Round About a Great Estate Part 7

'The turmots wants some rain terrable bad' (to me)--'you med see the fly a-hopping about 'em.'

'I hope they will spoil your turnips,' said Cicely; 'you are a very rude man not to answer a lady when she speaks to you.'

'You be a-coming on nicely, Cissy,' said he. 'Have 'ee got are a gage-ring yet?'

'How dare you!' (blushing). 'Tell me instantly why have you not been to see us? You know how angry it makes me.'

'Well, I was a-coming,' deliberately.

'When were you coming?'

'Well, I got to see a man down your way, Cissy; a' owes me for a load a' straw.'

'Then why don't you come down and get the money?'

'I telled 'ee I was a-coming. He wants some of our sheep to feed off a meadow; s'pose I must see about it'--with a sigh, as if the idea of a decision was insupportable.

'Why didn't you come before?'

'Aw, I don't seem to have no time'--farmers having more time than anybody else.

'You could have come in June.'

'Bless 'ee, your feyther's got the hay about; a' don't want no strangers bothering.'

'As if you were a stranger! Well, why didn't you come in May?'

'Lor bless 'ee, my dear.'

'In April?'

'Us was main busy a-hoeing.'

'In March?'

'I had the rheumatism bad in March.'

'Well, then,' concluded Cicely, 'now just change your coat and come to-day. Jump up in the pony-trap--we will make room.'

'To-day!' in hopeless bewilderment, his breath quite taken away at the idea of such sudden action. 'Couldn't do't--couldn't do't. Got to go down to Thirty Acre Corner: got to get out the reaping machine--a'

wants oiling, a' reckon; got some new hurdles coming; 'spects a chap to call about them lambs;' a farmer can always find a score of reasons for doing nothing.

'All rubbish!' cried Cicely, smiling.

'Nieces be main peart now-a-days,' said he, shutting one eye and keeping it closed, as much as to say--I won't be driven. Then to me, 'There won't be many at market to-day.'

'I am hungry,' said Cicely softly; 'I should like some bread and honey.'

'Aw; should 'ee?' in gentler tones; 'I'll get 'ee some: will'ee have it in th' comb? I got a bit left.'

She knew his pride in his bees and his honey; hill farmers still keep large stocks. He brought her a slice of home-baked bread and a piece of comb. She took the comb in her white fingers, and pressed the liquid gold from the cells; the luscious sweetness gathered from a thousand flowers making her lips still sweeter. Uncle Bennet offered me a jar full to the brim: 'Dip your vinger in,' said he.

'Why is the honey of the hills so much nicer?' asked Cicely, well knowing, but drawing him on.

'It be th' clover and th' thyme, and summat in the air. There bean't no hedges for um to fly up against, and so um carries home a bigger load.'

'How many hives have you?' I inquired.

'Let's see'--he counted them up, touching a finger for each twenty--'There be three score and sixteen; I have a' had six score years ago, but folk don't care for honey now sugar be so cheap.'

'Let us go and see them,' said Cicely. We went out and looked at the hives; they were all in a row, each protected by large 'pan-sherds'

from heavy rain, and placed along beneath the wall of the garden, which sheltered them on one side. Uncle Bennet chatted pleasantly about his bees for an hour, and would, I believe, have gossiped all day, notwithstanding that he had so little time for anything. Nothing more was said about the delayed visit, but just as we were on the point of departure, and Cicely had already taken the reins, he said to her, as if it were an afterthought, 'Tell your mother, I s'pose I must look down that way next week.'

We pa.s.sed swiftly through the little hamlet; the children had gathered by a gateway to watch us. Though so far from the world, they were not altogether without a spice of the impudence of the city arab. A tall and portly gentleman from town once chanced to visit this 'coombe-bottom'

on business, and strolled down the 'street' in all the glory of shining boots, large gold watch-chain, black coat and high hat, all the pomp of Regent-street; doubtless imagining that his grandeur astonished the rustics. A brown young rascal, however, looking him up--he was a tall man--with an air of intelligent criticism, audibly remarked, 'Hum! He be very well up to his ankles--and then a' falls off!'

That evening was one of the most beautiful I remember. We all sat in the garden at Lucketts' Place till ten o'clock; it was still light and it seemed impossible to go indoors. There was a seat under a sycamore tree with honeysuckle climbing over the bars of the back; the spot was near the orchard, but on slightly higher ground. From our feet the meadow sloped down to the distant brook, the murmur of whose stream as it fell over a bay could be just heard. Northwards the stars were pale, the sun seems so little below the horizon there that the glow of the sunset and the glow of the dawn nearly meet. But southwards shone the dull red star of summer--Antares, seen while the wheat ripens and the ruddy and golden tints come upon the fruits. Then nightly describing a low curve he looks down upon the white shimmering corn, and carries the mind away to the burning sands and palms of the far south. In the light and colour and brilliance of an English summer we sometimes seem very near those tropical lands.

So still was it that we heard an apple fall in the orchard, thud on the sward, blighted perhaps and ripe before its time. Under the trees as the months went on there would rise heaps of the windfalls collected there to wait for the cider-mill. The mill was the property of two or three of the village folk, a small band of adventurers now grown old, who every autumn went round from farm to farm grinding the produce of the various orchards. They sometimes poured a quant.i.ty of the acid juice into the mill to sharpen it, as cutting a lemon will sharpen a knife. The great press, with its unwieldy screw and levers, squeezed the liquor from the cut-up apples in the horse-hair bags: a c.u.mbersome apparatus, but not without interest; for surely so rude an engine must date back far in the past. The old fellows who brought it and put it up with slow deliberative motions were far, far past the joy with which all the children about the farm hailed its arrival.

With grave faces and indifferent manner they ground the apples, and departed as slowly and deliberately as they came; verily men of the autumn, harbingers of the fall of the year.

As I dreamed with the honeysuckle over my shoulder, and Antares southwards, Hilary talked at intervals about his wheat as usual and the weather, but I only caught fragments of it. All the signs were propitious, and as it had been a fine harvest under similar conditions before, people said it would be fine this time. But, unlike the law, the weather acknowledged no precedent, and n.o.body could tell, though folk now thought they knew everything. How all things had changed since the Queen ascended the throne! Not long since Hilary was talking with a labourer, an elderly man, who went to the feast in Overboro'

town on the day of the coronation. The feast was held in the market-place, and the puddings, said the old fellow regretfully, were so big they were brought in on hand-barrows.

It was difficult since he himself remembered even to learn the state of the markets. So few newspapers came into country places that before service on Sundays the farmers gathered round anybody in the churchyard who was known to take in a paper, to get particulars from this fortunate individual. Letters rarely came to the farmhouse door then. The old postman made a very good thing of his office--people were so eager for news, and it was easy to take a magpie glance at a newspaper. So he called at the butcher's before he started out, and in exchange for a peep at the paper got a little bit of griskin, or a chop, and at the farmhouses as he pa.s.sed they gave him a few eggs, and at the inns a drop of gin. Thus a dozen at least read sc.r.a.ps before it reached the rightful owner.

If anything very extraordinary had happened he would shout it out as he went through the hamlet. Hilary said he well remembered being up on the roof of the house one morning, mending the thatch, when suddenly a voice--it was the postman's--cried from the road, 'Royal Exchange burned down!' In this way news got about before the present facilities were afforded. But some of the old folk still regretted the change and believed that we should some day be punished for our worship of steam.

Steam had brought us to rely on foreign countries for our corn, and a day would come when through a war, or a failure of the crops there, the vast population of this country would be in danger of famine. But 'old folk' are p.r.o.ne to prophesy disaster and failure of all kinds.

Mrs. Luckett chimed in here, and said that modern ways were not all improvements, the girls now were so fond of gadding about. This was a hint for Cicely, who loved a change, and yet was deeply attached to the old home. She rose at this, doubtless pouting, but it was too dusky to see, and went indoors, and presently from the open window came the notes of her piano. As she played I dreamed again, till presently Mrs. Luckett began to argue with Hilary that the shrubs about the garden ought to be cut and trimmed. Hilary said he liked to see the shrubs and the trees growing freely; he objected to cut and trim them. 'For,' said he, 'G.o.d made nothing tidy.' Just then Cicely called us to supper.

NOTES.

The following interesting correspondence has been received.

MAGPIE OMENS. _Page 153._--In reference to the superst.i.tion that one magpie is good luck, but two sorrow, 'R. F.' writes from Wiesbaden:--'In the north of England the contrary belief holds good, witness the following saw which I heard many years ago in the county of Durham:--

"One for sorrow, two for mirth; Three a marriage, four a birth; Five for heaven, six for h.e.l.l, Seven--the devil's own sel!"

As to seventeen, which number I once saw together, Mrs. Luckett's exclamation "Goodness! something awful might happen" might have been appropriate; only nothing dreadful did occur.'

CART-HORSE ORNAMENTS. _Page 159._--As to the history of the crescent-shaped ornaments on carthorses, 'J. D.' writes from Dover: 'Anyone who has lived in Spanish countries must be struck on going to East Kent by the gay trappings of the farmers' horses on gala days, in which the national colours of Spain, scarlet and orange yellow, and the "glittering brazen" ornament of the crescent and the cross, so generally prevail. Their history must date from the introduction of the Flemish breed of horses to this country, showing that as the Moors carried the crescent to Spain, so the Spaniards took it to Flanders, and the Flemings here, whence it has been adopted pretty generally by the farmers of England.'

NAMES OF FIELDS. _Page 176._--'The Conigers is evidently the same as Coningar, a word sometimes occurring in Scottish local nomenclature, and which meant a rabbit-warren--Coniger, Coney-garth. I know two Coningars in Aberdeenshire, but the meaning of the word is as much forgotten there also.--H. W. L.'