jealous suburb of a city the dwellers in the villas would shrink from this winter custom, the constable would soon have orders to stop it; in the country people are not so rigidly exclusive. Now it is curious that the sparrows and blackbirds, yellowhammers and greenfinches, that roost in the bushes, fly into the net and are easily captured, but the starlings--thanks to their different ways in daylight--always fly out at the top of the bush, and so escape.

II.

A black cannon ball lies in a garden, an ornament like a sh.e.l.l or a fossil, among blue lobelia and green ferns. It is about as big as a cricket ball--a mere trifle to look at. What a contrast with the immense projectiles thrown by modern guns! Yet it is very heavy--quite out of proportion to its size. Imagine iron cricket b.a.l.l.s bounding along the gra.s.s and glancing at unexpected angles, smashing human beings instead of wickets. This cannon ball is not a memorial of the Civil War. It was shot at a carter with his waggon. Our grandfathers had no idea of taking care of other people's lives. Every man had to look out for himself; if you got in the way, that was your fault. A battery was practising, and they did not trouble themselves about the highway road which skirted the range; and as the carter was coming home with his waggon one of the b.a.l.l.s ricocheted and rolled along in front of his horses. He picked it up and brought it home, and there it has lain many a long year, a silent witness, like the bricks Jack Cade put in the chimney, to the extraordinary change of ideas which has taken place. We are all expected nowadays to think not only of ourselves but of others, and if a man fires a gun without due precautions, and injures or even might have injured another, he is liable. All our legislation and all the drift of public opinion goes in this direction. Men were the same then as now; the change in this respect shows the immense value of ideas. They were then quite strangers to the very idea of taking any thought for those who might chance to be in the way. That has been inculcated of recent years. Those were the days when there was an irresponsible tyrant in every village, who could not indeed hang men at his castle gate by feudal right of gallows, but who could as effectually silence them by setting in motion laws made by the rich for the rich. It is on record how a poor carrier, whose only fortune was a decrepit horse, dared presumptuously, against the will of the lord of the manor, to water his horse at a roadside pond.

For this offence he was taken before the justices and fined, his goods seized,--

And the knackers had his silly old horse, And so John Harris was bowled out!

Then there was a still more terrible offence--a hungry man picked up a rabbit. 'How dared John Bartlett for to venture for to go for to grab it?' But they put him in gaol and cured him of 'that there villanous habit,' which rhymes, and the tale thereof may be found by the student of old times in the 'Punch' of the day--a good true honest manly Punch, who brought his staff down heavily on the head of abuses and injustice. We do things every day in the present age equally unjust and cruel, only we cannot see them; as some one observed, one cannot see the eye because it is so close to the sight. In the almost sacred name of education tyrannies are being enacted surpa.s.sing anything recorded in the most outlying village in the most outlying time. One constantly sees cases of poor people sent to prison because they happen to have children. No other reason can be detected.

Our great-grandfathers' doctors never used to trouble themselves to write prescriptions for their poorer patients; they used to keep two or three mixtures always made up ready in great jars, and ladle them out. There was the bread and cheese mixture, very often called for, as the ailments of the labourers are commonly traceable to a heavy diet of cheese. As an old doctor used to say when he was called to a cottage, 'Hum; s'pose you've been eating too much fat bacon and cabbage!' Another was the club mixture, called for about May, when the village clubs are held and extra beer disturbs the economy. In factory towns, where the mechanics have dispensaries and employ doctors, something of the same sort of story has got about at the present day. The women are constantly coming for physic, and the a.s.sistants are stated to gravely measure a little peppermint and colour it pink or yellow, which does as well. Great invalids with long pockets, who have paid their scores of guineas and gone the round of fashionable physicians, do not seem to have received much more benefit than if they had themselves chosen the yellow or pink hue of their tinted water. It is wonderful what value the country poor set on a bottle of physic; they are twice as grateful for it as for a good dinner. Some of the doctors of old are said to have had an eye for an old book, or an old clock, or an old bit of furniture or china in the cottage, and when the patient was recovering they would take a fancy to it and buy it at their own valuation, for of course the humble labourer was obliged to regard such a wish as a command. The workhouse system puts the labourer completely under the thumb of the clergyman and the doctor. It was in this way that many good old pieces of work gradually found their destination in great London collections. Once now and then, however, the eager collector would come across some one independent, and meet with a sharp refusal to part with the old china bowl. The wife of a small farmer naively remarked about the t.i.thes, 'You know it is such a lot to pay, and we never go there to church; you know it is too far to walk.' It was not the doctrine to which she objected--it was the paying for nothing; paying and never having anything. The farmers, staunch upholders of Church and State, are always grumbling because the clergy are constantly begging.

One man took a deep oath that if the clergyman ever came to his house without asking for money he would cut a deep notch with his knife in the oaken doorpost. Ten years went by, still more years, and still no notch was cut. Odd things happen in odd places. There is a story of an old mansion where a powerful modern stove was put in an ancient hearth under a mantelpiece supported by carved oak figures of knights. The unwonted heat roasted the toes of these martyrs till their feet fell off. Another story relates how in our grandfathers' days a great man invited his friends to dinner, promising them a new dish that had never before been set upon the table. The fillet came in on the shoulders of several men, and when the cover was removed, lo an actress in a state of nature! One farmer lent his friend his dogcart. Time went on, and the dogcart was not returned; a year went by, still no cart. Country people are very peculiar in this respect, and do not like to remind their friends of obligations.

Two years went by, and still no return, though the parties were in constant intercourse. I have known people borrow a hundred pounds in the country, and debtor and creditor meet several times a week for years, and nothing said about it on either side. No strained relations were caused--it seemed quite forgotten till executors came. Three years went by, still no dogcart, though it was seen daily on the roads in use. I was driving with a man once when we met a woman walking, and as we pa.s.sed she put up her umbrella so as not to be able to see us. 'That's So-and-so,'

said he; 'they borrowed some money from me a long time ago; they have never said anything about it. Whenever she meets me she always puts up her umbrella so as not to see me.' Four years went by, and still no dogcart. By this time it was looking shabby and getting shaken by rough usage; perhaps they did not like to return it in such a condition. Five years went by, and after that they seem to have lost all count of the dogcart, which faded away like a phantom. One farmer had been telling another something which his companion seemed to consider doubtful, and disputed; however, he finished up by saying, 'That's no lie, I can a.s.sure you.' 'Well, no; but I should certainly have taken it as such.' One fellow happening by chance in the hunting-field to come across the Prince of Wales, took off his hat with _both_ hands to express his deep humility. Here is a cottage nursery rhyme, genuinely silly:--

Right round my garden There I found a farden, Gave it to my mother To buy a little brother, Brother was so cross Sat him on a horse, Horse was so randy Gave him some brandy, Brandy was so strong Put him in the pond, Pond was so deep Put him in the cradle and rocked him off to sleep.

It is curious that there seems to be a distinct race of flat heads among the cottagers; the children look as if the front part of the head had been sat upon and compressed. Straw hats, the common sort, seem to be made to fit these shallow crowns. In some parts they cook dates; others cook oranges, making them into dumplings and also stewing them. These are favourite sweets. To go out singing from door to door at Christmas is called wa.s.sailing--a relic of the ancient time when wa.s.sail was a common word. When I was a boy, among other out-of-the-way pursuits, I took an interest in astrology. The princ.i.p.al work on astrology, from which all the others have been more or less derived, is Ptolemy's 'Tetrabiblos,'

and there, pointing out the mysterious influence of one thing upon another, it mentions that the virtues of the magnet may be destroyed by rubbing it with garlic. This curious statement has been thrown against Ptolemy and held to invalidate his theories, because upon experiment garlic is not found to affect the magnet. Possibly, however, the plant Ptolemy meant may not have been the plant we now call garlic, for there is nothing so uncertain as the names of plants. There is a great confusion, and it is difficult to identify with certainty apparently well-known herbs with those used by the ancients. Possibly, too, the experiment was performed in a different manner. It happened one day, many years after reading this, I chanced to be talking to a village clockmaker about watches. We were discussing what a difficulty it was sometimes to get a watch to go right. I said I had heard that watches sometimes got magnetised, and went on in the most erratic manner until the magnetism was counteracted. Ah yes, he said, he recollected a case in the shop where he learnt his trade; they had a watch brought to them which had got magnetised, and he believed the influence was at last removed by the use of onions. Instantly memory ran back to Ptolemy's garlic; perhaps after all there was something in his statement; at all events, it is very curious that the subject should come up again in this unexpected way, in the darkness, as it were, of a village where the very name of the great mathematician was unknown. The clockmaker fumbled with an anecdote, and tried to tell me of another sort of magnetism which had got into a watch.