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Our Village

by Mary Russell Mitford

February, 2001 [Etext #2496]

The Project Gutenberg Etext of Our Village by Mary Russell Mitford

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OUR VILLAGE BY MARY RUSSELL MITFORD

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
COUNTRY PICTURES
WALKS IN THE COUNTRY
THE FIRST PRIMROSE
VIOLETING
THE COPSE
THE WOOD
THE DELL
THE COWSLIP-BALL
THE OLD HOUSE AT ABERLEIGH
THE HARD SUMMER
THE SHAW
NUTTING
THE VISIT
HANNAH BINT
THE FALL OF THE LEAF

Introduction by Anne Thackeray Ritchie

I.

There is a great deal of admirable literature concerning Miss

Mitford, so much of it indeed, that the writer of this little notice
feels as if she almost owed an apology to those who remember, for
having ventured to write, on hearsay only, and without having ever
known or ever seen the author of 'Our Village.' And yet, so vivid
is the homely friendly presence, so clear the sound of that voice
'like a chime of bells,' with its hospitable cheery greeting, that
she can scarcely realise that this acquaintance exists only in the
world of the might-have-beens.

For people who are beginning to remember, rather than looking

forward any more, there certainly exists no more delightful reading
than the memoirs and stories of heroes and heroines, many of whom we
ourselves may have seen, and to whom we may have spoken. As we read
on we are led into some happy bygone region,--such as that one
described by Mr. du Maurier in 'Peter Ibbetson,'--a region in which
we ourselves, together with all our friends and acquaintances, grow
young again;--very young, very brisk, very hopeful. The people we
love are there, along with the people we remember. Music begins to
play, we are dancing, laughing, scampering over the country once
more; our parents too are young and laughing cheerily. Every now
and then perhaps some old friend, also vigorous and hopeful, bursts
into the book, and begins to talk or to write a letter; early sights
and sounds return to us, we have NOW, and we have THEN, in a
pleasant harmony. To those of a certain literary generation who
read Miss Mitford's memoirs, how many such familiar presences and
names must appear and reappear. Not least among them that of her
biographer, Mr. Harness himself, who was so valued by his friends.
Mrs. Kemble, Mrs. Sartoris, Charles Allston Collins, always talked
of him with a great respect and tenderness. I used to think they
had a special voice with which to speak his name. He was never
among our intimate friends, but how familiar to my recollection are
the two figures, that of Mr. Harness and Miss Harness, his sister
and housekeeper, coming together along the busy Kensington roadway.
The brother and sister were like characters out of some book, with
their kind faces, their simple spiritual ways; in touch with so much
that was interesting and romantic, and in heart with so much that
suffered. I remember him with grey hair and a smile. He was not
tall; he walked rather lame; Miss Harness too was little, looking up
at all the rest of the world with a kind round face and sparkling
eyes fringed with thick lashes. Mary Mitford was indeed happy in
her friends, as happy as she was unfortunate in her nearer
relations.

With much that is sad, there is a great deal of beauty and enjoyment
in Miss Mitford's life. For her the absence of material happiness
was made up for by the presence of warm-hearted sensibility, of
enthusiasm, by her devotion to her parents. Her long endurance and
filial piety are very remarkable, her loving heart carried her
safely to the end, and she found comfort in her unreasoning life's
devotion. She had none of the restlessness which is so apt to spoil
much that might be harmonious; all the charm of a certain unity and
simplicity of motive is hers, 'the single eye,' of which Charles
Kingsley wrote so sweetly. She loved her home, her trees, her
surrounding lanes and commons. She loved her friends. Her books
and flowers are real and important events in her life, soothing and
distracting her from the contemplation of its constant anxieties.
'I may truly say,' she once writes to Miss Barrett, 'that ever since
I was a very young girl, I have never (although for some years
living apparently in affluence) been without pecuniary care,--the
care that pressed upon my thoughts the last thing at night, and woke
in the morning with a dreary sense of pain and pressure, of
something which weighed me to the earth.'

Mary Russell Mitford was born on the 16th of December 1787. She was
the only child of her parents, who were well connected; her mother
was an heiress. Her father belonged to the Mitfords of the North.
She describes herself as 'a puny child, with an affluence of curls
which made her look as if she were twin sister to her own great
doll.' She could read at three years old; she learnt the Percy
ballads by heart almost before she could read. Long after, she used
to describe how she first studied her beloved ballads in the
breakfast-room lined with books, warmly spread with its Turkey
carpet, with its bright fire, easy chairs, and the windows opening
to a garden full of flowers,--stocks, honeysuckles, and pinks. It
is touching to note how, all through her difficult life, her path
was (literally) lined with flowers, and how the love of them
comforted and cheered her from the first to the very last. In her
saddest hours, the passing fragrance and beauty of her favourite
geraniums cheered and revived her. Even when her mother died she
found comfort in the plants they had tended together, and at the
very last breaks into delighted descriptions of them.

She was sent to school in the year 1798 to No. 22 Hans Place, to a
Mrs. St. Quintin's. It seems to have been an excellent
establishment. Mary learnt the harp and astronomy; her taste for
literature was encouraged. The young ladies, attired as
shepherdesses, were also taught to skip through many mazy movements,
but she never distinguished herself as a shepherdess. She had
greater success in her literary efforts, and her composition 'on
balloons' was much applauded. She returned to her home in 18O2.
'Plain in figure and in face, she was never common-looking,' says
Mr. Harness. He gives a pretty description of her as 'no ordinary
child, her sweet smiles, her animated conversation, her keen
enjoyment of life, and her gentle voice won the love and admiration
of her friends, whether young or old.' Mr. Harness has chiefly told
Miss Mitford's story in her own words by quotations from her
letters, and, as one reads, one can almost follow her moods as they
succeed each other, and these moods are her real history. The
assiduity of childhood, the bright enthusiasm and gaiety of her
early days, the growing anxiety of her later life, the maturer
judgments, the occasional despairing terrors which came to try her
bright nature, but along with it all, that innocent and enduring
hopefulness which never really deserted her. Her elastic spirit she
owed to her father, that incorrigible old Skimpole. 'I am generally
happy everywhere,' she writes in her youth--and then later on: 'It
is a great pleasure to me to love and to admire, this is a faculty
which has survived many frosts and storms.' It is true that she
adds a query somewhere else, 'Did you ever remark how superior old
gaiety is to new?' she asks.

Her handsome father, her plain and long-enduring mother, are both
unconsciously described in her correspondence. 'The Doctor's
manners were easy, natural, cordial, and apparently extremely
frank,' says Mr. Harness, 'but he nevertheless met the world on its
own terms, and was prepared to allow himself any insincerity which
seemed expedient. He was not only recklessly extravagant, but
addicted to high play. His wife's large fortune, his daughter's,
his own patrimony, all passed through his hands in an incredibly
short space of time, but his wife and daughter were never heard to
complain of his conduct, nor appeared to admire him less.'

The story of Miss Mitford's 2O,OOO pounds is unique among the

adventures of authoresses. Dr. Mitford, having spent all his wife's
fortune, and having brought his family from a comfortable home, with
flowers and a Turkey carpet, to a small lodging near Blackfriars
Bridge, determined to present his daughter with an expensive lottery
ticket on the occasion of her tenth birthday. She had a fancy for
No. 2224, of which the added numbers came to 10. This number
actually came out the first prize of 2O,OOO pounds, which money
started the family once more in comparative affluence. Dr. Mitford
immediately built a new square house, which he calls Bertram House,
on the site of a pretty old farmhouse which he causes to be pulled
down. He also orders a dessert-service painted with the Mitford
arms; Mrs. Mitford is supplied with a carriage, and she subscribes
to a circulating library.

A list still exists of the books taken out by her for her daughter's
use; some fifty-five volumes a month, chiefly trash: 'Vicenza,' 'A
Sailor's Friendship and Soldier's Love,' 'Clarentina,' 'Robert and
Adela,' 'The Count de Valmont,' 'The Three Spaniards,' 'De Clifford'
(in four volumes) and so on.

The next two or three years were brilliant enough; for the family
must have lived at the rate of three or four thousand a year. Their
hospitality was profuse, they had servants, carriages, they bought
pictures and furniture, they entertained. Cobbett was among their
intimate friends. The Doctor naturally enough invested in a good
many more lottery tickets, but without any further return.

The ladies seem to take it as a matter of course that he should

speculate and gamble at cards, and indeed do anything and everything
he fancied, but they beg him at least to keep to respectable clubs.
He is constantly away. His daughter tries to tempt him home with
the bloom of her hyacinths. 'How they long to see him again!' she
says, 'how greatly have they been disappointed, when, every day, the
journey to Reading has been fruitless. The driver of the Reading
coach is quite accustomed to being waylaid by their carriage.' Then
she tells him about the primroses, but neither hyacinths nor
primroses bring the Doctor away from his cards. Finally, the
rhododendrons and the azaleas are in bloom, but these also fail to
attract him.

Miss Mitford herself as she grows up is sent to London more than

once, to the St. Quintin's and elsewhere. She goes to the play and
to Westminster Hall, she sees her hero, Charles James Fox, and has
the happiness of watching him helped on to his horse. Mr. Romilly
delights her, but her greatest favourite of all is Mr. Whitbread.
'You know I am always an enthusiast,' she writes, 'but at present it
is impossible to describe the admiration I feel for this exalted
character.' She speaks of his voice 'which she could listen to with
transport even if he spoke in an unknown language!' she writes a
sonnet to him, 'an impromptu, on hearing Mr. Whitbread declare in
Westminster Hall that he fondly trusted his name would descend to
posterity.'

'The hope of Fame thy noble bosom fires,

Nor vain the hope thy ardent mind inspires;
In British breasts whilst Purity remains,
Whilst Liberty her blessed abode retains,
Still shall the muse of History proclaim
To future ages thy immortal name!'

There are many references to the celebrities of the time in her

letters home,--every one agrees as to the extreme folly of
Sheridan's entertainments, Mrs. Opie is spoken of as a rising
authoress, etc. etc. etc.

Miss Austen used to go to 23 Hans Place, and Miss Mitford used to

stay at No. 22, but not at the same time. Mrs. Mitford had known
Miss Austen as a child. She may perhaps be forgiven for some
prejudice and maternal jealousy, in her later impressions, but Mary
Mitford admired Jane Austen always with warmest enthusiasm. She
writes to her mother at length from London, describing everything,
all the people and books and experiences that she comes across,--the
elegant suppers at Brompton, the Grecian lamps, Mr. Barker's beauty,
Mr. Plummer's plainness, and the destruction of her purple gown.

Mrs. Mitford writes back in return describing Reading festivities,

'an agreeable dinner at Doctor Valpy's, where Mrs. Women and Miss
Peacock are present and Mr. J. Simpson, M.P.; the dinner very good,
two full courses and one remove, the soup giving place to one
quarter of lamb.' Mrs. Mitford sends a menu of every dinner she
goes to.

In 1806 Dr. Mitford takes his daughter, who was then about nineteen,
to the North to visit his relations; they are entertained by the
grandparents of the Trevelyans and the Swinburnes, the Ogles and the
Mitfords of the present day. They fish in Sir John Swinburne's
lake, they visit at Alnwick Castle. Miss Mitford kept her front
hair in papers till she reached Alnwick, nor was her dress
discomposed though she had travelled thirty miles. They sat down,
sixty-five to dinner, which was 'of course' (she somewhat
magnificently says) entirely served on plate. Poor Mary's pleasure
is very much dashed by the sudden disappearance of her father,--Dr.
Mitford was in the habit of doing anything he felt inclined to do at
once and on the spot, quite irrespectively of the convenience of
others,--and although a party had been arranged on purpose to meet
him in the North, and his daughter was counting on his escort to
return home, (people posted in those days, they did not take their
tickets direct from Newcastle to London), Dr. Mitford one morning
leaves word that he has gone off to attend the Reading election,
where his presence was not in the least required. For the first and
apparently for the only time in her life his daughter protests.
'Mr. Ogle is extremely offended; nothing but your immediate return
can ever excuse you to him! I IMPLORE you to return, I call upon
Mamma's sense of propriety to send you here directly. Little did I
suspect that my father, my beloved father, would desert me at this
distance from home! Every one is surprised.' Dr. Mitford was
finally persuaded to travel back to Northumberland to fetch his
daughter.

The constant companionship of Dr. Mitford must have given a curious

colour to his good and upright daughter's views of life. Adoring
her father as she did, she must have soon accustomed herself to take
his fine speeches for fine actions, to accept his self-complacency
in the place of a conscience. She was a woman of warm impressions,
with a strong sense of right. But it was not within her daily
experience, poor soul, that people who did not make grand
professions were ready to do their duty all the same; nor did she
always depend upon the uprightness, the courage, the self-denial of
those who made no protestations. At that time loud talking was
still the fashion, and loud living was considered romantic. They
both exist among us, but they are less admired, and there is a
different language spoken now to that of Dr. Mitford and his
school.* This must account for some of Miss Mitford's judgments of
what she calls a 'cynical' generation, to which she did little
justice.

*People nowadays are more ready to laugh than to admire when they
hear the lions bray; for mewing and bleating, the taste, I fear, is
on the increase.

II.

There is one penalty people pay for being authors, which is that
from cultivating vivid impressions and mental pictures they are apt
to take fancies too seriously and to mistake them for reality. In
story-telling this is well enough, and it interferes with nobody;
but in real history, and in one's own history most of all, this
faculty is apt to raise up bogies and nightmares along one's path;
and while one is fighting imaginary demons, the good things and true
are passed by unnoticed, the best realities of life are sometimes
overlooked. . . .

But after all, Mary Russell Mitford, who spent most of her time
gathering figs off thistles and making the best of her difficult
circumstances, suffered less than many people do from the influence
of imaginary things.

She was twenty-three years old when her first book of poems was
published; so we read in her letters, in which she entreats her
father not to curtail ANY of the verses addressed to him; there is
no reason, she says, except his EXTREME MODESTY why the verses
should be suppressed,--she speaks not only with the fondness of a
daughter but with the sensibility of a poet. Our young authoress is
modest, although in print; she compares herself to Crabbe (as Jane
Austen might have done), and feels 'what she supposes a farthing
candle would experience when the sun rises in all its glory.' Then
comes the Publisher's bill for 59 pounds; she is quite shocked at
the bill, which is really exorbitant! In her next letter Miss
Mitford reminds her father that the taxes are still unpaid, and a
correspondence follows with somebody asking for a choice of the
Doctor's pictures in payment for the taxes. The Doctor is in London
all the time, dining out and generally amusing himself. Everybody
is speculating whether Sir Francis Burdett will go to the Tower.*
'Oh, my darling, how I envy you at the fountain-head of intelligence
in these interesting times! How I envy Lady Burdett for the fine
opportunity she has to show the heroism of our sex!' writes the
daughter, who is only encountering angry tax-gatherers at home. . .
. Somehow or other the bills are paid for the time, and the family
arrangements go on as before.

*Here, in our little suburban garden at Wimbledon, are the remains

of an old hedgerow which used to grow in the kitchen garden of the
Grange where Sir Francis Burdett then lived. The tradition is that
he was walking in the lane in his own kitchen garden when he was
taken up and carried off to honourable captivity.--A.T.R.

Besides writing to the members of her own home, Miss Mitford started
another correspondent very early in life; this was Sir William
Elford, to whom she describes her outings and adventures, her visits
to Tavistock House, where her kind friends the Perrys receive her.
Mr. Perry was the editor of the Morning Chronicle; he and his
beautiful wife were the friends of all the most interesting people
of the day. Here again the present writer's own experiences can
interpret the printed page, for her own first sight of London people
and of London society came to her in a little house in Chesham
Place, where her father's old friends, Mrs. Frederick Elliot and
Miss Perry, the daughters of Miss Mitford's friends, lived with a
very notable and interesting set of people, making a social centre,
by that kindly unconscious art which cannot be defined; that quick
apprehension, that benevolent fastidiousness (I have to use rather
far-fetched words) which are so essential to good hosts and
hostesses. A different standard is looked for now, by the rising
generations knocking at the doors, behind which the dignified past
is lying as stark as King Duncan himself!

Among other entertainments Miss Mitford went to the fetes which

celebrated the battle of Vittoria; she had also the happiness of
getting a good sight of Mme. de Stael, who was a great friend of the
Perrys. 'She is almost as much followed in the gardens as the
Princess,' she says, pouring out her wonders, her pleasures, her
raptures. She begins to read Burns with youthful delight, dilates
upon his exhaustless imagination, his versatility, and then she
suggests a very just criticism. 'Does it not appear' she says,
'that versatility is the true and rare characteristic of that rare
thing called genius--versatility and playfulness;' then she goes on
to speak of two highly-reputed novels just come out and ascribed to
Lady Morley, 'Pride and Prejudice' and 'Sense and Sensibility.'

She is still writing from Bertram House, but her pleasant gossip
continually alternates with more urgent and less agreeable letters
addressed to her father. Lawyers' clerks are again calling with
notices and warnings, tax-gatherers are troubling. Dr. Mitford has,
as usual, left no address, so that she can only write to the 'Star
Office,' and trust to chance. 'Mamma joins in tenderest love,' so
the letters invariably conclude.

Notwithstanding the adoration bestowed by the ladies of the family

and their endearing adjectives, Mr. Harness is very outspoken on the
subject of the handsome Doctor! He disliked his manners, his
morals, his self-sufficiency, his loud talk. 'The old brute never
informed his friends of anything; all they knew of him or his
affairs, or whatever false or true he intended them to believe, came
out carelessly in his loose, disjointed talk.'

In 1814 Miss Mitford is living on still with her parents at Bertram

House, but a change has come over their home; the servants are gone,
the gravel turned to moss, the turf into pasture, the shrubberies to
thickets, the house a sort of new 'ruin half inhabited, and a
Chancery suit is hanging over their heads.' Meantime some news
comes to cheer her from America. Two editions of her poems have
been printed and sold. 'Narrative Poems on the Female Character'
proved a real success. 'All who have hearts to feel and
understandings to discriminate, must wish you health and leisure to
complete your plan,' so write publishers in those golden days, with
complimentary copies of the work. . . .

Great things are happening all this time; battles are being fought
and won, Napoleon is on his way to St. Helena; London is in a frenzy
of rejoicings, entertainings, illuminations. To Mary Mitford the
appearance of 'Waverley' seems as great an event as the return of
the Bourbons; she is certain that 'Waverley' is written by Sir
Walter Scott, but 'Guy Mannering,' she thinks, is by another hand:
her mind is full of a genuine romantic devotion to books and belles
lettres, and she is also rejoicing, even more, in the spring-time of
1816. Dr. Mitford may be impecunious and their affairs may be
threadbare, but the lovely seasons come out ever in fresh beauty and
abundance. The coppices are carpeted with primroses, with pansies
and wild strawberry blossom,--the woods are spangled with the
delicate flowers of the woodsorrel and wood anemone, the meadows
enamelled with cowslips. . . . Certainly few human beings were ever
created more fit for this present world, and more capable of
admiring and enjoying its beauties, than Miss Mitford, who only
desired to be beautiful herself, she somewhere says, to be perfectly
contented.

III.

Most people's lives are divided into first, second and third
volumes; and as we read Miss Mitford's history it forms no exception
to the rule. The early enthusiastic volume is there, with its hopes
and wild judgments, its quaint old-fashioned dress and phraseology;
then comes the second volume, full of actual work and serious
responsibility, with those childish parents to provide for, whose
lives, though so protracted, never seem to reach beyond their
nurseries. Miss Mitford's third volume is retrospective; her
growing infirmities are courageously endured, there is the certainty
of success well earned and well deserved; we realise her legitimate
hold upon the outer world of readers and writers, besides the
reputation which she won upon the stage by her tragedies.

The literary ladies of the early part of the century in some ways
had a very good time of it. A copy of verses, a small volume of
travels, a few tea-parties, a harp in one corner of the room, and a
hat and feathers worn rather on one side, seemed to be all that was
wanted to establish a claim to fashion and inspiration. They had
footstools to rest their satin shoes upon, they had admirers and
panegyrists to their heart's content, and above all they possessed
that peculiar complacency in which (with a few notable exceptions)
our age is singularly deficient. We are earnest, we are audacious,
we are original, but we are not complacent. THEY were dolls
perhaps, and lived in dolls' houses; WE are ghosts without houses at
all; we come and go wrapped in sheets of newspaper, holding
flickering lights in our hands, paraffin lamps, by the light of
which we are seeking our proper sphere. Poor vexed spirits! We do
not belong to the old world any more! The new world is not yet
ready for us. Even Mr. Gladstone will not let us into the House of
Commons; the Geographical Society rejects us, so does the Royal
Academy; and yet who could say that any of their standards rise too
high! Some one or two are happily safe, carried by the angels of
the Press to little altars and pinnacles all their own; but the
majority of hard-working, intelligent women, 'contented with little,
yet ready for more,' may they not in moments of depression be
allowed to picture to themselves what their chances might have been
had they only been born half a century earlier?

Miss Mitford, notwithstanding all her troubles (she has been known
to say she had rather be a washerwoman than a literary lady), had
opportunities such as few women can now obtain. One is lost in
admiration at the solidity of one's grandparents' taste, when one
attempts to read the tragedies they delighted in, and yet 'Rienzi'
sold four thousand copies and was acted forty-five times; and at one
time Miss Mitford had two tragedies rehearsed upon the boards
together; one at Covent Garden and one at Drury Lane, with Charles
Kemble and Macready disputing for her work. Has not one also read
similar descriptions of the triumphs of Hannah More, or of Johanna
Baillie; cheered by enthusiastic audiences, while men shed tears.*

*Mem. Hannah More, v.i. p.124.

'Julian' was the first of Miss Mitford's acted plays. It was

brought out at Covent Garden in 1823, when she was thirty-six years
old; Macready played the principal part. 'If the play do reach the
ninth night,' Miss Mitford writes to Macready, 'it will be a very
complete refutation of Mr. Kemble's axiom that no single performer
can fill the theatre; for except our pretty Alfonso (Miss Foote)
there is only Julian, one and only one. Let him imagine how deeply
we feel his exertions and his kindness.*. . .'

*In Macready's diary we find an entry which is not over gracious.

'"Julian" acted March the 15th. Had but moderate success. The C.
G. company was no longer equal to the support of plays containing
moral characters. The authoress in her dedication to me was profuse
in her acknowledgments and compliments, but the performance made
little impression, and was soon forgotten.'

'Julian' was stopped on the eighth night, to her great

disappointment, but she is already engaged on another--on several
more---tragedies; she wants the money badly; for the editor of her
magazine has absconded, owing her 50 pounds. Some trying and
bewildering quarrel then ensues between Charles Kemble and Macready,
which puts off her tragedies, and sadly affects poor Miss Mitford's
nerves and profits. She has one solace. Her father, partly
instigated, she says, by the effect which the terrible feeling of
responsibility and want of power has had upon her health and
spirits, at last resolves to try if he can HIMSELF obtain any
employment that may lighten the burthen of the home. It is a good
thing that Dr. Mitford has braced himself to this heroic
determination. 'The addition of two or even one hundred a year to
our little income, joined to what I am, in a manner, sure of gaining
by mere industry, would take a load from my heart of which I can
scarcely give you an idea. . . even "Julian" was written under a
pressure of anxiety which left me not a moment's rest. . . .' So
she fondly dwells upon the delightful prospects. Then comes the
next letter to Sir William Elford, and we read that her dear father,
'relying with a blessed sanguineness on my poor endeavours, has not,
I believe, even inquired for a situation, and I do not press the
matter, though I anxiously wish it; being willing to give one more
trial to the theatre.'

On one of the many occasions when Miss Mitford writes to her trustee
imploring him to sell out the small remaining fragment of her
fortune, she says, 'My dear father has, years ago, been improvident,
is still irritable and difficult to live with, but he is a person of
a thousand virtues. . . there are very few half so good in this
mixed world; it is my fault that this money is needed, entirely my
fault, and if it be withheld, my dear father will be overthrown,
mind and body, and I shall never know another happy hour.'

No wonder Mr. Harness, who was behind the scenes, remonstrated

against the filial infatuation which sacrificed health, sleep, peace
of mind, to gratify every passing whim of the Doctor's. At a time
when she was sitting up at night and slaving, hour after hour, to
earn the necessary means of living, Dr. Mitford must needs have a
cow, a stable, and dairy implements procured for his amusement, and
when he died he left 1,000 pounds of debts for the scrupulous woman
to pay off. She is determined to pay, if she sells her clothes to
do so. Meanwhile, the Doctor is still alive, and Miss Mitford is
straining every nerve to keep him so. She is engaged (in strict
confidence) on a grand historical subject, Charles and Cromwell, the
finest episode in English history, she says. Here, too, fresh
obstacles arise. This time it is the theatrical censor who
interferes. It would be dangerous for the country to touch upon
such topics; Mr. George Colman dwells upon this theme, although he
gives the lady full credit for no evil intentions; but for the
present all her work is again thrown away. While Miss Mitford is
struggling on as best she can against this confusion of worries and
difficulty (she eventually received 2OO pounds for 'Julian' from a
Surrey theatre), a new firm 'Whittaker' undertakes to republish the
'village sketches' which had been written for the absconding editor.
The book is to be published under the title of 'Our Village.'

IV.

'Are your characters and descriptions true?' somebody once asked our
authoress. 'Yes, yes, yes, as true, as true as is well possible,'
she answers. 'You, as a great landscape painter, know that in
painting a favourite scene you do a little embellish and can't help
it; you avail yourself of happy accidents of atmosphere; if anything
be ugly you strike it out, or if anything be wanting, you put it in.
But still the picture is a likeness.'

So wrote Miss Mitford, but with all due respect for her and for Sir
William Elford, the great landscape painter, I cannot help thinking
that what is admirable in her book, are not her actual descriptions
and pictures of intelligent villagers and greyhounds, but the more
imaginative things; the sense of space and nature and progress which
she knows how to convey; the sweet and emotional chord she strikes
with so true a touch. Take at hazard her description of the sunset.
How simple and yet how finely felt it is. Her genuine delight
reaches us and carries us along; it is not any embellishing of
effects, or exaggeration of facts, but the reality of a true and
very present feeling. . . 'The narrow line of clouds which a few
minutes ago lay like long vapouring streaks along the horizon, now
lighted with a golden splendour, that the eye can scarcely endure;
those still softer clouds which floated above, wreathing and curling
into a thousand fantastic forms as thin and changeful as summer
smoke, defined and deepened into grandeur, and hedged with
ineffable, insufferable light. Another minute and the brilliant orb
totally disappears and the sky above grows, every moment, more
varied and more beautiful, as the dazzling golden lines are mixed
with glowing red and gorgeous purple, dappled with small dark
specks, and mingled with such a blue as the egg of the hedge-
sparrow. . . . To look up at that glorious sky, and then to see
that magnificent picture reflected in the clear and lovely Loddon
water, is a pleasure never to be described, and never to be
forgotten. My heart swells, and my eyes fill as I write of it, and
think of the immeasurable majesty of nature and the unspeakable
goodness of God, who has spread an enjoyment so pure, so peaceful,
and so intense before the meanest and lowliest of His creatures.'

But it is needless now to go on praising 'Our Village,' or to

recount what a success was in store for the little book. Certain
books hold their own by individual right and might; they are part of
everybody's life as a matter of course. They are not always read,
but they tacitly take their place among us. The editions succeeded
editions here and in America; artists came down to illustrate the
scenes. Miss Mitford, who was so delighted with the drawings by Mr.
Baxter, should have lived to see the charming glimpses of rural life
we owe to Mr. Thomson. 'I don't mind 'em,' says Lizzy to the cows,
as they stand with spirited bovine grace behind the stable door.
'Don't mind them indeed!'

I think the author would assuredly have enjoyed the picture of the
baker, the wheelwright and the shoemaker, each following his special
Alderney along the road to the village, or of the farmer driving his
old wife in the gig. . . . One design, that of the lady in her
pattens, comes home to the writer of these notes, who has perhaps
the distinction of being the only authoress now alive who has ever
walked out in pattens. At the age of seven years she was provided
with a pair by a great-great-aunt, a kind old lady living at
Fareham, in Hampshire, where they were still in use. How
interesting the little circles looked stamped upon the muddy road,
and how nearly down upon one's nose one was at every other step!

But even with all her success, Miss Mitford was not out of her
troubles. She writes to Mr. Harness saying: 'You cannot imagine
how perplexed I am. There are points in my domestic situation too
long and too painful to write about; the terrible improvidence of
one dear parent, the failure of memory and decay of faculty in that
other who is still dearer, cast on me a weight of care and fear that
I can hardly bear up against.' Her difficulties were unending. The
new publisher now stopped payment, so that even 'Our Village'
brought in no return for the moment; Charles Kemble was unable to
make any offer for 'Foscari.' She went up to town in the greatest
hurry to try and collect some of the money owing to her from her
various publishers, but, as Mr. Harness says, received little from
her debtors beyond invitations and compliments. She meditates a
novel, she plans an opera, 'Cupid and Psyche.'

At last, better times began to dawn, and she receives 150 pounds
down for a new novel and ten guineas from Blackwood as a retaining
fee. Then comes a letter from Charles Kemble giving her new hope,
for her tragedy, which was soon afterwards produced at Covent
Garden.

The tragedies are in tragic English, of course that language of the

boards, but not without a simplicity and music of their own. In the
introduction to them, in some volumes published by Hurst and Blacket
in 1854, Miss Mitford describes 'the scene of indescribable chaos
preceding the performance, the vague sense of obscurity and
confusion; tragedians, hatted and coated, skipping about, chatting
and joking; the only very grave person being Liston himself.
Ballet-girls walking through their quadrilles to the sound of a
solitary fiddle, striking up as if of its own accord, from amid the
tall stools and music-desks of the orchestra, and piercing, one
hardly knew how, through the din that was going on incessantly. Oh,
that din! Voices from every part; above, below, around, and in
every key. Heavy weights rolling here and falling there. Bells
ringing, one could not tell why, and the ubiquitous call-boy
everywhere.'

She describes her astonishment when the play succeeds. 'Not that I
had nerve enough to attend the first representation of my tragedies.
I sat still and trembling in some quiet apartment near, and thither
some friend flew to set my heart at ease. Generally the messenger
of good tidings was poor Haydon, whose quick and ardent spirit lent
him wings on such an occasion.'

We have the letter to her mother about 'Foscari,' from which I have
quoted; and on the occasion of the production of 'Rienzi' at Drury
Lane (two years later in October 1828), the letter to Sir William
Elford when the poor old mother was no longer here to rejoice in her
daughter's success.
Miss Mitford gratefully records the sympathy of her friends, the
warm-hearted muses of the day. Mrs. Trollope, Miss Landon, Miss
Edgeworth, Miss Porden, Mrs. Hofland, Mrs. Opie, who all appear with
their congratulations.

Miss Mitford says that Haydon, above all, sympathised with her love
for a large canvas. The Classics, Spain, Italy, Mediaeval Rome,
these are her favourite scenes and periods. Dukes and tribunes were
her heroes; daggers, dungeons, and executioners her means of
effects.

She moralises very sensibly upon Dramatic success. 'It is not,' she
says, 'so delicious, so glorious, so complete a gratification as, in
our secret longings, we all expect. It does not fill the heart,--it
is an intoxication followed by a dismal reaction.' She tells a
friend that never in all her life was she so depressed and out of
spirits as after 'Rienzi,' her first really successful venture. But
there is also a passing allusion to her father's state of mind, to
his mingled irritation and sulkiness, which partly explains things.
Could it be that the Doctor added petty jealousy and envy to his
other inconvenient qualities? His intolerance for any author or
actor, in short, for any one not belonging to a county family, his
violent annoyance at any acquaintances such as those which she now
necessarily made, would naturally account for some want of spirits
on the daughter's part; overwrought, over-taxed, for ever on the
strain, her work was exhausting indeed. The small pension she
afterwards obtained from the Civil List must have been an
unspeakable boon to the poor harassed woman.

Tragedy seems to have resulted in a substantial pony and a basket

carriage for Miss Mitford, and in various invitations (from the
Talfourds, among the rest) during which she is lionised right and
left. It must have been on this occasion that Serjeant Talfourd
complained so bitterly of a review of 'Ion' which appeared about
that time. His guest, to soothe him, unwarily said, 'she should not
have minded such a review of HER Tragedy.'

'YOUR "Rienzi," indeed! I should think not,' says the serjeant.

'"Ion" is very different.' The Talfourd household, as it is
described by Mr. Lestrange, is a droll mixture of poetry and prose,
of hospitality, of untidiness, of petulance, of most genuine
kindness and most genuine human nature.

There are also many mentions of Miss Mitford in the 'Life of

Macready' by Sir F. Pollock. The great tragedian seems not to have
liked her with any cordiality; but he gives a pleasant account of a
certain supper-party in honour of 'Ion' at which she is present, and
during which she asks Macready if he will not now bring out her
tragedy. The tragedian does not answer, but Wordsworth, sitting by,
says, 'Ay, keep him to it.'

V.

Besides the 'Life of Miss Mitford' by Messrs. Harness and Lestrange,

there is also a book of the 'Friendships of Mary Russell Mitford,'
consisting of the letters she received rather than of those which
she wrote. It certainly occurs to one, as one looks through the
printed correspondence of celebrated people, how different are
written from printed letters. Your friend's voice sounds, your
friend's eyes look out, of the written page, even its blots and
erasures remind you of your human being. But the magnetism is gone
out of these printer's lines with their even margins; in which
everybody's handwriting is exactly alike; in which everybody uses
the same type, the same expressions; in which the eye roams from
page to page untouched, unconvinced. I can imagine the pleasure
each one of these letters may have given to Miss Mitford to receive
in turn. They come from well-known ladies, accustomed to be
considered. Mrs. Trollope, Mrs. Hofland, Mrs. Howitt, Mrs. S. C.
Hall, Miss Strickland, Mrs. Opie; there, too, are Miss Barrett and
Mrs. Jamieson and Miss Sedgwick who writes from America; they are
all interesting people, but it must be confessed that the
correspondence is not very enlivening. Miss Barrett's is an
exception, that is almost as good as handwriting to read. But there
is no doubt that compliments to OTHER authoresses are much less
amusing, than those one writes or receives oneself; apologies also
for not writing sooner, CAN pall upon one in print, however soothing
they may be to the justly offended recipient, or to the
conscience-stricken correspondent.

'I must have seemed a thankless wretch, my dear Miss Mitford,' etc.
etc. 'You, my dear friend, know too well what it is to have to
finish a book, to blame my not attempting,' etc. etc. 'This is the
thirty-ninth letter I have written since yesterday morning,' says
Harriet Martineau. 'Oh, I can scarcely hold the pen! I will not
allow my shame for not having written, to prevent me from writing
now.' All these people seem to have been just as busy as people are
now, as amusing, as tiresome. They had the additional difficulty of
having to procure franks, and of having to cover four pages instead
of a post-card. OUR letters may be dull, but at all events they are
not nearly so long. We come sooner to the point and avoid elegant
circumlocutions. But one is struck, among other things, by the
keener literary zest of those days, and by the immense numbers of
MSS. and tragedies in circulation, all of which their authors
confidingly send from one to another. There are also whole flights
of travelling poems flapping their wings and uttering their cries as
they go.

An enthusiastic American critic who comes over to England emphasises

the situation. Mr. Willis's 'superlative admiration' seems to give
point to everything, and to all the enthusiasm. Miss Austen's
Collins himself could not have been more appreciative, not even if
Miss de Burgh had tried her hand at a MS. . . . Could he--Mr.
Willis--choose, he would have tragedy once a year from Miss
Mitford's pen. 'WHAT an intoxicating life it is,' he cries; 'I met
Jane Porter and Miss Aikin and Tom Moore and a troop more beaux
esprits at dinner yesterday! I never shall be content elsewhere.'

Miss Mitford's own letters speak in a much more natural voice.

'I never could understand what people could find to like in my

letters,' Miss Mitford writes, 'unless it be that they have a ROOT
to them.' The root was in her own kind heart. Miss Mitford may
have been wanting a little in discrimination, but she was never
wanting in sympathy. She seems to have loved people for kindness's
sake indiscriminately as if they were creations of her own brain:
but to friendliness or to trouble of any sort she responds with
fullest measure. Who shall complain if some rosy veil coloured the
aspects of life for her?

'Among the many blessings I enjoy,--my dear father, my admirable

mother, my tried and excellent friends,--there is nothing for which
I ought to thank God so earnestly as for the constitutional buoyancy
of spirits, the aptness to hope, the will to be happy WHICH I
INHERIT FROM MY FATHER,' she writes. Was ever filial piety so
irritating as hers? It is difficult to bear, with any patience, her
praises of Dr. Mitford. His illusions were no less a part of his
nature than his daughter's, the one a self-centred absolutely
selfish existence, the other generous, humble, beautiful. She is
hardly ever really angry except when some reports get about
concerning her marriage. There was an announcement that she was
engaged to one of her own clan, and the news spread among her
friends. The romantic Mrs. Hofland had conjured up the suggestion,
to Miss Mitford's extreme annoyance. It is said Mrs. Hofland also
married off Miss Edgeworth in the same manner.

Mary Mitford found her true romance in friendship, not in love. One
day Mr. Kenyon came to see her while she was staying in London, and
offered to show her the Zoological Gardens, and on the way he
proposed calling in Gloucester Place to take up a young lady, a
connection of his own, Miss Barrett by name. It was thus that Miss
Mitford first made the acquaintance of Mrs. Browning, whose
friendship was one of the happiest events of her whole life. A
happy romance indeed, with that added reality which must have given
it endurance. And indeed to make a new friend is like learning a
new language. I myself have a friend who says that we have each one
of us a chosen audience of our own to whom we turn instinctively,
and before whom we rehearse that which is in our minds; whose
opinion influences us, whose approval is our secret aim. All this
Mrs. Browning seems to have been to Miss Mitford.

'I sit and think of you and of the poems that you will write, and of
that strange rainbow crown called fame, until the vision is before
me. . . . My pride and my hopes seem altogether merged in you. At
my time of life and with so few to love, and with a tendency to body
forth images of gladness, you cannot think what joy it is to
anticipate. . . .' So wrote the elder woman to the younger with
romantic devotion. What Miss Mitford once said of herself was true,
hers was the instinct of the bee sucking honey from the hedge
flower. Whatever sweetness and happiness there was to find she
turned to with unerring directness.

It is to Miss Barrett that she sometimes complains. 'It will help

you to understand how impossible it is for me to earn money as I
ought to do, when I tell you that this very day I received your dear
letter and sixteen others; then my father brought into my room the
newspaper to hear the ten or twelve columns of news from India; then
I dined and breakfasted in one; then I got up, and by that time
there were three parties of people in the garden; eight others
arrived soon after. . . . I was forced to leave, being engaged to
call on Lady Madeline Palmer. She took me some six miles on foot in
Mr. Palmer's beautiful plantations, in search of that exquisite
wild-flower the bog-bean, do you know it? most beautiful of flowers,
either wild--or, as K. puts it,--"tame." After long search we found
the plant not yet in bloom.'

Dr. Mitford weeps over his daughters exhaustion, telling everybody

that she is killing herself by her walks and drives. He would like
her never to go beyond the garden and beyond reach of the columns of
his newspaper. She declares that it is only by getting out and
afield that she can bear the strain and the constant alternation of
enforced work and anxiety. Nature was, indeed, a second nature to
her. Charles Kingsley himself could scarcely write better of the
East wind. . . .

'We have had nine weeks of drought and east wind, scarcely a flower
to be seen, no verdure in the meadows, no leaves in the hedgerows;
if a poor violet or primrose did make its appearance it was
scentless. I have not once heard my aversion the cuckoo. . . and
in this place, so evidently the rendezvous of swallows, that it
takes its name from them, not a swallow has yet appeared. The only
time that I have heard the nightingale, I drove, the one mild day we
have had, to a wood where I used to find the woodsorrel in beds;
only two blossoms of that could be found, but a whole chorus of
nightingales saluted me the moment I drove into the wood.'

There is something of Madame de Sevigne in her vivid realisation of

natural things.

She nursed her father through a long and trying illness, and when he
died found herself alone in the world with impaired health and very
little besides her pension from the Civil List to live upon. Dr.
Mitford left 1000 pounds worth of debts, which this honourable woman
then and there set to work to try and pay. So much courage and
devotion touched the hearts of her many friends and readers, and
this sum was actually subscribed by them. Queens, archbishops,
dukes, and marquises subscribe to the testimonial, so do the
literary ladies, Mesdames Bailey, Edgeworth, Trollope; Mrs. Opie is
determined to collect twenty pounds at least, although she justly
says she wishes it were for anything but to pay the Doctor's debts.

In 1844 it is delightful to read of a little ease at last in this

harassed life; of a school-feast with buns and flags organised by
the kind lady, the children riding in waggons decked with laurel,
Miss Mitford leading the way, followed by eight or ten neighbouring
carriages, and the whole party waiting in Swallowfield Lane to see
the Queen and Prince Albert returning from their visit to the Duke
of Wellington. 'Our Duke went to no great expense,' says Miss
Mitford. (Dr. Mitford would have certainly disapproved had he been
still alive.) One strip of carpet the Duke did buy, the rest of the
furniture he hired in Reading for the week. The ringers, after
being hard at work for four hours, sent a can to the house to ask
for some beer, and the can was sent back empty.

It was towards the end of her life that Miss Mitford left Three Mile
Cross and came to Swallowfield to stay altogether. 'The poor
cottage was tumbling around us, and if we had stayed much longer we
should have been buried in the ruins,' she says; 'there I had toiled
and striven and tasted as bitterly of bitter anxiety, of fear and
hope, as often falls to the lot of women.' Then comes a charming
description of the three miles of straight and dusty road. 'I
walked from one cottage to the other on an autumn evening when the
vagrant birds, whose habit of assembling there for their annual
departure, gives, I suppose, its name of Swallowfield to the
village, were circling over my head, and I repeated to myself the
pathetic lines of Hayley as he saw those same birds gathering upon
his roof during his last illness:--

'"Ye gentle birds, that perch aloof,

And smooth your pinions on my roof. . .

'"Prepare for your departure hence

Ere winter's angry threats commence;
Like you my soul would smooth her plume
For longer flights beyond the tomb.

'"May God by whom is seen and heard

Departing men and wandering bird,
In mercy mark us for His own
And guide us to the land unknown!"'

Thoughts soothing and tender came with those touching lines, and
gayer images followed. . . .

It is from Swallowfield that she writes: 'I have fell this blessing
of being able to respond to new friendships very strongly lately,
for I have lost many old and valued connections during this trying
spring. I thank God far more earnestly for such blessings than for
my daily bread, for friendship is the bread of the heart.'

It was late in life to make such warm new ties as those which
followed her removal from Three Mile Cross; but some of the most
cordial friendships of her life date from this time. Mr. James Payn
and Mr. Fields she loved with some real motherly feeling, and Lady
Russell who lived at the Hall became her tender and devoted friend.

VI.

We went down to Reading the other day, as so many of Miss Mitford's

friends have done before, to look at 'our village' with our own
eyes, and at the cottage in which she lived for so long. A phaeton
with a fast-stepping horse met us at the station and whirled us
through the busy town and along the straight dusty road beyond it.
As we drove along in the soft clouded sunshine I looked over the
hedges on either side, and I could see fields and hedgerows and red
roofs clustering here and there, while the low background of blue
hills spread towards the horizon. It was an unpretentious homely
prospect intercepted each minute by the detestable advertisement
hoardings recommending this or that rival pill. 'Tongues in trees'
indeed, in a very different sense from the exiled duke's experience!
Then we come within sight of the running brook, uncontaminated as
yet; the river flowing cool and swift, without quack medicines
stamped upon its waters: we reach Whitley presently, with its
pretty gabled hostel (Mrs. Mitford used to drive to Whitley and back
for her airing), the dust rises on the fresh keen wind, the scent of
the ripe corn is in the air, the cows stoop under the elm trees,
looking exactly as they do in Mr. Thomson's pretty pictures, dappled
and brown, with delicate legs and horns. We pass very few people, a
baby lugged along in its cart, and accompanied by its brothers and
sisters; a fox-terrier comes barking at our wheels; at last the
phaeton stops abruptly between two or three roadside houses, and the
coachman, pointing with his whip, says, 'That is "The Mitford,"
ma'am.--That's where Miss Mitford used to live!'

Was that all? I saw two or three commonplace houses skirting the
dusty road, I saw a comfortable public-house with an elm tree, and
beside it another grey unpretentious little house, with a slate roof
and square walls, and an inscription, 'The Mitford,' painted over
the doorway. . . .

I had been expecting I knew not what; a spire, a pump, a green, a

winding street: my preconceived village in the air had immediately
to be swept into space, and in its stead, behold the inn with its
sign-post, and these half-dozen brick tenements, more or less cut to
one square pattern! So this was all! this was 'our village' of
which the author had written so charmingly! These were the sights
the kind eyes had dwelt upon, seeing in them all, the soul of hidden
things, rather than dull bricks and slates. Except for one memory,
Three Mile Cross would seem to be one of the dullest and most
uninteresting of country places. . . .

But we have Miss Mitford's own description. 'The Cross is not a

borough, thank Heaven, either rotten or independent. The
inhabitants are quiet, peaceable
people who would not think of visiting us, even if we had a knocker
to knock at. Our residence is a cottage' (she is writing to her
correspondent, Sir William Elford), 'no, not a cottage, it does not
deserve the name--a messuage or tenement such as a little farmer who
had made 1400 pounds might retire to when he left off business to
live on his means. It consists of a series of closets, the largest
of which may be about eight feet square, which they call parlours
and kitchens and pantries, some of them minus a corner, which has
been unnaturally filched for a chimney, others deficient in half a
side, which has been truncated by a shelving roof. Behind is a
garden about the size of a good drawing-room, with an arbour, which
is a complete sentry-box of privet. On one side a public-house, on
the other a village shop, and right opposite a cobbler's stall.
Notwithstanding all this "the cabin," as Boabdil says, "is
convenient." It is within reach of my dear old walks, the banks
where I find my violets, the meadows full of cowslips, and the woods
where the woodsorrel blows. . . . Papa has already had the
satisfaction of setting the neighbourhood to rights and committing a
disorderly person who was the pest of "The Cross" to Bridewell. . .
. Mamma has furbished up an old dairy; I have lost my only key and
stuffed the garden with flowers.' . . . . So writes the contented
young woman.

How much more delightful is all this than any commonplace stagey
effect of lattice and gable; and with what pleasant unconscious art
the writer of this letter describes what is NOT there and brings in
her banks of violets to perfume the dull rooms. The postscript to
this letter is Miss Mitford all over. 'Pray excuse my blots and
interlineations. They have been caused by my attention being
distracted by a nightingale in full song who is pouring a world of
music through my window.'

'Do you not like to meet with good company in your friends' hearts?'
Miss Mitford says somewhere,--to no one better than to herself does
this apply. Her heart was full of gracious things, and the best of
company was ever hers, 'La fleur de la hotte,' as Madame de Sevigne
says.

We walked into the small square hall where Dr. Mitford's bed was
established after his illness, whilst visitors and all the rest of
the household came and went through the kitchen door. In the
parlour, once kept for his private use, now sat a party of homely
friends from Reading, resting and drinking tea: we too were served
with smoking cups, and poured our libation to her who once presided
in the quiet place; and then the landlady took us round and about,
showed us the kitchen with its comfortable corners and low
window-frames--'I suppose this is scarcely changed at all?' said one
of us.

'Oh yes, ma'am,' says the housekeeper--'WE uses a Kitchener, Miss

Mitford always kept an open range.'

The garden, with its sentry-box of privet, exists no longer; an iron

mission-room stands in its place, with the harmonium, the rows of
straw chairs, the table and the candlesticks de circonstance. Miss
Mitford's picture hangs on the wall, a hand-coloured copy of one of
her portraits. The kindly homely features smile from the oils, in
good humour and attentive intelligence. The sentiment of to-day is
assuredly to be found in the spirit of things rather than in their
outward signs. . . . Any one of us can feel the romance of a
wayside shrine put up to the memory of some mediaeval well-dressed
saint with a nimbus at the back of her head, and a trailing cloak
and veil. . . . Here, after all, is the same sentiment, only
translated into nineteenth-century language; uses corrogated iron
sheds, and cups of tea, and oakum matting. 'Mr. Palmer, he bought
the place,' says the landlady, 'he made it into a Temperance Hotel,
and built the Temperance Hall in the garden.' . . . .

No romantic marble shrine, but a square meeting-house of good

intent, a tribute not less sincere because it is square, than if it
were drawn into Gothic arch and curve. It speaks, not of a holy and
mythical saint, but of a good and warm-hearted woman; of a life-long
penance borne with charity and cheerfulness; of sweet fancies and
blessings which have given innocent pleasure to many generations!

VII.

There is a note, written in a close and pretty writing, something

between Sir Walter Scott's and Mrs. Browning's, which the present
writer has possessed for years, fastened in a book among other early
treasures:--

Thank you, dearest Miss Priscilla, for your great kindness. I

return the ninth volume of [illegible], with the four succeeding
ones, all that I have; probably all that are yet published. You
shall have the rest when I get them. Tell dear Mr. George (I must
not call him Vert-Vert) that I have recollected the name of the
author of the clever novel 'Le Rouge et le Noir' (that is the right
title of the book, which has nothing to do with the name); the
author's name is Stendhal, or so he calls himself. I think that he
was either a musician or a musical critic, and that he is dead. . .
. My visitor has not yet arrived (6 o'clock, p.m.), frightened no
doubt by the abruptness of the two notes which I wrote in reply to
hers yesterday morning; and indeed nobody could fancy the hurry in
which one is forced to write by this walking post. . . .

Tell my visitors of yesterday with my kind love that they did me all
the good in the world, as indeed everybody of your house does.--
Ever, dear Miss Priscilla, very affectionately yours,
M. R. MITFORD.

In the present writer's own early days, when the now owner of
Swallowfield was a very young, younger son, she used to hear him and
his sister, Mrs. Brackenbury (the Miss Priscilla of the note),
speaking with affectionate remembrance of the old friend lately
gone, who had dwelt at their very gates; through which friendly
gates one is glad, indeed, to realise what delightful companionship
and loving help came to cheer the end of that long and toilsome
life; and when Messrs. Macmillan suggested this preface the writer
looked for her old autograph-book, and at its suggestion wrote
(wondering whether any links existed still) to ask for information
concerning Miss Mitford, and so it happened that she found herself
also kindly entertained at Swallowfield, and invited to visit the
scenes of which the author of 'Our Village' had written with so much
delight.

I think I should like to reverse the old proverb about letting those
who run read, my own particular fancy being for reading first and
running afterwards. There are few greater pleasures than to meet
with an Individuality, to listen to it speaking from a printed page,
recounting, suggesting, growing upon you every hour, gaining in life
and presence, and then, while still under its influence, to find
oneself suddenly transported into the very scene of that life, to
stand among its familiar impressions and experiences, realising
another distinct existence by some odd metempsychosis, and what may-
-or rather, what MUST have been. It is existing a book rather than
reading it when this happens to one.

The house in Swallowfield Park is an old English country home, a

fastness still piled up against time; whose stately walls and halls
within, and beautiful century-old trees in the park without, record
great times and striking figures. The manor was a part of the dowry
of Henry the VIII.'s luckless queens. The modern house was built by
Clarendon, and the old church among the elms dates from 1200, with
carved signs and symbols and brasses of knights and burgesses, and
names of strange sound and bygone fashion.

Lady Russell, who had sent the phaeton with the fast-stepping horse
to meet us, was walking in the park as we drove up, and instead of
taking us back to the house, she first led the way across the grass
and by the stream to the old church, standing in its trim sweet
garden, where Death itself seems smiling and fearless; where kind
Mary Mitford's warm heart rests quiet, and 'her busy hand,' as she
says herself, 'is lying in peace there, where the sun glances
through the great elm trees in the beautiful churchyard of
Swallowfield.'

The last baronet, Sir Charles, who fought in the Crimea, and who
succeeded his father, Sir Henry, moved the dividing rail so that his
old friend should be well within the shadow of these elm trees.
Lady Russell showed us the tranquil green place, and told us its
story, and how the old church had once been doomed to destruction
when Kingsley came over by chance, and pleaded that it should be
spared; and how, when rubbish and outward signs of decay had been
cleared away, the restorers were rewarded for their piety, by coming
upon noble beams of oak, untouched by time, upon some fine old
buried monuments and brasses and inscriptions, among which the
people still say their prayers in the shrine where their fathers
knelt, and of which the tradition is not yet swept away. The
present Lady of the Manor, who loves old traditions, has done her
part to preserve the records for her children.

So Miss Mitford walked from Three Mile Cross to Swallowfield to end

her days, with these kind friends to cheer and to comfort her. Sir
Henry Russell was alive when she first established herself, but he
was already suffering from some sudden seizure, which she, with her
usual impetuosity, describes in her letters as a chronic state of
things. After his death, his widow, the Lady Russell of those days,
was her kindest friend and comforter.

The little Swallowfield cottage at the meeting of the three roads,

to which Mary Mitford came when she left Three Mile Cross, has
thrown out a room or two, as cottages do, but otherwise I think it
can be little changed. It was here Miss Mitford was visited by so
many interesting people, here she used to sit writing at her big
table under the 'tassels of her acacia tree.' When the present Lady
of the Manor brought us to the gate, the acacia flowers were over,
but a balmy breath of summer was everywhere; a beautiful rose was
hanging upon the wall beneath the window (it must have taken many
years to grow to such a height), and beyond the palings of the
garden spread the fields, ripening in the late July, and turning to
gold. The farmer and his son were at work with their scythes; the
birds were still flying, the sweet scents were in the air.

From a lady who had known her, 'my own Miss Anne' of the letters, we
heard something more that day of the author of 'Our Village'; of her
charming intellect, her gift of talk, her impulsiveness, her
essential sociability, and rapid grace of mind. She had the faults
of her qualities; she jumped too easily to conclusions; she was too
much under the influence of those with whom she lived. She was born
to be a victim,--even after her old tyrant father's death, she was
more or less over-ridden by her servants. Neighbours looked
somewhat doubtfully on K. and Ben, but they were good to her, on the
whole, and tended her carefully. Miss Russell said that when she
and her brother took refuge in the cottage, one morning from a
storm, while they dried themselves by the fire, they saw the careful
meal carried up to the old lady, the kidneys, the custard, for her
dejeuner a la fourchette.

When Miss Mitford died, she left everything she had to her beloved
K. and to Ben, except that she said she wished that one book from
her well-stocked library should be given to each of her friends.
The old Doctor, with all his faults, had loved books, and bought
handsome and valuable first editions of good authors. K. and Ben
also seem to have loved books and first editions. To the Russells,
who had nursed Miss Mitford, comforted her, by whose gates she
dwelt, in whose arms she died, Ben brought, as a token of
remembrance, an old shilling volume of one of G. P. R. James's
novels, which was all he could bear to part with. A prettier
incident was told me by Miss Russell, who once went to visit Miss
Mitford's grave. She found a young man standing there whom she did
not know. 'Don't you know me?' said he; 'I am Henry, ma'am. I have
just come back from Australia.' He was one of the children of the
couple who had lived in the cottage, and his first visit on his
return from abroad had been to the tomb of his old protectress.

I also heard a friend who knew Miss Mitford in her latest days,
describe going to see her within a very few months of her death; she
was still bright and responding as ever, though very ill. The young
visitor had herself been laid up and absent from the invalid's
bedside for some time. They talked over many things,--an authoress
among the rest, concerning whose power of writing a book Miss
Mitford seems to have been very doubtful. After her visitor was
gone, the sick woman wrote one of her delicate pretty little notes
and despatched it with its tiny seal (there it is still unbroken,
with its M. R. M. just as she stamped it), and this is the little
letter:--

Thank you, dearest Miss . . . for once again showing me your fair
face by the side of the dear, dear friend [Lady Russell] for whose
goodness I have neither thanks nor words. To the end of my life I
shall go on sinning and repenting. Heartily sorry have I been ever
since you went away to have spoken so unkindly to Mrs . . . .
Heaven forgive me for it, and send her a happier conclusion to her
life than the beginning might warrant. If you have an idle lover,
my dear, present over to him my sermon, for those were words of
worth.

God bless you all! Ever, most faithfully and affectionately yours,
M. R. MITFORD.
Sunday Evening.

VIII.

When one turns from Miss Mitford's works to the notices in the
biographical dictionary (in which Miss Mitford and Mithridates
occupy the same page), one finds how firmly her reputation is
established. 'Dame auteur,' says my faithful mentor, the Biographic
Generale, 'consideree comme le peintre le plus fidele de la vie
rurale en Angleterre.' 'Author of a remarkable tragedy, "Julian,"
in which Macready played a principal part, followed by "Foscari,"
"Rienzi," and others,' says the English Biographical Dictionary.

'I am charmed with my new cottage,' she writes soon after her last
installation; 'the neighbours are most kind.' Kingsley was one of
the first to call upon her. 'He took me quite by surprise in his
extraordinary fascination,' says the old lady.

Mr. Fields, the American publisher, also went to see Miss Mitford at
Swallowfield, and immediately became a very great ally of hers. It
was to him that she gave her own portrait, by Lucas. Mr. Fields has
left an interesting account of her in his 'Yesterdays with Authors'-
-'Her dogs and her geraniums,' he says, 'were her great glories!
She used to write me long letters about Fanchon, a dog whose
personal acquaintance I had made some time before, while on a visit
to her cottage. Every virtue under heaven she attributed to that
canine individual; and I was obliged to allow in my return letters
that since our planet began to spin, nothing comparable to Fanchon
had ever run on four legs. I had also known Flush, the ancestor of
Fanchon, intimately, and had been accustomed to hear wonderful
things of that dog, but Fanchon had graces and genius unique. Miss
Mitford would have joined with Hamerton, when he says, 'I humbly
thank Divine Providence for having invented dogs, and I regard that
man with wondering pity who can lead a dogless life.'

Another of Miss Mitford's great friends was John Ruskin,* and one
can well imagine how much they must have had in common. Of Miss
Mitford's writings Ruskin says, 'They have the playfulness and
purity of the "Vicar of Wakefield" without the naughtiness of its
occasional wit, or the dust of the world's great road on the other
side of the hedge. . . . '

*It is Mr. Harness who says, writing of Ruskin and Miss Mitford,
'His kindness cheered her closing days. He sent her every book that
would interest, every delicacy that would strengthen her.'

Neither the dust nor the ethics of the world of men quite belonged
to Miss Mitford's genius. It is always a sort of relief to turn
from her criticism of people, her praise of Louis Napoleon, her
facts about Mr. Dickens, whom she describes as a dull companion, or
about my father, whom she looked upon as an utter heartless
worldling, to the natural spontaneous sweet flow of nature in which
she lived and moved instinctively.

Mr. James Payn gives, perhaps, the most charming of all the
descriptions of the author of 'Our Village.' He has many letters
from her to quote from. 'The paper is all odds and ends,' he says,
'and not a scrap of it but is covered and crossed. The very flaps
of the envelopes and the outsides of them have their message.'

Mr. Payn went to see her at Swallowfield, and describes the small
apartment lined with books from floor to ceiling and fragrant with
flowers. 'Its tenant rose from her arm-chair with difficulty, but
with a sunny smile and a charming manner bade me welcome. My father
had been an old friend of hers, and she spoke of my home and
belongings as only a woman can speak of such things, then we plunged
into medea res, into men and books. She seemed to me to have known
everybody worth knowing from the Duke of Wellington to the last new
verse-maker. And she talked like an angel, but her views upon
poetry as a calling in life, shocked me not a little. She said she
preferred a mariage de convenance to a love match, because it
generally turned out better. "This surprises you," she said,
smiling, "but then I suppose I am the least romantic person that
ever wrote plays." She was much more proud of her plays, even then
well-nigh forgotten, than of the works by which she was well known,
and which at that time brought people from the ends of the earth to
see her. . . .

'Nothing ever destroyed her faith in those she loved. If I had not
known all about him from my own folk I should have thought her
father had been a patriot and a martyr. She spoke of him as if
there had never been such a father--which in a sense was true.'

Mr. Payn quotes Miss Mitford's charming description of K., 'for whom
she had the highest admiration.' 'K. is a great curiosity, by far
the cleverest woman in these parts, not in a literary way [this was
not to disappoint me], but in everything that is useful. She could
make a Court dress for a duchess or cook a dinner for a Lord Mayor,
but her principal talent is shown in managing everybody whom she
comes near. Especially her husband and myself; she keeps the money
of both and never allows either of us to spend sixpence without her
knowledge. . . . You should see the manner in which she makes Ben
reckon with her, and her contempt for all women who do not manage
their husbands.'

Another delightful quotation is from one of Charles Kingsley's

letters to Mr. Payn. It brings the past before us from another
point of view.

'I can never forget the little figure rolled up in two chairs in the
little Swallowfield room, packed round with books up to the ceiling-
-the little figure with clothes on of no recognised or recognisable
pattern; and somewhere, out of the upper end of the heap, gleaming
under a great deep globular brow, two such eyes as I never perhaps
saw in any other Englishwoman--though I believe she must have had
French blood in her veins to breed such eyes and such a tongue, the
beautiful speech which came out of that ugly (it was that) face, and
the glitter and depth too of the eyes, like live coals--perfectly
honest the while. . . .' One would like to go on quoting and
copying, but here my preface must cease, for it is but a preface
after all, one of those many prefaces written out of the past and
when everything is over.

COUNTRY PICTURES.

Of all situations for a constant residence, that which appears to me

most delightful is a little village far in the country; a small
neighbourhood, not of fine mansions finely peopled, but of cottages
and cottage-like houses, 'messuages or tenements,' as a friend of
mine calls such ignoble and nondescript dwellings, with inhabitants
whose faces are as familiar to us as the flowers in our garden; a
little world of our own, close-packed and insulated like ants in an
ant-hill, or bees in a hive, or sheep in a fold, or nuns in a
convent, or sailors in a ship; where we know every one, are known to
every one, interested in every one, and authorised to hope that
every one feels an interest in us. How pleasant it is to slide into
these true-hearted feelings from the kindly and unconscious
influence of habit, and to learn to know and to love the people
about us, with all their peculiarities, just as we learn to know and
to love the nooks and turns of the shady lanes and sunny commons
that we pass every day. Even in books I like a confined locality,
and so do the critics when they talk of the unities. Nothing is so
tiresome as to be whirled half over Europe at the chariot-wheels of
a hero, to go to sleep at Vienna, and awaken at Madrid; it produces
a real fatigue, a weariness of spirit. On the other hand, nothing
is so delightful as to sit down in a country village in one of Miss
Austen's delicious novels, quite sure before we leave it to become
intimate with every spot and every person it contains; or to ramble
with Mr. White* over his own parish of Selborne, and form a
friendship with the fields and coppices, as well as with the birds,
mice, and squirrels, who inhabit them; or to sail with Robinson
Crusoe to his island, and live there with him and his goats and his
man Friday;--how much we dread any new comers, any fresh importation
of savage or sailor! we never sympathise for a moment in our hero's
want of company, and are quite grieved when he gets away;--or to be
shipwrecked with Ferdinand on that other lovelier island--the island
of Prospero, and Miranda, and Caliban, and Ariel, and nobody else,
none of Dryden's exotic inventions:--that is best of all. And a
small neighbourhood is as good in sober waking reality as in poetry
or prose; a village neighbourhood, such as this Berkshire hamlet in
which I write, a long, straggling, winding street at the bottom of a
fine eminence, with a road through it, always abounding in carts,
horsemen, and carriages, and lately enlivened by a stage-coach from
B---- to S----, which passed through about ten days ago, and will I
suppose return some time or other. There are coaches of all
varieties nowadays; perhaps this may be intended for a monthly
diligence, or a fortnight fly. Will you walk with me through our
village, courteous reader? The journey is not long. We will begin
at the lower end, and proceed up the hill.

*White's 'Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne;' one of the

most fascinating books ever written. I wonder that no naturalist
has adopted the same plan.

The tidy, square, red cottage on the right hand, with the long
well-stocked garden by the side of the road, belongs to a retired
publican from a neighbouring town; a substantial person with a
comely wife; one who piques himself on independence and idleness,
talks politics, reads newspapers, hates the minister, and cries out
for reform. He introduced into our peaceful vicinage the rebellious
innovation of an illumination on the Queen's acquittal.
Remonstrance and persuasion were in vain; he talked of liberty and
broken windows--so we all lighted up. Oh! how he shone that night
with candles, and laurel, and white bows, and gold paper, and a
transparency (originally designed for a pocket-handkerchief) with a
flaming portrait of her Majesty, hatted and feathered, in red ochre.
He had no rival in the village, that we all acknowledged; the very
bonfire was less splendid; the little boys reserved their best
crackers to be expended in his honour, and he gave them full
sixpence more than any one else. He would like an illumination once
a month; for it must not be concealed that, in spite of gardening,
of newspaper reading, of jaunting about in his little cart, and
frequenting both church and meeting, our worthy neighbour begins to
feel the weariness of idleness. He hangs over his gate, and tries
to entice passengers to stop and chat; he volunteers little jobs all
round, smokes cherry trees to cure the blight, and traces and blows
up all the wasps'-nests in the parish. I have seen a great many
wasps in our garden to-day, and shall enchant him with the
intelligence. He even assists his wife in her sweepings and
dustings. Poor man! he is a very respectable person, and would be a
very happy one, if he would add a little employment to his dignity.
It would be the salt of life to him.

Next to his house, though parted from it by another long garden with
a yew arbour at the end, is the pretty dwelling of the shoemaker, a
pale, sickly-looking, black-haired man, the very model of sober
industry. There he sits in his little shop from early morning till
late at night. An earthquake would hardly stir him: the
illumination did not. He stuck immovably to his last, from the
first lighting up, through the long blaze and the slow decay, till
his large solitary candle was the only light in the place. One
cannot conceive anything more perfect than the contempt which the
man of transparencies and the man of shoes must have felt for each
other on that evening. There was at least as much vanity in the
sturdy industry as in the strenuous idleness, for our shoemaker is a
man of substance; he employs three journeymen, two lame, and one a
dwarf, so that his shop looks like an hospital; he has purchased the
lease of his commodious dwelling, some even say that he has bought
it out and out; and he has only one pretty daughter, a light,
delicate, fair-haired girl of fourteen, the champion, protectress,
and playfellow of every brat under three years old, whom she jumps,
dances, dandles, and feeds all day long. A very attractive person
is that child-loving girl. I have never seen any one in her station
who possessed so thoroughly that undefinable charm, the lady-look.
See her on a Sunday in her simplicity and her white frock, and she
might pass for an earl's daughter. She likes flowers too, and has a
profusion of white stocks under her window, as pure and delicate as
herself.

The first house on the opposite side of the way is the blacksmith's;
a gloomy dwelling, where the sun never seems to shine; dark and
smoky within and without, like a forge. The blacksmith is a high
officer in our little state, nothing less than a constable; but,
alas! alas! when tumults arise, and the constable is called for, he
will commonly be found in the thickest of the fray. Lucky would it
be for his wife and her eight children if there were no public-house
in the land: an inveterate inclination to enter those bewitching
doors is Mr. Constable's only fault.

Next to this official dwelling is a spruce brick tenement, red,

high, and narrow, boasting, one above another, three sash-windows,
the only sash-windows in the village, with a clematis on one side
and a rose on the other, tall and narrow like itself. That slender
mansion has a fine, genteel look. The little parlour seems made for
Hogarth's old maid and her stunted footboy; for tea and card
parties,--it would just hold one table; for the rustle of faded
silks, and the splendour of old china; for the delight of four by
honours, and a little snug, quiet scandal between the deals; for
affected gentility and real starvation. This should have been its
destiny; but fate has been unpropitious: it belongs to a plump,
merry, bustling dame, with four fat, rosy, noisy children, the very
essence of vulgarity and plenty.

Then comes the village shop, like other village shops, multifarious
as a bazaar; a repository for bread, shoes, tea, cheese, tape,
ribands, and bacon; for everything, in short, except the one
particular thing which you happen to want at the moment, and will be
sure not to find. The people are civil and thriving, and frugal
withal; they have let the upper part of their house to two young
women (one of them is a pretty blue-eyed girl) who teach little
children their A B C, and make caps and gowns for their mammas,--
parcel schoolmistress, parcel mantua-maker. I believe they find
adorning the body a more profitable vocation than adorning the mind.

Divided from the shop by a narrow yard, and opposite the

shoemaker's, is a habitation of whose inmates I shall say nothing.
A cottage--no--a miniature house, with many additions, little odds
and ends of places, pantries, and what not; all angles, and of a
charming in-and-outness; a little bricked court before one half, and
a little flower-yard before the other; the walls, old and
weather-stained, covered with hollyhocks, roses, honeysuckles, and a
great apricot-tree; the casements full of geraniums (ah! there is
our superb white cat peeping out from among them); the closets (our
landlord has the assurance to call them rooms) full of contrivances
and corner-cupboards; and the little garden behind full of common
flowers, tulips, pinks, larkspurs, peonies, stocks, and carnations,
with an arbour of privet, not unlike a sentry-box, where one lives
in a delicious green light, and looks out on the gayest of all gay
flower-beds. That house was built on purpose to show in what an
exceeding small compass comfort may be packed. Well, I will loiter
there no longer.

The next tenement is a place of importance, the Rose Inn: a

white-washed building, retired from the road behind its fine
swinging sign, with a little bow-window room coming out on one side,
and forming, with our stable on the other, a sort of open square,
which is the constant resort of carts, waggons, and return chaises.
There are two carts there now, and mine host is serving them with
beer in his eternal red waistcoat. He is a thriving man and a
portly, as his waistcoat attests, which has been twice let out
within this twelvemonth. Our landlord has a stirring wife, a
hopeful son, and a daughter, the belle of the village; not so pretty
as the fair nymph of the shoe-shop, and far less elegant, but ten
times as fine; all curl-papers in the morning, like a porcupine, all
curls in the afternoon, like a poodle, with more flounces than
curl-papers, and more lovers than curls. Miss Phoebe is fitter for
town than country; and to do her justice, she has a consciousness of
that fitness, and turns her steps townward as often as she can. She
is gone to B---- to-day with her last and principal lover, a
recruiting sergeant--a man as tall as Sergeant Kite, and as
impudent. Some day or other he will carry off Miss Phoebe.

In a line with the bow-window room is a low garden-wall, belonging

to a house under repair:--the white house opposite the
collar-maker's shop, with four lime-trees before it, and a
waggon-load of bricks at the door. That house is the plaything of a
wealthy, well-meaning, whimsical person who lives about a mile off.
He has a passion for brick and mortar, and, being too wise to meddle
with his own residence, diverts himself with altering and
re-altering, improving and re-improving, doing and undoing here. It
is a perfect Penelope's web. Carpenters and bricklayers have been
at work for these eighteen months, and yet I sometimes stand and
wonder whether anything has really been done. One exploit in last
June was, however, by no means equivocal. Our good neighbour
fancied that the limes shaded the rooms, and made them dark (there
was not a creature in the house but the workmen), so he had all the
leaves stripped from every tree. There they stood, poor miserable
skeletons, as bare as Christmas under the glowing midsummer sun.
Nature revenged herself, in her own sweet and gracious manner; fresh
leaves sprang out, and at nearly Christmas the foliage was as
brilliant as when the outrage was committed.

Next door lives a carpenter, 'famed ten miles round, and worthy all
his fame,'--few cabinet-makers surpass him, with his excellent wife,
and their little daughter Lizzy, the plaything and queen of the
village, a child three years old according to the register, but six
in size and strength and intellect, in power and in self-will. She
manages everybody in the place, her schoolmistress included; turns
the wheeler's children out of their own little cart, and makes them
draw her; seduces cakes and lollypops from the very shop window;
makes the lazy carry her, the silent talk to her, the grave romp
with her; does anything she pleases; is absolutely irresistible.
Her chief attraction lies in her exceeding power of loving, and her
firm reliance on the love and indulgence of others. How impossible
it would be to disappoint the dear little girl when she runs to meet
you, slides her pretty hand into yours, looks up gladly in your
face, and says 'Come!' You must go: you cannot help it. Another
part of her charm is her singular beauty. Together with a good deal
of the character of Napoleon, she has something of his square,
sturdy, upright form, with the finest limbs in the world, a
complexion purely English, a round laughing face, sunburnt and rosy,
large merry blue eyes, curling brown hair, and a wonderful play of
countenance. She has the imperial attitudes too, and loves to stand
with her hands behind her, or folded over her bosom; and sometimes,
when she has a little touch of shyness, she clasps them together on
the top of her head, pressing down her shining curls, and looking so
exquisitely pretty! Yes, Lizzy is queen of the village! She has
but one rival in her dominions, a certain white greyhound called
Mayflower, much her friend, who resembles her in beauty and
strength, in playfulness, and almost in sagacity, and reigns over
the animal world as she over the human. They are both coming with
me, Lizzy and Lizzy's 'pretty May.' We are now at the end of the
street; a cross-lane, a rope-walk shaded with limes and oaks, and a
cool clear pond overhung with elms, lead us to the bottom of the
hill. There is still one house round the corner, ending in a
picturesque wheeler's shop. The dwelling-house is more ambitious.
Look at the fine flowered window-blinds, the green door with the
brass knocker, and the somewhat prim but very civil person, who is
sending off a labouring man with sirs and curtsies enough for a
prince of the blood. Those are the curate's lodgings--apartments
his landlady would call them; he lives with his own family four
miles off, but once or twice a week he comes to his neat little
parlour to write sermons, to marry, or to bury, as the case may
require. Never were better or kinder people than his host and
hostess; and there is a reflection of clerical importance about them
since their connection with the Church, which is quite edifying--a
decorum, a gravity, a solemn politeness. Oh, to see the worthy
wheeler carry the gown after his lodger on a Sunday, nicely pinned
up in his wife's best handkerchief!--or to hear him rebuke a
squalling child or a squabbling woman! The curate is nothing to
him. He is fit to be perpetual churchwarden.

We must now cross the lane into the shady rope-walk. That pretty
white cottage opposite, which stands straggling at the end of the
village in a garden full of flowers, belongs to our mason, the
shortest of men, and his handsome, tall wife: he, a dwarf, with the
voice of a giant; one starts when he begins to talk as if he were
shouting through a speaking trumpet; she, the sister, daughter, and
grand-daughter, of a long line of gardeners, and no contemptible one
herself. It is very magnanimous in me not to hate her; for she
beats me in my own way, in chrysanthemums, and dahlias, and the like
gauds. Her plants are sure to live; mine have a sad trick of dying,
perhaps because I love them, 'not wisely, but too well,' and kill
them with over-kindness. Half-way up the hill is another detached
cottage, the residence of an officer, and his beautiful family.
That eldest boy, who is hanging over the gate, and looking with such
intense childish admiration at my Lizzy, might be a model for a
Cupid.

How pleasantly the road winds up the hill, with its broad green
borders and hedgerows so thickly timbered! How finely the evening
sun falls on that sandy excavated bank, and touches the farmhouse on
the top of the eminence! and how clearly defined and relieved is the
figure of the man who is just coming
down! It is poor John Evans, the gardener--an excellent gardener
till about ten years ago, when he lost his wife, and became insane.
He was sent to St. Luke's, and dismissed as cured; but his power was
gone and his strength; he could no longer manage a garden, nor
submit to the restraint, nor encounter the fatigue of regular
employment: so he retreated to the workhouse, the pensioner and
factotum of the village, amongst whom he divides his services. His
mind often wanders, intent on some fantastic and impracticable plan,
and lost to present objects; but he is perfectly harmless, and full
of a childlike simplicity, a smiling contentedness, a most touching
gratitude. Every one is kind to John Evans, for there is that about
him which must be loved; and his unprotectedness, his utter
defencelessness, have an irresistible claim on every better feeling.
I know nobody who inspires so deep and tender a pity; he improves
all around him. He is useful, too, to the extent of his little
power; will do anything, but loves gardening best, and still piques
himself on his old arts of pruning fruit-trees, and raising
cucumbers. He is the happiest of men just now, for he has the
management of a melon bed--a melon bed!--fie! What a grand pompous
name was that for three melon plants under a hand-light! John Evans
is sure that they will succeed. We shall see: as the chancellor
said, 'I doubt.'

We are now on the very brow of the eminence, close to the Hill-house
and its beautiful garden. On the outer edge of the paling, hanging
over the bank that skirts the road, is an old thorn--such a thorn!
The long sprays covered with snowy blossoms, so graceful, so
elegant, so lightsome, and yet so rich! There only wants a pool
under the thorn to give a still lovelier reflection, quivering and
trembling, like a tuft of feathers, whiter and greener than the
life, and more prettily mixed with the bright blue sky. There
should indeed be a pool; but on the dark grass-plat, under the high
bank, which is crowned by that magnificent plume, there is something
that does almost as well,--Lizzy and Mayflower in the midst of a
game at romps, 'making a sunshine in the shady place;' Lizzy
rolling, laughing, clapping her hands, and glowing like a rose;
Mayflower playing about her like summer lightning, dazzling the eyes
with her sudden turns, her leaps, her bounds, her attacks, and her
escapes. She darts round the lovely little girl, with the same
momentary touch that the swallow skims over the water, and has
exactly the same power of flight, the same matchless ease and
strength and grace. What a pretty picture they would make; what a
pretty foreground they do make to the real landscape! The road
winding down the hill with a slight bend, like that in the High
Street at Oxford; a waggon slowly ascending, and a horseman passing
it at a full trot--(ah! Lizzy, Mayflower will certainly desert you
to have a gambol with that blood-horse!) half-way down, just at the
turn, the red cottage of the lieutenant, covered with vines, the
very image of comfort and content; farther down, on the opposite
side, the small white dwelling of the little mason; then the limes
and the rope-walk; then the village street, peeping through the
trees, whose clustering tops hide all but the chimneys, and various
roofs of the houses, and here and there some angle of a wall;
farther on, the elegant town of B----, with its fine old
church-towers and spires; the whole view shut in by a range of
chalky hills and over every part of the picture, trees so profusely
scattered, that it appears like a woodland scene, with glades and
villages intermixed. The trees are of all kinds and all hues,
chiefly the finely-shaped elm, of so bright and deep a green, the
tips of whose high outer branches drop down with such a crisp and
garland-like richness, and the oak, whose stately form is just now
so splendidly adorned by the sunny colouring of the young leaves.
Turning again up the hill, we find ourselves on that peculiar charm
of English scenery, a green common, divided by the road; the right
side fringed by hedgerows and trees, with cottages and farmhouses
irregularly placed, and terminated by a double avenue of noble oaks;
the left, prettier still, dappled by bright pools of water, and
islands of cottages and cottage-gardens, and sinking gradually down
to cornfields and meadows, and an old farmhouse, with pointed roofs
and clustered chimneys, looking out from its blooming orchard, and
backed by woody hills. The common is itself the prettiest part of
the prospect; half covered with low furze, whose golden blossoms
reflect so intensely the last beams of the setting sun, and alive
with cows and sheep, and two sets of cricketers; one of young men,
surrounded by spectators, some standing, some sitting, some
stretched on the grass, all taking a delighted interest in the game;
the other, a merry group of little boys, at a humble distance, for
whom even cricket is scarcely lively enough, shouting, leaping, and
enjoying themselves to their hearts' content. But cricketers and
country boys are too important persons in our village to be talked
of merely as figures in the landscape. They deserve an individual
introduction--an essay to themselves--and they shall have it. No
fear of forgetting the good-humoured faces that meet us in our walks
every day.

WALKS IN THE COUNTRY.

Frost.

January 23rd.--At noon to-day I and my white greyhound, Mayflower,

set out for a walk into a very beautiful world,--a sort of silent
fairyland,--a creation of that matchless magician the hoar-frost.
There had been just snow enough to cover the earth and all its
covers with one sheet of pure and uniform white, and just time
enough since the snow had fallen to allow the hedges to be freed of
their fleecy load, and clothed with a delicate coating of rime. The
atmosphere was deliciously calm; soft, even mild, in spite of the
thermometer; no perceptible air, but a stillness that might almost
be felt, the sky, rather gray than blue, throwing out in bold relief
the snow-covered roofs of our village, and the rimy trees that rise
above them, and the sun shining dimly as through a veil, giving a
pale fair light, like the moon, only brighter. There was a silence,
too, that might become the moon, as we stood at our little gate
looking up the quiet street; a Sabbath-like pause of work and play,
rare on a work-day; nothing was audible but the pleasant hum of
frost, that low monotonous sound, which is perhaps the nearest
approach that life and nature can make to absolute silence. The
very waggons as they come down the hill along the beaten track of
crisp yellowish frost-dust, glide along like shadows; even May's
bounding footsteps, at her height of glee and of speed, fall like
snow upon snow.

But we shall have noise enough presently: May has stopped at

Lizzy's door; and Lizzy, as she sat on the window-sill with her
bright rosy face laughing through the casement, has seen her and
disappeared. She is coming. No! The key is turning in the door,
and sounds of evil omen issue through the keyhole--sturdy 'let me
outs,' and 'I will goes,' mixed with shrill cries on May and on me
from Lizzy, piercing through a low continuous harangue, of which the
prominent parts are apologies, chilblains, sliding, broken bones,
lollypops, rods, and gingerbread, from Lizzy's careful mother.
'Don't scratch the door, May! Don't roar so, my Lizzy! We'll call
for you as we come back.' 'I'll go now! Let me out! I will go!'
are the last words of Miss Lizzy. Mem. Not to spoil that child--if
I can help it. But I do think her mother might have let the poor
little soul walk with us to-day. Nothing worse for children than
coddling. Nothing better for chilblains than exercise. Besides, I
don't believe she has any--and as to breaking her bones in sliding,
I don't suppose there's a slide on the common. These murmuring
cogitations have brought us up the hill, and half-way across the
light and airy common, with its bright expanse of snow and its
clusters of cottages, whose turf fires send such wreaths of smoke
sailing up the air, and diffuse such aromatic fragrance around. And
now comes the delightful sound of childish voices, ringing with glee
and merriment almost from beneath our feet. Ah, Lizzy, your mother
was right! They are shouting from that deep irregular pool, all
glass now, where, on two long, smooth, liny slides, half a dozen
ragged urchins are slipping along in tottering triumph. Half a
dozen steps bring us to the bank right above them. May can hardly
resist the temptation of joining her friends, for most of the
varlets are of her acquaintance, especially the rogue who leads the
slide,--he with the brimless hat, whose bronzed complexion and white
flaxen hair, reversing the usual lights and shadows of the human
countenance, give so strange and foreign a look to his flat and
comic features. This hobgoblin, Jack Rapley by name, is May's great
crony; and she stands on the brink of the steep, irregular descent,
her black eyes fixed full upon him, as if she intended him the
favour of jumping on his head. She does: she is down, and upon
him; but Jack Rapley is not easily to be knocked off his feet. He
saw her coming, and in the moment of her leap sprung dexterously off
the slide on the rough ice, steadying himself by the shoulder of the
next in the file, which unlucky follower, thus unexpectedly checked
in his career, fell plump backwards, knocking down the rest of the
line like a nest of card-houses. There is no harm done; but there
they lie, roaring, kicking, sprawling, in every attitude of comic
distress, whilst Jack Rapley and Mayflower, sole authors of this
calamity, stand apart from the throng, fondling, and coquetting, and
complimenting each other, and very visibly laughing, May in her
black eyes, Jack in his wide, close-shut mouth, and his whole
monkey-face, at their comrades' mischances. I think, Miss May, you
may as well come up again, and leave Master Rapley to fight your
battles. He'll get out of the scrape. He is a rustic wit--a sort
of Robin Goodfellow--the sauciest, idlest, cleverest, best-natured
boy in the parish; always foremost in mischief, and always ready to
do a good turn. The sages of our village predict sad things of Jack
Rapley, so that I am sometimes a little ashamed to confess, before
wise people, that I have a lurking predilection for him (in common
with other naughty ones), and that I like to hear him talk to May
almost as well as she does. 'Come, May!' and up she springs, as
light as a bird. The road is gay now; carts and post-chaises, and
girls in red cloaks, and, afar off, looking almost like a toy, the
coach. It meets us fast and soon. How much happier the walkers
look than the riders--especially the frost-bitten gentleman, and the
shivering lady with the invisible face, sole passengers of that
commodious machine! Hooded, veiled, and bonneted, as she is, one
sees from her attitude how miserable she would look uncovered.

Another pond, and another noise of children. More sliding? Oh no!

This is a sport of higher pretension. Our good neighbour, the
lieutenant, skating, and his own pretty little boys, and two or
three other four-year-old elves, standing on the brink in an ecstasy
of joy and wonder! Oh what happy spectators! And what a happy
performer! They admiring, he admired, with an ardour and sincerity
never excited by all the quadrilles and the spread-eagles of the
Seine and the Serpentine. He really skates well though, and I am
glad I came this way; for, with all the father's feelings sitting
gaily at his heart, it must still gratify the pride of skill to have
one spectator at that solitary pond who has seen skating before.

Now we have reached the trees,--the beautiful trees! never so

beautiful as to-day. Imagine the effect of a straight and regular
double avenue of oaks, nearly a mile long, arching overhead, and
closing into perspective like the roof and columns of a cathedral,
every tree and branch incrusted with the bright and delicate
congelation of hoar-frost, white and pure as snow, delicate and
defined as carved ivory. How beautiful it is, how uniform, how
various, how filling, how satiating to the eye and to the mind--
above all, how melancholy! There is a thrilling awfulness, an
intense feeling of simple power in that naked and colourless beauty,
which falls on the earth like the thoughts of death--death pure, and
glorious, and smiling,--but still death. Sculpture has always the
same effect on my imagination, and painting never. Colour is life.-
-We are now at the end of this magnificent avenue, and at the top of
a steep eminence commanding a wide view over four counties--a
landscape of snow. A deep lane leads abruptly down the hill; a mere
narrow cart-track, sinking between high banks clothed with fern and
furze and low broom, crowned with luxuriant hedgerows, and famous
for their summer smell of thyme. How lovely these banks are now--
the tall weeds and the gorse fixed and stiffened in the hoar-frost,
which fringes round the bright prickly holly, the pendent foliage of
the bramble, and the deep orange leaves of the pollard oaks! Oh,
this is rime in its loveliest form! And there is still a berry here
and there on the holly, 'blushing in its natural coral' through the
delicate tracery, still a stray hip or haw for the birds, who abound
here always. The poor birds, how tame they are, how sadly tame!
There is the beautiful and rare crested wren, 'that shadow of a
bird,' as White of Selborne calls it, perched in the middle of the
hedge, nestling as it were amongst the cold bare boughs, seeking,
poor pretty thing, for the warmth it will not find. And there,
farther on, just under the bank, by the slender runlet, which still
trickles between its transparent fantastic margin of thin ice, as if
it were a thing of life,--there, with a swift, scudding motion,
flits, in short low flights, the gorgeous kingfisher, its
magnificent plumage of scarlet and blue flashing in the sun, like
the glories of some tropical bird. He is come for water to this
little spring by the hillside,--water which even his long bill and
slender head can hardly reach, so nearly do the fantastic forms of
those garland-like icy margins meet over the tiny stream beneath.
It is rarely that one sees the shy beauty so close or so long; and
it is pleasant to see him in the grace and beauty of his natural
liberty, the only way to look at a bird. We used, before we lived
in a street, to fix a little board outside the parlour window, and
cover it with bread crumbs in the hard weather. It was quite
delightful to see the pretty things come and feed, to conquer their
shyness, and do away their mistrust. First came the more social
tribes, 'the robin red-breast and the wren,' cautiously,
suspiciously, picking up a crumb on the wing, with the little keen
bright eye fixed on the window; then they would stop for two pecks;
then stay till they were satisfied. The shyer birds, tamed by their
example, came next; and at last one saucy fellow of a blackbird--a
sad glutton, he would clear the board in two minutes,--used to tap
his yellow bill against the window for more. How we loved the
fearless confidence of that fine, frank-hearted creature! And
surely he loved us. I wonder the practice is not more general.
'May! May! naughty May!' She has frightened away the kingfisher;
and now, in her coaxing penitence, she is covering me with snow.
'Come, pretty May! it is time to go home.'

Thaw.

January 28th.--We have had rain, and snow, and frost, and rain again
four days of absolute confinement. Now it is a thaw and a flood;
but our light gravelly soil, and country boots, and country
hardihood, will carry us through. What a dripping, comfortless day
it is! just like the last days of November: no sun, no sky, gray or
blue; one low, overhanging, dark, dismal cloud, like London smoke;
Mayflower is out coursing too, and Lizzy gone to school. Never
mind. Up the hill again! Walk we must. Oh what a watery world to
look back upon! Thames, Kennet, Loddon--all overflowed; our famous
town, inland once, turned into a sort of Venice; C. park converted
into an island; and the long range of meadows from B. to W. one huge
unnatural lake, with trees growing out of it. Oh what a watery
world!--I will look at it no longer. I will walk on. The road is
alive again. Noise is reborn. Waggons creak, horses splash, carts
rattle, and pattens paddle through the dirt with more than their
usual clink. The common has its old fine tints of green and brown,
and its old variety of inhabitants, horses, cows, sheep, pigs, and
donkeys. The ponds are unfrozen, except where some melancholy piece
of melting ice floats sullenly on the water; and cackling geese and
gabbling ducks have replaced the lieutenant and Jack Rapley. The
avenue is chill and dark, the hedges are dripping, the lanes
knee-deep, and all nature is in a state of 'dissolution and thaw.'

THE FIRST PRIMROSE.

March 6th.--Fine March weather: boisterous, blustering, much wind
and squalls of rain; and yet the sky, where the clouds are swept
away, deliciously blue, with snatches of sunshine, bright, and
clear, and healthful, and the roads, in spite of the slight
glittering showers, crisply dry. Altogether the day is tempting,
very tempting. It will not do for the dear common, that windmill of
a walk; but the close sheltered lanes at the bottom of the hill,
which keep out just enough of the stormy air, and let in all the
sun, will be delightful. Past our old house, and round by the
winding lanes, and the workhouse, and across the lea, and so into
the turnpike-road again,--that is our route for to-day. Forth we
set, Mayflower and I, rejoicing in the sunshine, and still more in
the wind, which gives such an intense feeling of existence, and,
co-operating with brisk motion, sets our blood and our spirits in a
glow. For mere physical pleasure, there is nothing perhaps equal to
the enjoyment of being drawn, in a light carriage, against such a
wind as this, by a blood-horse at his height of speed. Walking
comes next to it; but walking is not quite so luxurious or so
spiritual, not quite so much what one fancies of flying, or being
carried above the clouds in a balloon.

Nevertheless, a walk is a good thing; especially under this southern

hedgerow, where nature is just beginning to live again; the
periwinkles, with their starry blue flowers, and their shining
myrtle-like leaves, garlanding the bushes; woodbines and elder-trees
pushing out their small swelling buds; and grasses and mosses
springing forth in every variety of brown and green. Here we are at
the corner where four lanes meet, or rather where a passable road of
stones and gravel crosses an impassable one of beautiful but
treacherous turf, and where the small white farmhouse, scarcely
larger than a cottage, and the well-stocked rick-yard behind, tell
of comfort and order, but leave all unguessed the great riches of
the master. How he became so rich is almost a puzzle; for, though
the farm be his own, it is not large; and though prudent and frugal
on ordinary occasions, Farmer Barnard is no miser. His horses,
dogs, and pigs are the best kept in the parish,--May herself,
although her beauty be injured by her fatness, half envies the
plight of his bitch Fly: his wife's gowns and shawls cost as much
again as any shawls or gowns in the village; his dinner parties (to
be sure they are not frequent) display twice the ordinary quantity
of good things--two couples of ducks, two dishes of green peas, two
turkey poults, two gammons of bacon, two plum-puddings; moreover, he
keeps a single-horse chaise, and has built and endowed a Methodist
chapel. Yet is he the richest man in these parts. Everything
prospers with him. Money drifts about him like snow. He looks like
a rich man. There is a sturdy squareness of face and figure; a
good-humoured obstinacy; a civil importance. He never boasts of his
wealth, or gives himself undue airs; but nobody can meet him at
market or vestry without finding out immediately that he is the
richest man there. They have no child to all this money; but there
is an adopted nephew, a fine spirited lad, who may, perhaps, some
day or other, play the part of a fountain to the reservoir.

Now turn up the wide road till we come to the open common, with its
park-like trees, its beautiful stream, wandering and twisting along,
and its rural bridge. Here we turn again, past that other white
farmhouse, half hidden by the magnificent elms which stand before
it. Ah! riches dwell not there, but there is found the next best
thing--an industrious and light-hearted poverty. Twenty years ago
Rachel Hilton was the prettiest and merriest lass in the country.
Her father, an old gamekeeper, had retired to a village alehouse,
where his good beer, his social humour, and his black-eyed daughter,
brought much custom. She had lovers by the score; but Joseph White,
the dashing and lively son of an opulent farmer, carried off the
fair Rachel. They married and settled here, and here they live
still, as merrily as ever, with fourteen children of all ages and
sizes, from nineteen years to nineteen months, working harder than
any people in the parish, and enjoying themselves more. I would
match them for labour and laughter against any family in England.
She is a blithe, jolly dame, whose beauty has amplified into
comeliness; he is tall, and thin, and bony, with sinews like
whipcord, a strong lively voice, a sharp weather-beaten face, and
eyes and lips that smile and brighten when he speaks into a most
contagious hilarity. They are very poor, and I often wish them
richer; but I don't know--perhaps it might put them out.

Quite close to Farmer White's is a little ruinous cottage,

white-washed once, and now in a sad state of betweenity, where
dangling stockings and shirts, swelled by the wind, drying in a
neglected garden, give signal of a washerwoman. There dwells, at
present in single blessedness, Betty Adams, the wife of our
sometimes gardener. I never saw any one who so much reminded me in
person of that lady whom everybody knows, Mistress Meg Merrilies;--
as tall, as grizzled, as stately, as dark, as gipsy-looking,
bonneted and gowned like her prototype, and almost as oracular.
Here the resemblance ceases. Mrs. Adams is a perfectly honest,
industrious, painstaking person, who earns a good deal of money by
washing and charing, and spends it in other luxuries than tidiness,-
-in green tea, and gin, and snuff. Her husband lives in a great
family, ten miles off. He is a capital gardener--or rather he would
be so, if he were not too ambitious. He undertakes all things, and
finishes none. But a smooth tongue, a knowing look, and a great
capacity of labour, carry him through. Let him but like his ale and
his master and he will do work enough for four. Give him his own
way, and his full quantum, and nothing comes amiss to him.

Ah, May is bounding forward! Her silly heart leaps at the sight of
the old place--and so in good truth does mine. What a pretty place
it was--or rather, how pretty I thought it! I suppose I should have
thought any place so where I had spent eighteen happy years. But it
was really pretty. A large, heavy, white house, in the simplest
style, surrounded by fine oaks and elms, and tall massy plantations
shaded down into a beautiful lawn by wild overgrown shrubs, bowery
acacias, ragged sweet-briers, promontories of dogwood, and Portugal
laurel, and bays, over-hung by laburnum and bird-cherry; a long
piece of water letting light into the picture, and looking just like
a natural stream, the banks as rude and wild as the shrubbery,
interspersed with broom, and furze, and bramble, and pollard oaks
covered with ivy and honeysuckle; the whole enclosed by an old mossy
park paling, and terminating in a series of rich meadows, richly
planted. This is an exact description of the home which, three
years ago, it nearly broke my heart to leave. What a tearing up by
the root it was! I have pitied cabbage-plants and celery, and all
transplantable things, ever since; though, in common with them, and
with other vegetables, the first agony of the transportation being
over, I have taken such firm and tenacious hold of my new soil, that
I would not for the world be pulled up again, even to be restored to
the old beloved ground;--not even if its beauty were undiminished,
which is by no means the case; for in those three years it has
thrice changed masters, and every successive possessor has brought
the curse of improvement upon the place; so that between filling up
the water to cure dampness, cutting down trees to let in prospects,
planting to keep them out, shutting up windows to darken the inside
of the house (by which means one end looks precisely as an eight of
spades would do that should have the misfortune to lose one of his
corner pips), and building colonnades to lighten the out, added to a
general clearance of pollards, and brambles, and ivy, and
honeysuckles, and park palings, and irregular shrubs, the poor place
is so transmogrified, that if it had its old looking-glass, the
water, back again, it would not know its own face. And yet I love
to haunt round about it: so does May. Her particular attraction is
a certain broken bank full of rabbit burrows, into which she
insinuates her long pliant head and neck, and tears her pretty feet
by vain scratchings: mine is a warm sunny hedgerow, in the same
remote field, famous for early flowers. Never was a spot more
variously flowery: primroses yellow, lilac white, violets of either
hue, cowslips, oxslips, arums, orchises, wild hyacinths, ground ivy,
pansies, strawberries, heart's-ease, formed a small part of the
Flora of that wild hedgerow. How profusely they covered the sunny
open slope under the weeping birch, 'the lady of the woods'--and how
often have I started to see the early innocent brown snake, who
loved the spot as well as I did, winding along the young blossoms,
or rustling amongst the fallen leaves! There are primrose leaves
already, and short green buds, but no flowers; not even in that
furze cradle so full of roots, where they used to blow as in a
basket. No, my May, no rabbits! no primroses! We may as well get
over the gate into the woody winding lane, which will bring us home
again.

Here we are making the best of our way between the old elms that
arch so solemnly over head, dark and sheltered even now. They say
that a spirit haunts this deep pool--a white lady without a head. I
cannot say that I have seen her, often as I have paced this lane at
deep midnight, to hear the nightingales, and look at the
glow-worms;--but there, better and rarer than a thousand ghosts,
dearer even than nightingales or glow-worms, there is a primrose,
the first of the year; a tuft of primroses, springing in yonder
sheltered nook, from the mossy roots of an old willow, and living
again in the clear bright pool. Oh, how beautiful they are--three
fully blown, and two bursting buds! How glad I am I came this way!
They are not to be reached. Even Jack Rapley's love of the
difficult and the unattainable would fail him here: May herself
could not stand on that steep bank. So much the better. Who would
wish to disturb them? There they live in their innocent and
fragrant beauty, sheltered from the storms, and rejoicing in the
sunshine, and looking as if they could feel their happiness. Who
would disturb them? Oh, how glad I am I came this way home!

VIOLETING.

March 27th.--It is a dull gray morning, with a dewy feeling in the

air; fresh, but not windy; cool, but not cold;--the very day for a
person newly arrived from the heat, the glare, the noise, and the
fever of London, to plunge into the remotest labyrinths of the
country, and regain the repose of mind, the calmness of heart, which
has been lost in that great Babel. I must go violeting--it is a
necessity--and I must go alone: the sound of a voice, even my
Lizzy's, the touch of Mayflower's head, even the bounding of her
elastic foot, would disturb the serenity of feeling which I am
trying to recover. I shall go quite alone, with my little basket,
twisted like a bee-hive, which I love so well, because SHE gave it
to me, and kept sacred to violets and to those whom I love; and I
shall get out of the high-road the moment I can. I would not meet
any one just now, even of those whom I best like to meet.

Ha!--Is not that group--a gentleman on a blood-horse, a lady keeping

pace with him so gracefully and easily--see how prettily her veil
waves in the wind created by her own rapid motion!--and that gay,
gallant boy, on the gallant white Arabian, curveting at their side,
but ready to spring before them every instant--is not that
chivalrous-looking party Mr. and Mrs. M. and dear R? No! the
servant is in a different livery. It is some of the ducal family,
and one of their young Etonians. I may go on. I shall meet no one
now; for I have fairly left the road, and am crossing the lea by one
of those wandering paths, amidst the gorse, and the heath, and the
low broom, which the sheep and lambs have made--a path turfy,
elastic, thymy, and sweet, even at this season.

We have the good fortune to live in an unenclosed parish, and may

thank the wise obstinacy of two or three sturdy farmers, and the
lucky unpopularity of a ranting madcap lord of the manor, for
preserving the delicious green patches, the islets of wilderness
amidst cultivation, which form, perhaps, the peculiar beauty of
English scenery. The common that I am passing now--the lea, as it
is called--is one of the loveliest of these favoured spots. It is a
little sheltered scene, retiring, as it were, from the village; sunk
amidst higher lands, hills would be almost too grand a word; edged
on one side by one gay high-road, and intersected by another; and
surrounded by a most picturesque confusion of meadows, cottages,
farms, and orchards; with a great pond in one corner, unusually
bright and clear, giving a delightful cheerfulness and daylight to
the picture. The swallows haunt that pond; so do the children.
There is a merry group round it now; I have seldom seen it without
one. Children love water, clear, bright, sparkling water; it
excites and feeds their curiosity; it is motion and life.

The path that I am treading leads to a less lively spot, to that

large heavy building on one side of the common, whose solid wings,
jutting out far beyond the main body, occupy three sides of a
square, and give a cold, shadowy look to the court. On one side is
a gloomy garden, with an old man digging in it, laid out in straight
dark beds of vegetables, potatoes, cabbages, onions, beans; all
earthy and mouldy as a newly-dug grave. Not a flower or flowering
shrub! Not a rose-tree or currant-bush! Nothing but for sober,
melancholy use. Oh, different from the long irregular slips of the
cottage-gardens, with their gay bunches of polyanthuses and
crocuses, their wallflowers sending sweet odours through the narrow
casement, and their gooseberry-trees bursting into a brilliancy of
leaf, whose vivid greenness has the effect of a blossom on the eye!
Oh, how different! On the other side of this gloomy abode is a
meadow of that deep, intense emerald hue, which denotes the presence
of stagnant water, surrounded by willows at regular distances, and
like the garden, separated from the common by a wide, moat-like
ditch. That is the parish workhouse. All about it is solid,
substantial, useful;--but so dreary! so cold! so dark! There are
children in the court, and yet all is silent. I always hurry past
that place as if it were a prison. Restraint, sickness, age,
extreme poverty, misery, which I have no power to remove or
alleviate,--these are the ideas, the feelings, which the sight of
those walls excites; yet, perhaps, if not certainly, they contain
less of that extreme desolation than the morbid fancy is apt to
paint. There will be found order, cleanliness, food, clothing,
warmth, refuge for the homeless, medicine and attendance for the
sick, rest and sufficiency for old age, and sympathy, the true and
active sympathy which the poor show to the poor, for the unhappy.
There may be worse places than a parish workhouse--and yet I hurry
past it. The feeling, the prejudice, will not be controlled.

The end of the dreary garden edges off into a close-sheltered lane,
wandering and winding, like a rivulet, in gentle 'sinuosities' (to
use a word once applied by Mr. Wilberforce to the Thames at Henley),
amidst green meadows, all alive with cattle, sheep, and beautiful
lambs, in the very spring and pride of their tottering prettiness;
or fields of arable land, more lively still with troops of stooping
bean-setters, women and children, in all varieties of costume and
colour; and ploughs and harrows, with their whistling boys and
steady carters, going through, with a slow and plodding industry,
the main business of this busy season. What work beansetting is!
What a reverse of the position assigned to man to distinguish him
from the beasts of the field! Only think of stooping for six,
eight, ten hours a day, drilling holes in the earth with a little
stick, and then dropping in the beans one by one. They are paid
according to the quantity they plant; and some of the poor women
used to be accused of clumping them--that is to say, of dropping
more than one bean into a hole. It seems to me, considering the
temptation, that not to clump is to be at the very pinnacle of human
virtue.

Another turn in the lane, and we come to the old house standing
amongst the high elms--the old farm-house, which always, I don't
know why, carries back my imagination to Shakspeare's days. It is a
long, low, irregular building, with one room, at an angle from the
house, covered with ivy, fine white-veined ivy; the first floor of
the main building projecting and supported by oaken beams, and one
of the windows below, with its old casement and long narrow panes,
forming the half of a shallow hexagon. A porch, with seats in it,
surmounted by a pinnacle, pointed roofs, and clustered chimneys,
complete the picture! Alas! it is little else but a picture! The
very walls are crumbling to decay under a careless landlord and
ruined tenant.

Now a few yards farther, and I reach the bank. Ah! I smell them
already--their exquisite perfume steams and lingers in this moist,
heavy air. Through this little gate, and along the green south bank
of this green wheat-field, and they burst upon me, the lovely
violets, in tenfold loveliness. The ground is covered with them,
white and purple, enamelling the short dewy grass, looking but the
more vividly coloured under the dull, leaden sky. There they lie by
hundreds, by thousands. In former years I have been used to watch
them from the tiny green bud, till one or two stole into bloom.
They never came on me before in such a sudden and luxuriant glory of
simple beauty,--and I do really owe one pure and genuine pleasure to
feverish London! How beautifully they are placed too, on this
sloping bank, with the palm branches waving over them, full of early
bees, and mixing their honeyed scent with the more delicate violet
odour! How transparent and smooth and lusty are the branches, full
of sap and life! And there, just by the old mossy root, is a superb
tuft of primroses, with a yellow butterfly hovering over them, like
a flower floating on the air. What happiness to sit on this tufty
knoll, and fill my basket with the blossoms! What a renewal of
heart and mind! To inhabit such a scene of peace and sweetness is
again to be fearless, gay, and gentle as a child. Then it is that
thought becomes poetry, and feeling religion. Then it is that we
are happy and good. Oh, that my whole life could pass so, floating
on blissful and innocent sensation, enjoying in peace and gratitude
the common blessings of Nature, thankful above all for the simple
habits, the healthful temperament, which render them so dear! Alas!
who may dare expect a life of such happiness? But I can at least
snatch and prolong the fleeting pleasure, can fill my basket with
pure flowers, and my heart with pure thoughts; can gladden my little
home with their sweetness; can divide my treasures with one, a dear
one, who cannot seek them; can see them when I shut my eyes and
dream of them when I fall asleep.

THE COPSE.

April 18th.--Sad wintry weather; a northeast wind; a sun that puts

out one's eyes, without affording the slightest warmth; dryness that
chaps lips and hands like a frost in December; rain that comes
chilly and arrowy like hail in January; nature at a dead pause; no
seeds up in the garden; no leaves out in the hedgerows; no cowslips
swinging their pretty bells in the fields; no nightingales in the
dingles; no swallows skimming round the great pond; no cuckoos (that
ever I should miss that rascally sonneteer!) in any part.
Nevertheless there is something of a charm in this wintry spring,
this putting-back of the seasons. If the flower-clock must stand
still for a month or two, could it choose a better time than that of
the primroses and violets? I never remember (and for such gauds my
memory, if not very good for aught of wise or useful, may be
trusted) such an affluence of the one or such a duration of the
other. Primrosy is the epithet which this year will retain in my
recollection. Hedge, ditch, meadow, field, even the very paths and
highways, are set with them; but their chief habitat is a certain
copse, about a mile off, where they are spread like a carpet, and
where I go to visit them rather oftener than quite comports with the
dignity of a lady of mature age. I am going thither this very
afternoon, and May and her company are going too.

This Mayflower of mine is a strange animal. Instinct and imitation

make in her an approach to reason which is sometimes almost
startling. She mimics all that she sees us do, with the dexterity
of a monkey, and far more of gravity and apparent purpose; cracks
nuts and eats them; gathers currants and severs them from the stalk
with the most delicate nicety; filches and munches apples and pears;
is as dangerous in an orchard as a schoolboy; smells to flowers;
smiles at meeting; answers in a pretty lively voice when spoken to
(sad pity that the language should be unknown!) and has greatly the
advantage of us in a conversation, inasmuch as our meaning is
certainly clear to her;--all this and a thousand amusing
prettinesses (to say nothing of her canine feat of bringing her game
straight to her master's feet, and refusing to resign it to any hand
but his), does my beautiful greyhound perform untaught, by the mere
effect of imitation and sagacity. Well, May, at the end of the
coursing season, having lost Brush, our old spaniel, her great
friend, and the blue greyhound, Mariette, her comrade and rival,
both of which four-footed worthies were sent out to keep for the
summer, began to find solitude a weary condition, and to look abroad
for company. Now it so happened that the same suspension of sport
which had reduced our little establishment from three dogs to one,
had also dispersed the splendid kennel of a celebrated courser in
our neighbourhood, three of whose finest young dogs came home to
'their walk' (as the sporting phrase goes) at the collarmaker's in
our village. May, accordingly, on the first morning of her solitude
(she had never taken the slightest notice of her neighbours before,
although they had sojourned in our street upwards of a fortnight),
bethought herself of the timely resource offered to her by the
vicinity of these canine beaux, and went up boldly and knocked at
their stable door, which was already very commodiously on the
half-latch. The three dogs came out with much alertness and
gallantry, and May, declining apparently to enter their territories,
brought them off to her own. This manoeuvre has been repeated every
day, with one variation; of the three dogs, the first a brindle, the
second a yellow, and the third a black, the two first only are now
allowed to walk or consort with her, and the last, poor fellow, for
no fault that I can discover except May's caprice, is driven away
not only by the fair lady, but even by his old companions--is, so to
say, sent to Coventry. Of her two permitted followers, the yellow
gentleman, Saladin by name, is decidedly the favourite. He is,
indeed, May's shadow, and will walk with me whether I choose or not.
It is quite impossible to get rid of him unless by discarding Miss
May also;--and to accomplish a walk in the country without her,
would be like an adventure of Don Quixote without his faithful
'squire Sancho.

So forth we set, May and I, and Saladin and the brindle; May and
myself walking with the sedateness and decorum befitting our sex and
age (she is five years old this grass, rising six)--the young
things, for the soldan and the brindle are (not meaning any
disrespect) little better than puppies, frisking and frolicking as
best pleased them.

Our route lay for the first part along the sheltered quiet lanes
which lead to our old habitation; a way never trodden by me without
peculiar and homelike feelings, full of the recollections, the pains
and pleasures, of other days. But we are not to talk sentiment
now;--even May would not understand that maudlin language. We must
get on. What a wintry hedgerow this is for the eighteenth of April!
Primrosy to be sure, abundantly spangled with those stars of the
earth,--but so bare, so leafless, so cold! The wind whistles
through the brown boughs as in winter. Even the early elder shoots,
which do make an approach to springiness, look brown, and the small
leaves of the woodbine, which have also ventured to peep forth, are
of a sad purple, frost-bitten, like a dairymaid's elbows on a snowy
morning. The very birds, in this season of pairing and building,
look chilly and uncomfortable, and their nests!--'Oh, Saladin! come
away from the hedge! Don't you see that what puzzles you and makes
you leap up in the air is a redbreast's nest? Don't you see the
pretty speckled eggs? Don't you hear the poor hen calling as it
were for help? Come here this moment, sir!' And by good luck
Saladin (who for a paynim has tolerable qualities) comes, before he
has touched the nest, or before his playmate the brindle, the less
manageable of the two, has espied it.

Now we go round the corner and cross the bridge, where the common,
with its clear stream winding between clumps of elms, assumes so
park-like an appearance. Who is this approaching so slowly and
majestically, this square bundle of petticoat and cloak, this
road-waggon of a woman? It is, it must be Mrs. Sally Mearing, the
completest specimen within my knowledge of farmeresses (may I be
allowed that innovation in language?) as they were. It can be
nobody else.

Mrs. Sally Mearing, when I first became acquainted with her,

occupied, together with her father (a superannuated man of ninety),
a large farm very near our former habitation. It had been anciently
a great manor-farm or court-house, and was still a stately,
substantial building, whose lofty halls and spacious chambers gave
an air of grandeur to the common offices to which they were applied.
Traces of gilding might yet be seen on the panels which covered the
walls, and on the huge carved chimney-pieces which rose almost to
the ceilings; and the marble tables and the inlaid oak staircase
still spoke of the former grandeur of the court. Mrs. Sally
corresponded well with the date of her mansion, although she
troubled herself little with its dignity. She was thoroughly of the
old school, and had a most comfortable contempt for the new: rose
at four in winter and summer, breakfasted at six, dined at eleven in
the forenoon, supped at five, and was regularly in bed before eight,
except when the hay-time or the harvest imperiously required her to
sit up till sunset, a necessity to which she submitted with no very
good grace. To a deviation from these hours, and to the modern
iniquities of white aprons, cotton stockings, and muslin
handkerchiefs (Mrs. Sally herself always wore check, black worsted,
and a sort of yellow compound which she was wont to call 'susy'),
together with the invention of drill plough and thrashing-machines,
and other agricultural novelties, she failed not to attribute all
the mishaps or misdoings of the whole parish. The last-mentioned
discovery especially aroused her indignation. Oh to hear her
descant on the merits of the flail, wielded by a stout right arm,
such as she had known in her youth (for by her account there was as
great a deterioration in bones and sinews as in the other implements
of husbandry), was enough to make the very inventor break his
machine. She would even take up her favourite instrument, and
thrash the air herself by way of illustrating her argument, and, to
say truth, few men in these degenerate days could have matched the
stout, brawny, muscular limb which Mrs. Sally displayed at
sixty-five.

In spite of this contumacious rejection of agricultural

improvements, the world went well with her at Court Farm. A good
landlord, an easy rent, incessant labour, unremitting frugality, and
excellent times, insured a regular though moderate profit; and she
lived on, grumbling and prospering, flourishing and complaining,
till two misfortunes befell her at once--her father died, and her
lease expired. The loss of her father although a bedridden man,
turned of ninety, who could not in the course of nature have been
expected to live long, was a terrible shock to a daughter, who was
not so much younger as to be without fears for her own life, and who
had besides been so used to nursing the good old man, and looking to
his little comforts, that she missed him as a mother would miss an
ailing child. The expiration of the lease was a grievance and a
puzzle of a different nature. Her landlord would have willingly
retained his excellent tenant, but not on the terms on which she
then held the land, which had not varied for fifty years; so that
poor Mrs. Sally had the misfortune to find rent rising and prices
sinking both at the same moment--a terrible solecism in political
economy. Even this, however, I believe she would have endured,
rather than have quitted the house where she was born, and to which
all her ways and notions were adapted, had not a priggish steward,
as much addicted to improvement and reform as she was to precedent
and established usages, insisted on binding her by lease to spread a
certain number of loads of chalk on every field. This tremendous
innovation, for never had that novelty in manure whitened the crofts
and pightles of Court Farm, decided her at once. She threw the
proposals into the fire, and left the place in a week.

Her choice of a habitation occasioned some wonder, and much

amusement in our village world. To be sure, upon the verge of
seventy, an old maid may be permitted to dispense with the more
rigid punctilio of her class, but Mrs. Sally had always been so
tenacious on the score of character, so very a prude, so determined
an avoider of the 'men folk' (as she was wont contemptuously to call
them), that we all were conscious of something like astonishment, on
finding that she and her little handmaid had taken up their abode in
one end of a spacious farmhouse belonging to the bluff old bachelor,
George Robinson, of the Lea. Now Farmer Robinson was quite as
notorious for his aversion to petticoated things, as Mrs. Sally for
her hatred to the unfeathered bipeds who wear doublet and hose, so
that there was a little astonishment in that quarter too, and plenty
of jests, which the honest farmer speedily silenced, by telling all
who joked on the subject that he had given his lodger fair warning,
that, let people say what they would, he was quite determined not to
marry her: so that if she had any views that way, it would be
better for her to go elsewhere. This declaration, which must be
admitted to have been more remarkable for frankness than civility,
made, however, no ill impression on Mrs. Sally. To the farmer's she
went, and at his house she lives still, with her little maid, her
tabby cat, a decrepit sheep-dog, and much of the lumber of Court
Farm, which she could not find in her heart to part from. There she
follows her old ways and her old hours, untempted by matrimony, and
unassailed (as far as I hear) by love or by scandal, with no other
grievance than an occasional dearth of employment for herself and
her young lass (even pewter dishes do not always want scouring), and
now and then a twinge of the rheumatism.

Here she is, that good relique of the olden time--for, in spite of
her whims and prejudices, a better and a kinder woman never lived--
here she is, with the hood of her red cloak pulled over her close
black bonnet, of that silk which once (it may be presumed) was
fashionable, since it is still called mode, and her whole stout
figure huddled up in a miscellaneous and most substantial covering
of thick petticoats, gowns, aprons, shawls, and cloaks--a weight
which it requires the strength of a thrasher to walk under--here she
is, with her square honest visage, and her loud frank voice;--and we
hold a pleasant disjointed chat of rheumatisms and early chickens,
bad weather, and hats with feathers in them;--the last exceedingly
sore subject being introduced by poor Jane Davis (a cousin of Mrs.
Sally), who, passing us in a beaver bonnet, on her road from school,
stopped to drop her little curtsy, and was soundly scolded for her
civility. Jane, who is a gentle, humble, smiling lass, about twelve
years old, receives so many rebukes from her worthy relative, and
bears them so meekly, that I should not wonder if they were to be
followed by a legacy: I sincerely wish they may. Well, at last we
said good-bye; when, on inquiring my destination, and hearing that I
was bent
to the ten-acre copse (part of the farm which she ruled so long),
she stopped me to tell a dismal story of two sheep-stealers who,
sixty years ago, were found hidden in that copse, and only taken
after great difficulty and resistance, and the maiming of a
peace-officer.--'Pray don't go there, Miss! For mercy's sake don't
be so venturesome! Think if they should kill you!' were the last
words of Mrs. Sally.

Many thanks for her care and kindness! But, without being at all
foolhardy in general, I have no great fear of the sheep-stealers of
sixty years ago. Even if they escaped hanging for that exploit, I
should greatly doubt their being in case to attempt another. So on
we go: down the short shady lane, and out on the pretty retired
green, shut in by fields and hedgerows, which we must cross to reach
the copse. How lively this green nook is to-day, half covered with
cows, and horses, and sheep! And how glad these frolicsome
greyhounds are to exchange the hard gravel of the high road for this
pleasant short turf, which seems made for their gambols! How
beautifully they are at play, chasing each other round and round in
lessening circles, darting off at all kinds of angles, crossing and
recrossing May, and trying to win her sedateness into a game at
romps, turning round on each other with gay defiance, pursuing the
cows and the colts, leaping up as if to catch the crows in their
flight;--all in their harmless and innocent--'Ah, wretches!
villains! rascals! four-footed mischiefs! canine plagues! Saladin!
Brindle!'--They are after the sheep--'Saladin, I say!'--They have
actually singled out that pretty spotted lamb--'Brutes, if I catch
you! Saladin! Brindle!' We shall be taken up for sheep-stealing
presently ourselves. They have chased the poor little lamb into a
ditch, and are mounting guard over it, standing at bay.--'Ah,
wretches, I have you now! for shame, Saladin! Get away, Brindle!
See how good May is. Off with you, brutes! For shame! For shame!'
and brandishing a handkerchief, which could hardly be an efficient
instrument of correction, I succeeded in driving away the two
puppies, who after all meant nothing more than play, although it was
somewhat rough, and rather too much in the style of the old fable of
the boys and the frogs. May is gone after them, perhaps to scold
them: for she has been as grave as a judge during the whole
proceeding, keeping ostentatiously close to me, and taking no part
whatever in the mischief.

The poor little pretty lamb! here it lies on the bank quite
motionless, frightened I believe to death, for certainly those
villains never touched it. It does not stir. Does it breathe? Oh
yes, it does! It is alive, safe enough. Look, it opens its eyes,
and, finding the coast clear and its enemies far away, it springs up
in a moment and gallops to its dam, who has stood bleating the whole
time at a most respectful distance. Who would suspect a lamb of so
much simple cunning? I really thought the pretty thing was dead--
and now how glad the ewe is to recover her curling spotted little
one! How fluttered they look! Well! this adventure has flurried me
too; between fright and running, I warrant you my heart beats as
fast as the lamb's.

Ah! here is the shameless villain Saladin, the cause of the

commotion, thrusting his slender nose into my hand to beg pardon and
make up! 'Oh wickedest of soldans! Most iniquitous pagan! Soul of
a Turk!'--but there is no resisting the good-humoured creature's
penitence. I must pat him. 'There! there! Now we will go to the
copse; I am sure we shall find no worse malefactors than ourselves--
shall we, May?--and the sooner we get out of sight of the sheep the
better; for Brindle seems meditating another attack. Allons,
messieurs, over this gate, across this meadow, and here is the
copse.'

How boldly that superb ash-tree with its fine silver bark rises from
the bank, and what a fine entrance it makes with the holly beside
it, which also deserves to be called a tree! But here we are in the
copse. Ah! only one half of the underwood was cut last year, and
the other is at its full growth: hazel, brier, woodbine, bramble,
forming one impenetrable thicket, and almost uniting with the lower
branches of the elms, and oaks, and beeches, which rise at regular
distances overhead. No foot can penetrate that dense and thorny
entanglement; but there is a walk all round by the side of the wide
sloping bank, walk and bank and copse carpeted with primroses, whose
fresh and balmy odour impregnates the very air. Oh how exquisitely
beautiful! and it is not the primroses only, those gems of flowers,
but the natural mosaic of which they form a part; that network of
ground-ivy, with its lilac blossoms and the subdued tint of its
purplish leaves, those rich mosses, those enamelled wild hyacinths,
those spotted arums, and above all those wreaths of ivy linking all
those flowers together with chains of leaves more beautiful than
blossoms, whose white veins seem swelling amidst the deep green or
splendid brown;--it is the whole earth that is so beautiful! Never
surely were primroses so richly set, and never did primroses better
deserve such a setting. There they are of their own lovely yellow,
the hue to which they have given a name, the exact tint of the
butterfly that overhangs them (the first I have seen this year! can
spring really be coming at last?)--sprinkled here and there with
tufts of a reddish purple, and others of the purest white, as some
accident of soil affects that strange and inscrutable operation of
nature, the colouring of flowers. Oh how fragrant they are, and how
pleasant it is to sit in this sheltered copse, listening to the fine
creaking of the wind amongst the branches, the most unearthly of
sounds, with this gay tapestry under our feet, and the wood-pigeons
flitting from tree to tree, and mixing the deep note of love with
the elemental music.

Yes! spring is coming. Wood-pigeons, butterflies, and sweet

flowers, all give token of the sweetest of the seasons. Spring is
coming. The hazel stalks are swelling and putting forth their pale
tassels, the satin palms with their honeyed odours are out on the
willow, and the last lingering winter berries are dropping from the
hawthorn, and making way for the bright and blossomy leaves.

THE WOOD.

April 20th.--Spring is actually come now, with the fulness and

almost the suddenness of a northern summer. To-day is completely
April;--clouds and sunshine, wind and showers; blossoms on the
trees, grass in the fields, swallows by the ponds, snakes in the
hedgerows, nightingales in the thickets, and cuckoos everywhere. My
young friend Ellen G. is going with me this evening to gather
wood-sorrel. She never saw that most elegant plant, and is so
delicate an artist that the introduction will be a mutual benefit;
Ellen will gain a subject worthy of her pencil, and the pretty weed
will live;--no small favour to a flower almost as transitory as the
gum cistus: duration is the only charm which it wants, and that
Ellen will give it. The weather is, to be sure, a little
threatening, but we are not people to mind the weather when we have
an object in view; we shall certainly go in quest of the
wood-sorrel, and will take May, provided we can escape May's
followers; for since the adventure of the lamb, Saladin has had an
affair with a gander, furious in defence of his goslings, in which
rencontre the gander came off conqueror; and as geese abound in the
wood to which we are going (called by the country people the Pinge),
and the victory may not always incline to the right side, I should
be very sorry to lead the Soldan to fight his battles over again.
We will take nobody but May.

So saying, we proceeded on our way through winding lanes, between

hedgerows tenderly green, till we reached the hatch-gate, with the
white cottage beside it embosomed in fruit-trees, which forms the
entrance to the Pinge, and in a moment the whole scene was before
our eyes.

'Is not this beautiful, Ellen?' The answer could hardly be other
than a glowing rapid 'Yes!'--A wood is generally a pretty place; but
this wood--Imagine a smaller forest, full of glades and sheep-walks,
surrounded by irregular cottages with their blooming orchards, a
clear stream winding about the brakes, and a road intersecting it,
and giving life and light to the picture; and you will have a faint
idea of the Pinge. Every step was opening a new point of view, a
fresh combination of glade and path and thicket. The accessories
too were changing every moment. Ducks, geese, pigs, and children,
giving way, as we advanced into the wood, to sheep and forest
ponies; and they again disappearing as we became more entangled in
its mazes, till we heard nothing but the song of the nightingale,
and saw only the silent flowers.

What a piece of fairy land! The tall elms overhead just bursting
into tender vivid leaf, with here and there a hoary oak or a
silver-barked beech, every twig swelling with the brown buds, and
yet not quite stripped of the tawny foliage of autumn; tall hollies
and hawthorn beneath, with their crisp brilliant leaves mixed with
the white blossoms of the sloe, and woven together with garlands of
woodbines and wild-briers;--what a fairy land!
Primroses, cowslips, pansies, and the regular open-eyed white
blossom of the wood anemone (or, to use the more elegant Hampshire
name, the windflower), were set under our feet as thick as daisies
in a meadow; but the pretty weed that we came to seek was coyer; and
Ellen began to fear that we had mistaken the place or the season.--
At last she had herself the pleasure of finding it under a brake of
holly--'Oh, look! look! I am sure that this is the wood-sorrel!
Look at the pendent white flower, shaped like a snowdrop and veined
with purple streaks, and the beautiful trefoil leaves folded like a
heart,--some, the young ones, so vividly yet tenderly green that the
foliage of the elm and the hawthorn would show dully at their side,-
-others of a deeper tint, and lined, as it were, with a rich and
changeful purple!--Don't you see them?' pursued my dear young
friend, who is a delightful piece of life and sunshine, and was half
inclined to scold me for the calmness with which, amused by her
enthusiasm, I stood listening to her ardent exclamations--'Don't you
see them? Oh how beautiful! and in what quantity! what profusion!
See how the dark shade of the holly sets off the light and delicate
colouring of the flower!--And see that other bed of them springing
from the rich moss in the roots of that old beech-tree! Pray, let
us gather some. Here are baskets.' So, quickly and carefully we
began gathering, leaves, blossoms, roots and all, for the plant is
so fragile that it will not brook separation;--quickly and carefully
we gathered, encountering divers petty misfortunes in spite of all
our care, now caught by the veil in a holly bush, now hitching our
shawls in a bramble, still gathering on, in spite of scratched
fingers, till we had nearly filled our baskets and began to talk of
our departure:--

'But where is May? May! May! No going home without her. May!
Here she comes galloping, the beauty!'--(Ellen is almost as fond of
May as I am.)--'What has she got in her mouth? that rough, round,
brown substance which she touches so tenderly? What can it be? A
bird's nest? Naughty May!'

'No! as I live, a hedgehog! Look, Ellen, how it has coiled itself

into a thorny ball! Off with it, May! Don't bring it to me!'--And
May, somewhat reluctant to part with her prickly prize, however
troublesome of carriage, whose change of shape seemed to me to have
puzzled her sagacity more than any event I ever witnessed, for in
general she has perfectly the air of understanding all that is going
forward--May at last dropt the hedgehog; continuing, however, to pat
it with her delicate cat-like paw, cautiously and daintily applied,
and caught back suddenly and rapidly after every touch, as if her
poor captive had been a red-hot coal. Finding that these pats
entirely failed in solving the riddle (for the hedgehog shammed
dead, like the lamb the other day, and appeared entirely
motionless), she gave him so spirited a nudge with her pretty black
nose, that she not only turned him over, but sent him rolling some
little way along the turfy path,--an operation which that sagacious
quadruped endured with the most perfect passiveness, the most
admirable non-resistance. No wonder that May's discernment was at
fault, I myself, if I had not been aware of the trick, should have
said that the ugly rough thing which she was trundling along, like a
bowl or a cricket-ball, was an inanimate substance, something devoid
of sensation and of will. At last my poor pet, thoroughly perplexed
and tired out, fairly relinquished the contest, and came slowly
away, turning back once or twice to look at the object of her
curiosity, as if half inclined to return and try the event of
another shove. The sudden flight of a wood-pigeon effectually
diverted her attention; and Ellen amused herself by fancying how the
hedgehog was scuttling away, till our notice was also attracted by a
very different object.

We had nearly threaded the wood, and were approaching an open grove
of magnificent oaks on the other side, when sounds other than of
nightingales burst on our ear, the deep and frequent strokes of the
woodman's axe, and emerging from the Pinge we discovered the havoc
which that axe had committed. Above twenty of the finest trees lay
stretched on the velvet turf. There they lay in every shape and
form of devastation: some, bare trunks stripped ready for the
timber carriage, with the bark built up in long piles at the side;
some with the spoilers busy about them, stripping, hacking, hewing;
others with their noble branches, their brown and fragrant shoots
all fresh as if they were alive--majestic corses, the slain of
to-day! The grove was like a field of battle. The young lads who
were stripping the bark, the very children who were picking up the
chips, seemed awed and silent, as if conscious that death was around
them. The nightingales sang faintly and interruptedly--a few low
frightened notes like a requiem.

Ah! here we are at the very scene of murder, the very tree that they
are felling; they have just hewn round the trunk with those
slaughtering axes, and are about to saw it asunder. After all, it
is a fine and thrilling operation, as the work of death usually is.
Into how grand an attitude was that young man thrown as he gave the
final strokes round the root; and how wonderful is the effect of
that supple and apparently powerless saw, bending like a riband, and
yet overmastering that giant of the woods, conquering and
overthrowing that thing of life! Now it has passed half through the
trunk, and the woodman has begun to calculate which way the tree
will fall; he drives a wedge to direct its course;--now a few more
movements of the noiseless saw; and then a larger wedge. See how
the branches tremble! Hark how the trunk begins to crack! Another
stroke of the huge hammer on the wedge, and the tree quivers, as
with a mortal agony, shakes, reels, and falls. How slow, and
solemn, and awful it is! How like to death, to human death in its
grandest form! Caesar in the Capitol, Seneca in the bath, could not
fall more sublimely than that oak.

Even the heavens seem to sympathise with the devastation. The

clouds have gathered into one thick low canopy, dark and vapoury as
the smoke which overhangs London; the setting sun is just gleaming
underneath with a dim and bloody glare, and the crimson rays
spreading upward with a lurid and portentous grandeur, a subdued and
dusky glow, like the light reflected on the sky from some vast
conflagration. The deep flush fades away, and the rain begins to
descend; and we hurry homeward rapidly, yet sadly, forgetful alike
of the flowers, the hedgehog, and the wetting, thinking and talking
only of the fallen tree.

THE DELL.
May 2nd.--A delicious evening;--bright sunshine; light summer air; a
sky almost cloudless; and a fresh yet delicate verdure on the hedges
and in the fields;--an evening that seems made for a visit to my
newly-discovered haunt, the mossy dell, one of the most beautiful
spots in the neighbourhood, which after passing, times out of
number, the field which it terminates, we found out about two months
ago from the accident of May's killing a rabbit there. May has had
a fancy for the place ever since; and so have I.

Thither accordingly we bend our way;--through the village;--up the

hill;--along the common;--past the avenue;--across the bridge; and
by the hill. How deserted the road is to-night! We have not seen a
single acquaintance, except poor blind Robert, laden with his sack
of grass plucked from the hedges, and the little boy that leads him.
A singular division of labour! Little Jem guides Robert to the
spots where the long grass grows, and tells him where it is most
plentiful; and then the old man cuts it close to the roots, and
between them they fill the sack, and sell the contents in the
village. Half the cows in the street--for our baker, our
wheelwright, and our shoemaker has each his Alderney--owe the best
part of their maintenance to blind Robert's industry.

Here we are at the entrance of the cornfield which leads to the

dell, and which commands so fine a view of the Loddon, the mill, the
great farm, with its picturesque outbuildings, and the range of
woody hills beyond. It is impossible not to pause a moment at that
gate, the landscape, always beautiful, is so suited to the season
and the hour,--so bright, and gay, and spring-like. But May, who
has the chance of another rabbit in her pretty head, has galloped
forward to the dingle, and poor May, who follows me so faithfully in
all my wanderings, has a right to a little indulgence in hers. So
to the dingle we go.

At the end of the field, which when seen from the road seems
terminated by a thick dark coppice, we come suddenly to the edge of
a ravine, on one side fringed with a low growth of alder, birch, and
willow, on the other mossy, turfy, and bare, or only broken by
bright tufts of blossomed broom. One or two old pollards almost
conceal the winding road that leads down the descent, by the side of
which a spring as bright as crystal runs gurgling along. The dell
itself is an irregular piece of broken ground, in some parts very
deep, intersected by two or three high banks of equal irregularity,
now abrupt and bare, and rocklike, now crowned with tufts of the
feathery willow or magnificent old thorns. Everywhere the earth is
covered by short, fine turf, mixed with mosses, soft, beautiful, and
various, and embossed with the speckled leaves and lilac flowers of
the arum, the paler blossoms of the common orchis, the enamelled
blue of the wild hyacinth, so splendid in this evening light, and
large tufts of oxslips and cowslips rising like nosegays from the
short turf.

The ground on the other side of the dell is much lower than the
field through which we came, so that it is mainly to the
labyrinthine intricacy of these high banks that it owes its singular
character of wildness and variety. Now we seem hemmed in by those
green cliffs, shut out from all the world, with nothing visible but
those verdant mounds and the deep blue sky; now by some sudden turn
we get a peep at an adjoining meadow, where the sheep are lying,
dappling its sloping surface like the small clouds on the summer
heaven. Poor harmless, quiet creatures, how still they are! Some
socially lying side by side; some grouped in threes and fours; some
quite apart. Ah! there are lambs amongst them--pretty, pretty
lambs--nestled in by their mothers. Soft, quiet, sleepy things!
Not all so quiet, though! There is a party of these young lambs as
wide awake as heart can desire; half a dozen of them playing
together, frisking, dancing, leaping, butting, and crying in the
young voice, which is so pretty a diminutive of the full-grown
bleat. How beautiful they are with their innocent spotted faces,
their mottled feet, their long curly tails, and their light flexible
forms, frolicking like so many kittens, but with a gentleness, an
assurance of sweetness and innocence, which no kitten, nothing that
ever is to be a cat, can have. How complete and perfect is their
enjoyment of existence! Ah! little rogues! your play has been too
noisy; you have awakened your mammas; and two or three of the old
ewes are getting up; and one of them marching gravely to the troop
of lambs has selected her own, given her a gentle butt, and trotted
off; the poor rebuked lamb following meekly, but every now and then
stopping and casting a longing look at its playmates; who, after a
moment's awed pause, had resumed their gambols; whilst the stately
dame every now and then looked back in her turn, to see that her
little one was following. At last she lay down, and the lamb by her
side. I never saw so pretty a pastoral scene in my life.*

*I have seen one which affected me much more. Walking in the

Church-lane with one of the young ladies of the vicarage, we met a
large flock of sheep, with the usual retinue of shepherds and dogs.
Lingering after them and almost out of sight, we encountered a
straggling ewe, now trotting along, now walking, and every now and
then stopping to look back, and bleating. A little behind her came
a lame lamb, bleating occasionally, as if in answer to its dam, and
doing its very best to keep up with her. It was a lameness of both
the fore-feet; the knees were bent, and it seemed to walk on the
very edge of the hoof--on tip-toe, if I may venture such an
expression. My young friend thought that the lameness proceeded
from original malformation, I am rather of opinion that it was
accidental, and that the poor creature was wretchedly foot-sore.
However that might be, the pain and difficulty with which it took
every step were not to be mistaken; and the distress and fondness of
the mother, her perplexity as the flock passed gradually out of
sight, the effort with which the poor lamb contrived to keep up a
sort of trot, and their mutual calls and lamentations were really so
affecting, that Ellen and I, although not at all lachrymose sort of
people, had much ado not to cry. We could not find a boy to carry
the lamb, which was too big for us to manage;--but I was quite sure
that the ewe would not desert it, and as the dark was coming on, we
both trusted that the shepherds on folding their flock would miss
them and return for them;--and so I am happy to say it proved.

Another turning of the dell gives a glimpse of the dark coppice by

which it is backed, and from which we are separated by some marshy,
rushy ground, where the springs have formed into a pool, and where
the moor-hen loves to build her nest. Ay, there is one scudding
away now;--I can hear her plash into the water, and the rustling of
her wings amongst the rushes. This is the deepest part of the wild
dingle. How uneven the ground is! Surely these excavations, now so
thoroughly clothed with vegetation, must originally have been huge
gravel pits; there is no other way of accounting for the labyrinth,
for they do dig gravel in such capricious meanders; but the quantity
seems incredible. Well! there is no end of guessing! We are
getting amongst the springs, and must turn back. Round this corner,
where on ledges like fairy terraces the orchises and arums grow, and
we emerge suddenly on a new side of the dell, just fronting the
small homestead of our good neighbour Farmer Allen.

This rustic dwelling belongs to what used to be called in this part

of the country 'a little bargain': thirty or forty acres, perhaps,
of arable land, which the owner and his sons cultivated themselves,
whilst the wife and daughters assisted in the husbandry, and eked
out the slender earnings by the produce of the dairy, the poultry
yard, and the orchard;--an order of cultivators now passing rapidly
away, but in which much of the best part of the English character,
its industry, its frugality, its sound sense, and its kindness might
be found. Farmer Allen himself is an excellent specimen, the
cheerful venerable old man with his long white hair, and his bright
grey eye, and his wife is a still finer. They have had a hard
struggle to win through the world and keep their little property
undivided; but good management and good principles, and the
assistance afforded them by an admirable son, who left our village a
poor 'prentice boy, and is now a partner in a great house in London
have enabled them to overcome all the difficulties of these trying
times, and they are now enjoying the peaceful evenings of a
well-spent life as free from care and anxiety as their best friends
could desire.

Ah! there is Mr. Allen in the orchard, the beautiful orchard, with
its glorious gardens of pink and white, its pearly pear-blossoms and
coral apple-buds. What a flush of bloom it is! How brightly
delicate it appears, thrown into strong relief by the dark house and
the weather-stained barn, in this soft evening light! The very
grass is strewed with the snowy petals of the pear and the cherry.
And there sits Mrs. Allen, feeding her poultry, with her three
little grand-daughters from London, pretty fairies from three years
old to five (only two-and-twenty months elapsed between the birth of
the eldest and the youngest) playing round her feet.

Mrs. Allen, my dear Mrs. Allen, has been that rare thing a beauty,
and although she be now an old woman I had almost said that she is
so still. Why should I not say so? Nobleness of feature and
sweetness of expression are surely as delightful in age as in youth.
Her face and figure are much like those which are stamped indelibly
on the memory of every one who ever saw that grand specimen of
woman--Mrs. Siddons. The outline of Mrs. Allen's face is exactly
the same; but there is more softness, more gentleness, a more
feminine composure in the eye and in the smile. Mrs. Allen never
played Lady Macbeth. Her hair, almost as black as at twenty, is
parted on her large fair forehead, and combed under her exquisitely
neat and snowy cap; a muslin neckerchief, a grey stuff gown and a
white apron complete the picture.

There she sits under an old elder-tree which flings its branches
over her like a canopy, whilst the setting sun illumines her
venerable figure and touches the leaves with an emerald light; there
she sits, placid and smiling, with her spectacles in her hand and a
measure of barley on her lap, into which the little girls are
dipping their chubby hands and scattering the corn amongst the ducks
and chickens with unspeakable glee. But those ingrates the poultry
don't seem so pleased and thankful as they ought to be; they
mistrust their young feeders. All domestic animals dislike
children, partly from an instinctive fear of their tricks and their
thoughtlessness; partly, I suspect, from jealousy. Jealousy seems a
strange tragic passion to attribute to the inmates of the basse
cour,--but only look at that strutting fellow of a bantam cock
(evidently a favourite), who sidles up to his old mistress with an
air half affronted and half tender, turning so scornfully from the
barley-corns which Annie is flinging towards him, and say if he be
not as jealous as Othello? Nothing can pacify him but Mrs. Allen's
notice and a dole from her hand. See, she is calling to him and
feeding him, and now how he swells out his feathers, and flutters
his wings, and erects his glossy neck, and struts and crows and
pecks, proudest and happiest of bantams, the pet and glory of the
poultry yard!

In the meantime my own pet May, who has all this while been peeping
into every hole, and penetrating every nook and winding of the dell,
in hopes to find another rabbit, has returned to my side, and is
sliding her snake-like head into my hand, at once to invite the
caress which she likes so well, and to intimate, with all due
respect, that it is time to go home. The setting sun gives the same
warning; and in a moment we are through the dell, the field, and the
gate, past the farm and the mill, and hanging over the bridge that
crosses the Loddon river.

What a sunset! how golden! how beautiful! The sun just

disappearing, and the narrow liny clouds, which a few minutes ago
lay like soft vapoury streaks along the horizon, lighted up with a
golden splendour that the eye can scarcely endure, and those still
softer clouds which floated above them wreathing and curling into a
thousand fantastic forms, as thin and changeful as summer smoke, now
defined and deepened into grandeur, and edged with ineffable,
insufferable light! Another minute and the brilliant orb totally
disappears, and the sky above grows every moment more varied and
more beautiful as the dazzling golden lines are mixed with glowing
red and gorgeous purple, dappled with small dark specks, and mingled
with such a blue as the egg of the hedge-sparrow. To look up at
that glorious sky, and then to see that magnificent picture
reflected in the clear and lovely Loddon water, is a pleasure never
to be described and never forgotten. My heart swells and my eyes
fill as I write of it, and think of the immeasurable majesty of
nature, and the unspeakable goodness of God, who has spread an
enjoyment so pure, so peaceful, and so intense before the meanest
and the lowliest of His creatures.

THE COWSLIP-BALL.

May 16th.--There are moments in life when, without any visible or

immediate cause, the spirits sink and fail, as it were, under the
mere pressure of existence: moments of unaccountable depression,
when one is weary of one's very thoughts, haunted by images that
will not depart--images many and various, but all painful; friends
lost, or changed, or dead; hopes disappointed even in their
accomplishment; fruitless regrets, powerless wishes, doubt and fear,
and self-distrust, and self-disapprobation. They who have known
these feelings (and who is there so happy as not to have known some
of them?) will understand why Alfieri became powerless, and
Froissart dull; and why even needle-work, the most effectual
sedative, that grand soother and composer of woman's distress, fails
to comfort me to-day. I will go out into the air this cool,
pleasant afternoon, and try what that will do. I fancy that
exercise or exertion of any kind, is the true specific for
nervousness. 'Fling but a stone, the giant dies.' I will go to the
meadows, the beautiful meadows! and I will have my materials of
happiness, Lizzy and May, and a basket for flowers, and we will make
a cowslip-ball. 'Did you ever see a cowslip-ball, my Lizzy?'--
'No.'--'Come away, then; make haste! run, Lizzy!'

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,
Lizzy; over the gate; never mind the cows; they are quiet enough.'--
'I don't mind 'em,' said Miss Lizzy, 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, Lizzy;
but let them alone, and don't chase the turkey-cock. Come to me, my
dear!' and, for a wonder, Lizzy 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. Out he sallied,
growling, from the depth of his kennel, erecting his tail, and
shaking his long chain. May's attention was instantly diverted from
the sow to this new playmate, friend or foe, she cared not which;
and he of the kennel, seeing his charge unhurt, and out of danger,
was at leisure to observe the charms of his fair enemy, as she
frolicked round him, always beyond the reach of his chain, yet
always, with the natural instinctive coquetry of her sex, alluring
him to the pursuit which she knew to be vain. I never saw a
prettier flirtation. At last the noble animal, wearied out, retired
to the inmost recesses of his habitation, and would not even
approach her when she stood right before the entrance. 'You are
properly served, May. Come along, Lizzy. Across this wheatfield,
and now over the gate. Stop! let me lift you down. No jumping, no
breaking of necks, Lizzy!' And here we are in the meadows, and out
of the world. Robinson Crusoe, in his lonely island, had scarcely a
more complete, or a more beautiful solitude.

These meadows consist of a double row of small enclosures of rich

grass-land, a mile or two in length, sloping down from high arable
grounds on either side, to a little nameless brook that winds
between them with a course which, in its infinite variety,
clearness, and rapidity, seems to emulate the bold rivers of the
north, of whom, far more than of our lazy southern streams, our
rivulet presents a miniature likeness. Never was water more
exquisitely tricksy:--now darting over the bright pebbles, sparkling
and flashing in the light with a bubbling music, as sweet and wild
as the song of the woodlark; now stretching quietly along, giving
back the rich tufts of the golden marsh-marigolds which grow on its
margin; now sweeping round a fine reach of green grass, rising
steeply into a high mound, a mimic promontory, whilst the other side
sinks softly away, like some tiny bay, and the water flows between,
so clear, so wide, so shallow, that Lizzy, longing for adventure, is
sure she could cross unwetted; now dashing through two sand-banks, a
torrent deep and narrow, which May clears at a bound; now sleeping,
half hidden, beneath the alders, and hawthorns, and wild roses, with
which the banks are so profusely and variously fringed, whilst
flags,* lilies, and other aquatic plants, almost cover the surface
of the stream. In good truth, it is a beautiful brook, and one that
Walton himself might have sitten by and loved, for trout are there;
we see them as they dart up the stream, and hear and start at the
sudden plunge when they spring to the surface for the summer flies.
Izaak Walton would have loved our brook and our quiet meadows; they
breathe the very spirit of his own peacefulness, a soothing quietude
that sinks into the soul. There is no path through them, not one;
we might wander a whole spring day, and not see a trace of human
habitation. They belong to a number of small proprietors, who allow
each other access through their respective grounds, from pure
kindness and neighbourly feeling; a privilege never abused: and the
fields on the other side of the water are reached by a rough plank,
or a tree thrown across, or some such homely bridge. We ourselves
possess one of the most beautiful; so that the strange pleasure of
property, that instinct which makes Lizzy delight in her broken
doll, and May in the bare bone which she has pilfered from the
kennel of her recreant admirer of Newfoundland, is added to the
other charms of this enchanting scenery; a strange pleasure it is,
when one so poor as I can feel it! Perhaps it is felt most by the
poor, with the rich it may be less intense--too much diffused and
spread out, becoming thin by expansion, like leaf-gold; the little
of the poor may be not only more precious, but more pleasant to
them: certain that bit of grassy and blossomy earth, with its green
knolls and tufted bushes, its old pollards wreathed with ivy, and
its bright and babbling waters, is very dear to me. But I must
always have loved these meadows, so fresh, and cool, and delicious
to the eye and to the tread, full of cowslips, and of all vernal
flowers: Shakspeare's 'Song of Spring' bursts irrepressibly from
our lips as we step on them.

*Walking along these meadows one bright sunny afternoon, a year or

two back, and rather later in the season, I had an opportunity of
noticing a curious circumstance in natural history. Standing close
to the edge of the stream, I remarked a singular appearance on a
large tuft of flags. It looked like bunches of flowers, the leaves
of which seemed dark, yet transparent, intermingled with brilliant
tubes of bright blue or shining green. On examining this phenomenon
more closely, it turned out to be several clusters of dragon-flies,
just emerged from their deformed chrysalis state, and still torpid
and motionless from the wetness of their filmy wings. Half an hour
later we returned to the spot and they were gone. We had seen them
at the very moment when beauty was complete and animation dormant.
I have since found nearly a similar account of this curious process
in Mr. Bingley's very entertaining work, called 'Animal Biography.'

'When daisies pied and violets blue

And lady-smocks all silver-white
 And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
Do paint the meadows with delight,
The cuckoo then, on every tree--'

'Cuckoo! cuckoo!' cried Lizzy, breaking in with her clear childish

voice; and immediately, as if at her call, the real bird, from a
neighbouring tree (for these meadows are dotted with timber like a
park), began to echo my lovely little girl, 'cuckoo! cuckoo!' I
have a prejudice very unpastoral and unpoetical (but I cannot help
it, I have many such) against this 'harbinger of spring.' His note
is so monotonous, so melancholy; and then the boys mimic him; one
hears 'cuckoo! cuckoo!' in dirty streets, amongst smoky houses, and
the bird is hated for faults not his own. But prejudices of taste,
likings and dislikings, are not always vanquishable by reason; so,
to escape the serenade from the tree, which promised to be of
considerable duration (when once that eternal song begins, on it
goes ticking like a clock)--to escape that noise I determined to
excite another, and challenged Lizzy to a cowslip-gathering; a trial
of skill and speed, to see which should soonest fill her basket. My
stratagem succeeded completely. What scrambling, what shouting,
what glee from Lizzy! twenty cuckoos might have sung unheard whilst
she was pulling her own flowers, and stealing mine, and laughing,
screaming, and talking through all.

At last the baskets were filled, and Lizzy declared victor: and
down we sat, on the brink of the stream, under a spreading hawthorn,
just disclosing its own pearly buds, and surrounded with the rich
and enamelled flowers of the wild hyacinth, blue and white, to make
our cowslip-ball. Every one knows the process: to nip off the tuft
of flowerets just below the top of the stalk, and hang each cluster
nicely balanced across a riband, till you have a long string like a
garland; then to press them closely together, and tie them tightly
up. We went on very prosperously, CONSIDERING; as people say of a
young lady's drawing, or a Frenchman's English, or a woman's
tragedy, or of the poor little dwarf who works without fingers, or
the ingenious sailor who writes with his toes, or generally of any
performance which is accomplished by means seemingly inadequate to
its production. To be sure we met with a few accidents. First,
Lizzy spoiled nearly all her cowslips by snapping them off too
short; so there was a fresh gathering; in the next place, May
overset my full basket, and sent the blossoms floating, like so many
fairy favours, down the brook; then, when we were going on pretty
steadily, just as we had made a superb wreath, and were thinking of
tying it together, Lizzy, who held the riband, caught a glimpse of a
gorgeous butterfly, all brown and red and purple, and, skipping off
to pursue the new object, let go her hold; so all our treasures were
abroad again. At last, however, by dint of taking a branch of alder
as a substitute for Lizzy, and hanging the basket in a pollard-ash,
out of sight of May, the cowslip-ball was finished. What a
concentration of fragrance and beauty it was! golden and sweet to
satiety! rich to sight, and touch, and smell! Lizzy 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.

In the meanwhile I sat listening, not to my enemy the cuckoo, but to

a whole concert of nightingales, scarcely interrupted by any meaner
bird, answering and vying with each other in those short delicious
strains which are to the ear as roses to the eye: those snatches of
lovely sound which come across us as airs from heaven. Pleasant
thoughts, delightful associations, awoke as I listened; and almost
unconsciously I repeated to myself the beautiful story of the Lutist
and the Nightingale, from Ford's 'Lover's Melancholy.' Here it is.
Is there in English poetry anything finer?

'Passing from Italy to Greece, the tales

Which poets of an elder time have feign'd
To glorify their Tempe, bred in me
Desire of visiting Paradise.
To Thessaly I came, and living private,
Without acquaintance of more sweet companions
Than the old inmates to my love, my thoughts,
I day by day frequented silent groves
And solitary walks. One morning early
This accident encounter'd me: I heard
The sweetest and most ravishing contention
That art and nature ever were at strife in.
A sound of music touch'd mine ears, or rather
Indeed entranced my soul; as I stole nearer,
Invited by the melody, I saw
This youth, this fair-faced youth, upon his lute
With strains of strange variety and harmony
Proclaiming, as it seem'd, so bold a challenge
To the clear choristers of the woods, the birds,
That as they flock'd about him, all stood silent,
Wondering at what they heard. I wonder'd too.
A nightingale,
Nature's best skill'd musician, undertakes
The challenge; and for every several strain
The well-shaped youth could touch, she sang him down.
He could not run divisions with more art
Upon his quaking instrument than she,
The nightingale, did with her various notes
Reply to.

Some time thus spent, the young man grew at last

Into a pretty anger, that a bird,
Whom art had never taught cliffs, moods, or notes
Should vie with him for mastery, whose study
Had busied many hours to perfect practice.
To end the controversy, in a rapture
Upon his instrument he plays so swiftly,
So many voluntaries, and so quick,
That there was curiosity and cunning,
Concord in discord, lines of differing method
Meeting in one full centre of delight.
The bird (ordain'd to be
Music's first martyr) strove to imitate
These several sounds; which when her warbling throat
Fail'd in, for grief down dropt she on his lute,
And brake her heart. It was the quaintest sadness
To see the conqueror upon her hearse
To weep a funeral elegy of tears.
He look'd upon the trophies of his art,
Then sigh'd, then wiped his eyes; then sigh'd, and cry'd
"Alas! poor creature, I will soon revenge
 This cruelty upon the author of it.
Henceforth this lute, guilty of innocent blood,
Shall never more betray a harmless peace
To an untimely end:" and in that sorrow,
As he was pashing it against a tree,
I suddenly stept in.'

When I had finished the recitation of this exquisite passage, the

sky, which had been all the afternoon dull and heavy, began to look
more and more threatening; darker clouds, like wreaths of black
smoke, flew across the dead leaden tint; a cooler, damper air blew
over the meadows, and a few large heavy drops splashed in the water.
'We shall have a storm. Lizzy! May! where are ye? Quick, quick,
my Lizzy! run, run! faster, faster!'

And off we ran; Lizzy not at all displeased at the thoughts of a

wetting, to which indeed she is almost as familiar as a duck; May,
on the other hand, peering up at the weather, and shaking her pretty
ears with manifest dismay. Of all animals, next to a cat, a
greyhound dreads rain. She might have escaped it; her light feet
would have borne her home long before the shower; but May is too
faithful for that, too true a comrade, understands too well the laws
of good-fellowship; so she waited for us. She did, to be sure,
gallop on before, and then stop and look back, and beckon, as it
were, with some scorn in her black eyes at the slowness of our
progress. We in the meanwhile got on as fast as we could,
encouraging and reproaching each other. 'Faster, my Lizzy! Oh,
what a bad runner!'--'Faster, faster! Oh, what a bad runner!'
echoed my saucebox. 'You are so fat, Lizzy, you make no way!'--'Ah!
who else is fat?' retorted the darling. Certainly her mother is
right; I do spoil that child.

By this time we were thoroughly soaked, all three. It was a pelting

shower, that drove through our thin summer clothing and poor May's
short glossy coat in a moment. And then, when we were wet to the
skin, the sun came out, actually the sun, as if to laugh at our
plight; and then, more provoking still, when the sun was shining,
and the shower over, came a maid and a boy to look after us, loaded
with cloaks and umbrellas enough to fence us against a whole day's
rain. Never mind! on we go, faster and faster; Lizzy obliged to be
most ignobly carried, having had the misfortune to lose a shoe in
the mud, which we left the boy to look after.

Here we are at home--dripping; but glowing and laughing, and bearing

our calamity most manfully. May, a dog of excellent sense, went
instantly to bed in the stable, and is at this moment over head and
ears in straw; Lizzy is gone to bed too, coaxed into that wise
measure by a promise of tea and toast, and of not going home till
to-morrow, and the story of Little Red Riding Hood; and I am
enjoying the luxury of dry clothing by a good fire. Really getting
wet through now and then is no bad thing, finery apart; for one
should not like spoiling a new pelisse, or a handsome plume; but
when there is nothing in question but a white gown and a straw
bonnet, as was the case to-day, it is rather pleasant than not. The
little chill refreshes, and our enjoyment of the subsequent warmth
and dryness is positive and absolute. Besides, the stimulus and
exertion do good to the mind as well as body. How melancholy I was
all the morning! how cheerful I am now! Nothing like a shower-bath-
-a real shower-bath, such as Lizzy and May and I have undergone, to
cure low spirits. Try it, my dear readers, if ever ye be nervous--I
will answer for its success.

THE OLD HOUSE AT ABERLEIGH.

June 25th.--What a glowing glorious day! Summer in its richest

prime, noon in its most sparkling brightness, little white clouds
dappling the deep blue sky, and the sun, now partially veiled, and
now bursting through them with an intensity of light! It would not
do to walk to-day, professedly to walk,--we should be frightened at
the very sound! and yet it is probable that we may be beguiled into
a pretty long stroll before we return home. We are going to drive
to the old house at Aberleigh, to spend the morning under the shade
of those balmy firs, and amongst those luxuriant rose trees, and by
the side of that brimming Loddon river. 'Do not expect us before
six o'clock,' said I, as I left the house; 'Six at soonest!' added
my charming companion; and off we drove in our little pony chaise,
drawn by our old mare, and with the good humoured urchin, Henry's
successor, a sort of younger Scrub, who takes care of horse and
chaise, and cow and garden, for our charioteer.

My comrade in this homely equipage was a young lady of high family

and higher endowments, to whom the novelty of the thing, and her own
naturalness of character and simplicity of taste, gave an
unspeakable enjoyment. She danced the little chaise up and down as
she got into it, and laughed for very glee like a child, Lizzy
herself could not have been more delighted. She praised the horse
and the driver, and the roads and the scenery, and gave herself
fully up to the enchantment of a rural excursion in the sweetest
weather of this sweet season. I enjoyed all this too; for the road
was pleasant to every sense, winding through narrow lanes, under
high elms, and between hedges garlanded with woodbine and rose
trees, whilst the air was scented with the delicious fragrance of
blossomed beans. I enjoyed it all,--but, I believe, my principal
pleasure was derived from my companion herself.

Emily I. is a person whom it is a privilege to know. She is quite

like a creation of the older poets, and might pass for one of
Shakspeare's or Fletcher's women stepped into life; just as tender,
as playful, as gentle, and as kind. She is clever too, and has all
the knowledge and accomplishments that a carefully-conducted
education, acting on a mind of singular clearness and ductility,
matured and improved by the very best company, can bestow. But one
never thinks of her acquirements. It is the charming artless
character, the bewitching sweetness of manner, the real and
universal sympathy, the quick taste and the ardent feeling, that one
loves in Emily. She is Irish by birth, and has in perfection the
melting voice and soft caressing accent by which her fair
countrywomen are distinguished. Moreover she is pretty--I think her
beautiful, and so do all who have heard as well as seen her,--but
pretty, very pretty, all the world must confess; and perhaps that is
a distinction more enviable, because less envied, than the 'palmy
state' of beauty. Her prettiness is of the prettiest kind--that of
which the chief character is youthfulness. A short but pleasing
figure, all grace and symmetry, a fair blooming face, beaming with
intelligence and good-humour; the prettiest little feet and the
whitest hands in the world;--such is Emily I.

She resides with her maternal grandmother, a venerable old lady,

slightly shaken with the palsy; and when together (and they are so
fondly attached to each other
that they are seldom parted), it is one of the loveliest
combinations of youth and age ever witnessed. There is no seeing
them without feeling an increase of respect and affection for both
grandmother and granddaughter--always one of the tenderest and most
beautiful of natural connections--as Richardson knew when he made
such exquisite use of it in his matchless book. I fancy that
grandmamma Shirley must have been just such another venerable lady
as Mrs. S., and our sweet Emily--Oh no! Harriet Byron is not half
good enough for her! There is nothing like her in the whole seven
volumes.

But here we are at the bridge! Here we must alight! 'This is the
Loddon, Emily. Is it not a beautiful river? rising level with its
banks, so clear, and smooth, and peaceful, giving back the verdant
landscape and the bright blue sky, and bearing on its pellucid
stream the snowy water-lily, the purest of flowers, which sits
enthroned on its own cool leaves, looking chastity itself, like the
lady in Comus. That queenly flower becomes the water, and so do the
stately swans who are sailing so majestically down the stream, like
those who

"'On St. Mary's lake

Float double, swan and shadow."

We must dismount here, and leave Richard to take care of our

equipage under the shade of these trees, whilst we walk up to the
house:--See, there it is! We must cross this stile; there is no
other way now.'

And crossing the stile we were immediately in what had been a drive
round a spacious park, and still retained something of the
character, though the park itself had long been broken into arable
fields,--and in full view of the Great House, a beautiful structure
of James the First's time, whose glassless windows and dilapidated
doors form a melancholy contrast with the strength and entireness of
the rich and massive front.

The story of that ruin--for such it is--is always to me singularly

affecting. It is that of the decay of an ancient and distinguished
family, gradually reduced from the highest wealth and station to
actual poverty. The house and park, and a small estate around it,
were entailed on a distant cousin, and could not be alienated; and
the late owner, the last of his name and lineage, after long
struggling with debt and difficulty, farming his own lands, and
clinging to his magnificent home with a love of place almost as
tenacious as that of the younger Foscari, was at last forced to
abandon it, retired to a paltry lodging in a paltry town, and died
there about twenty years ago, broken-hearted. His successor, bound
by no ties of association to the spot, and rightly judging the
residence to be much too large for the diminished estate,
immediately sold the superb fixtures, and would have entirely taken
down the house, if, on making the attempt, the masonry had not been
found so solid that the materials were not worth the labour. A
great part, however, of one side is laid open, and the splendid
chambers, with their carving and gilding, are exposed to the wind
and rain--sad memorials of past grandeur! The grounds have been
left in a merciful neglect; the park, indeed, is broken up, the lawn
mown twice a year like a common hayfield, the grotto mouldering into
ruin, and the fishponds choked with rushes and aquatic plants; but
the shrubs and flowering trees are undestroyed, and have grown into
a magnificence of size and wildness of beauty, such as we may
imagine them to attain in their native forests. Nothing can exceed
their luxuriance, especially in the spring, when the lilac, and
laburnum, and double-cherry put forth their gorgeous blossoms.
There is a sweet sadness in the sight of such floweriness amidst
such desolation; it seems the triumph of nature over the destructive
power of man. The whole place, in that season more particularly, is
full of a soft and soothing melancholy, reminding me, I scarcely
know why, of some of the descriptions of natural scenery in the
novels of Charlotte Smith, which I read when a girl, and which,
perhaps, for that reason hang on my memory.

But here we are, in the smooth grassy ride, on the top of a steep
turfy slope descending to the river, crowned with enormous firs and
limes of equal growth, looking across the winding waters into a
sweet peaceful landscape of quiet meadows, shut in by distant woods.
What a fragrance is in the air from the balmy fir trees and the
blossomed limes! What an intensity of odour! And what a murmur of
bees in the lime trees! What a coil those little winged people make
over our heads! And what a pleasant sound it is! the pleasantest of
busy sounds, that which comes associated with all that is good and
beautiful--industry and forecast, and sunshine and flowers. Surely
these lime trees might store a hundred hives; the very odour is of a
honeyed richness, cloying, satiating.

Emily exclaimed in admiration as we stood under the deep, strong,

leafy shadow, and still more when honeysuckles trailed their
untrimmed profusion in our path, and roses, really trees, almost
intercepted our passage.

'On, Emily! farther yet! Force your way by that jessamine--it will
yield; I will take care of this stubborn white rose bough.'--'Take
care of yourself! Pray take care,' said my fairest friend; 'let me
hold back the branches.'-- After we had won our way through the
strait, at some expense of veils and flounces, she stopped to
contemplate and admire the tall, graceful shrub, whose long thorny
stems, spreading in every direction, had opposed our progress, and
now waved their delicate clusters over our heads. 'Did I ever
think,' exclaimed she, 'of standing under the shadow of a white rose
tree! What an exquisite fragrance! And what a beautiful flower! so
pale, and white, and tender, and the petals thin and smooth as silk!
What rose is it?'--'Don't you know? Did you never see it before?
It is rare now, I believe, and seems rarer than it is, because it
only blossoms in very hot summers; but this, Emily, is the musk
rose,--that very musk rose of which Titania talks, and which is
worthy of Shakspeare and of her. Is it not?--No! do not smell to
it; it is less sweet so than other roses; but one cluster in a vase,
or even that bunch in your bosom, will perfume a large room, as it
does the summer air.'--'Oh! we will take twenty clusters,' said
Emily. 'I wish grandmamma were here! She talks so often of a musk
rose tree that grew against one end of her father's house. I wish
she were here to see this!'

Echoing her wish, and well laden with musk roses, planted perhaps in
the days of Shakspeare, we reached the steps that led to a square
summer-house or banqueting-room, overhanging the river: the under
part was a boat-house, whose projecting roof, as well as the walls
and the very top of the little tower, was covered with ivy and
woodbine, and surmounted by tufted barberries, bird cherries,
acacias, covered with their snowy chains, and other pendent and
flowering trees. Beyond rose two poplars of unrivalled magnitude,
towering like stately columns over the dark tall firs, and giving a
sort of pillared and architectural grandeur to the scene.

We were now close to the mansion; but it looked sad and desolate,
and the entrance, choked with brambles and nettles, seemed almost to
repel our steps. The summer-house, the beautiful summer-house, was
free and open, and inviting, commanding from the unglazed windows,
which hung high above the water, a reach of the river terminated by
a rustic mill.

There we sat, emptying our little basket of fruit and country cakes,
till Emily was seized with a desire of viewing, from the other side
of the Loddon, the scenery which had so much enchanted her. 'I
must,' said she, 'take a sketch of the ivied boat-house, and of this
sweet room, and this pleasant window;--grandmamma would never be
able to walk from the road to see the place itself, but she must see
its likeness.' So forth we sallied, not forgetting the dear musk
roses.

We had no way of reaching the desired spot but by retracing our

steps a mile, during the heat of the hottest hour of the day, and
then following the course of the river to an equal distance on the
other side; nor had we any materials for sketching, except the
rumpled paper which had contained our repast, and a pencil without a
point which I happened to have about me. But these small
difficulties are pleasures to gay and happy youth. Regardless of
such obstacles, the sweet Emily bounded on like a fawn, and I
followed delighting in her delight. The sun went in, and the walk
was delicious; a reviving coolness seemed to breathe over the water,
wafting the balmy scent of the firs and limes; we found a point of
view presenting the boat-house, the water, the poplars, and the
mill, in a most felicitous combination; the little straw fruit
basket made a capital table; and refreshed and sharpened and pointed
by our trusty lacquey's excellent knife (your country boy is never
without a good knife, it is his prime treasure), the pencil did
double duty;--first in the skilful hands of Emily, whose faithful
and spirited sketch does equal honour to the scene and to the
artist, and then in the humbler office of attempting a faint
transcript of my own impressions in the following sonnet:--

It was an hour of calmest noon, at day

Of ripest summer: o'er the deep blue sky
White speckled clouds came sailing peacefully,
Half-shrouding in a chequer'd veil the ray
Of the sun, too ardent else,--what time we lay
By the smooth Loddon, opposite the high
Steep bank, which as a coronet gloriously
 Wore its rich crest of firs and lime trees, gay
With their pale tassels; while from out a bower
Of ivy (where those column'd poplars rear
Their heads) the ruin'd boat-house, like a tower,
Flung its deep shadow on the waters clear.
My Emily! forget not that calm hour,
Nor that fair scene, by thee made doubly dear!

THE HARD SUMMER.

August 15th.--Cold, cloudy, windy, wet. Here we are, in the midst

of the dog-days, clustering merrily round the warm hearth like so
many crickets, instead of chirruping in the green fields like that
other merry insect the grasshopper; shivering under the influence of
the Jupiter Pluvius of England, the watery St. Swithin; peering at
that scarce personage the sun, when he happens to make his
appearance, as intently as astronomers look after a comet, or the
common people stare at a balloon; exclaiming against the cold
weather, just as we used to exclaim against the warm. 'What a
change from last year!' is the first sentence you hear, go where you
may. Everybody remarks it, and everybody complains of it; and yet
in my mind it has its advantages, or at least its compensations, as
everything in nature has, if we would only take the trouble to seek
for them.

Last year, in spite of the love which we are now pleased to profess
towards that ardent luminary, not one of the sun's numerous admirers
had courage to look him in the face: there was no bearing the world
till he had said 'Good-night' to it. Then we might stir: then we
began to wake and to live. All day long we languished under his
influence in a strange dreaminess, too hot to work, too hot to read,
too hot to write, too hot even to talk; sitting hour after hour in a
green arbour, embowered in leafiness, letting thought and fancy
float as they would. Those day-dreams were pretty things in their
way; there is no denying that. But then, if one half of the world
were to dream through a whole summer, like the sleeping Beauty in
the wood, what would become of the other?

The only office requiring the slightest exertion, which I performed

in that warm weather, was watering my flowers. Common sympathy
called for that labour. The poor things withered, and faded, and
pined away; they almost, so to say, panted for draught. Moreover,
if I had not watered them myself, I suspect that no one else would;
for water last year was nearly as precious hereabout as wine. Our
land-springs were dried up; our wells were exhausted; our deep ponds
were dwindling into mud; and geese, and ducks, and pigs, and
laundresses, used to look with a jealous and suspicious eye on the
few and scanty half-buckets of that impure element, which my trusty
lacquey was fain to filch for my poor geraniums and campanulas and
tuberoses. We were forced to smuggle them in through my faithful
adherent's territories, the stable, to avoid lectures within doors
and at last even that resource failed; my garden, my blooming
garden, the joy of my eyes, was forced to go waterless like its
neighbours, and became shrivelled, scorched, and sunburnt, like
them. It really went to my heart to look at it.
On the other side of the house matters were still worse. What a
dusty world it was, when about sunset we became cool enough to creep
into it! Flowers in the court looking fit for a 'hortus siccus;'
mummies of plants, dried as in an oven; hollyhocks, once pink,
turned into Quakers; cloves smelling of dust. Oh, dusty world! May
herself looked of that complexion; so did Lizzy; so did all the
houses, windows, chickens, children, trees, and pigs in the village;
so above all did the shoes. No foot could make three plunges into
that abyss of pulverised gravel, which had the impudence to call
itself a hard road, without being clothed with a coat a quarter of
an inch thick. Woe to white gowns! woe to black! Drab was your
only wear.

Then, when we were out of the street, what a toil it was to mount
the hill, climbing with weary steps and slow upon the brown turf by
the wayside, slippery, hot, and hard as a rock! And then if we
happened to meet a carriage coming along the middle of the road,--
the bottomless middle,--what a sandy whirlwind it was! What
choking! what suffocation! No state could be more pitiable, except
indeed that of the travellers who carried this misery about with
them. I shall never forget the plight in which we met the coach one
evening in last August, full an hour after its time, steeds and
driver, carriage and passengers, all one dust. The outsides, and
the horses, and the coachman, seemed reduced to a torpid quietness,
the resignation of despair. They had left off trying to better
their condition, and taken refuge in a wise and patient
hopelessness, bent to endure in silence the extremity of ill. The
six insides, on the contrary, were still fighting against their
fate, vainly struggling to ameliorate their hapless destiny. They
were visibly grumbling at the weather, scolding at the dust, and
heating themselves like a furnace, by striving against the heat.
How well I remember the fat gentleman without his coat, who was
wiping his forehead, heaving up his wig, and certainly uttering that
English ejaculation, which, to our national reproach, is the phrase
of our language best known on the continent. And that poor boy,
red-hot, all in a flame, whose mamma, having divested her own person
of all superfluous apparel, was trying to relieve his sufferings by
the removal of his neckerchief--an operation which he resisted with
all his might. How perfectly I remember him, as well as the pale
girl who sat opposite, fanning herself with her bonnet into an
absolute fever! They vanished after a while into their own dust;
but I have them all before my eyes at this moment, a companion
picture to Hogarth's 'Afternoon,' a standing lesson to the grumblers
at cold summers.

For my part, I really like this wet season. It keeps us within, to

be sure, rather more than is quite agreeable; but then we are at
least awake and alive there, and the world out of doors is so much
the pleasanter when we can get abroad. Everything does well, except
those fastidious bipeds, men and women; corn ripens, grass grows,
fruit is plentiful; there is no lack of birds to eat it, and there
has not been such a wasp-season these dozen years. My garden wants
no watering, and is more beautiful than ever, beating my old rival
in that primitive art, the pretty wife of the little mason, out and
out. Measured with mine, her flowers are naught. Look at those
hollyhocks, like pyramids of roses; those garlands of the
convolvulus major of all colours, hanging around that tall pole,
like the wreathy hop-bine; those magnificent dusky cloves, breathing
of the Spice Islands; those flaunting double dahlias; those splendid
scarlet geraniums, and those fierce and warlike flowers the
tiger-lilies. Oh, how beautiful they are! Besides, the weather
clears sometimes--it has cleared this evening; and here are we,
after a merry walk up the hill, almost as quick as in the winter,
bounding lightly along the bright green turf of the pleasant common,
enticed by the gay shouts of a dozen clear young voices, to linger
awhile, and see the boys play at cricket.

I plead guilty to a strong partiality towards that unpopular class

of beings, country boys: I have a large acquaintance amongst them,
and I can almost say, that I know good of many and harm of none. In
general they are an open, spirited, good-humoured race, with a
proneness to embrace the pleasures and eschew the evils of their
condition, a capacity for happiness, quite unmatched in man, or
woman, or a girl. They are patient, too, and bear their fate as
scape-goats (for all sins whatsoever are laid as matters of course
to their door), whether at home or abroad, with amazing resignation
and, considering the many lies of which they are the objects, they
tell wonderfully few in return. The worst that can be said of them
is, that they seldom, when grown to man's estate, keep the promise
of their boyhood; but that is a fault to come--a fault that may not
come, and ought not to be anticipated. It is astonishing how
sensible they are to notice from their betters, or those whom they
think such. I do not speak of money, or gifts, or praise, or the
more coarse and common briberies--they are more delicate courtiers;
a word, a nod, a smile, or the mere calling of them by their names,
is enough to ensure their hearts and their services. Half a dozen
of them, poor urchins, have run away now to bring us chairs from
their several homes. 'Thank you, Joe Kirby!--you are always first--
yes, that is just the place--I shall see everything there. Have you
been in yet, Joe?'--'No, ma'am! I go in next.'--'Ah, I am glad of
that--and now's the time. Really that was a pretty ball of Jem
Eusden's!--I was sure it would go to the wicket. Run, Joe! They
are waiting for you.' There was small need to bid Joe Kirby make
haste; I think he is, next to a race-horse, or a greyhound, or a
deer, the fastest creature that runs--the most completely alert and
active. Joe is mine especial friend, and leader of the 'tender
juveniles,' as Joel Brent is of the adults. In both instances this
post of honour was gained by merit, even more remarkably so in Joe's
case than in Joel's; for Joe is a less boy than many of his
companions (some of whom are fifteeners and sixteeners, quite as
tall and nearly as old as Tom Coper), and a poorer than all, as may
be conjectured from the lamentable state of that patched round
frock, and the ragged condition of those unpatched shoes, which
would encumber, if anything could, the light feet that wear them.
But why should I lament the poverty that never troubles him? Joe is
the merriest and happiest creature that ever lived twelve years in
this wicked world. Care cannot come near him. He hath a perpetual
smile on his round ruddy face, and a laugh in his hazel eye, that
drives the witch away. He works at yonder farm on the top of the
hill, where he is in such repute for intelligence and good-humour,
that he has the honour of performing all the errands of the house,
of helping the maid, the mistress, and the master, in addition to
his own stated office of carter's boy. There he works hard from
five till seven, and then he comes here to work still harder, under
the name of play--batting, bowling, and fielding, as if for life,
filling the place of four boys; being, at a pinch, a whole eleven.
The late Mr. Knyvett, the king's organist, who used in his own
person to sing twenty parts at once of the Hallelujah Chorus, so
that you would have thought he had a nest of nightingales in his
throat, was but a type of Joe Kirby. There is a sort of ubiquity
about him; he thinks nothing of being in two places at once, and for
pitching a ball, William Grey himself is nothing to him. It goes
straight to the mark like a bullet. He is king of the cricketers
from eight to sixteen, both inclusive, and an excellent ruler he
makes. Nevertheless, in the best-ordered states there will be
grumblers, and we have an opposition here in the shape of Jem
Eusden.

Jem Eusden is a stunted lad of thirteen, or thereabout, lean, small,

and short, yet strong and active. His face is of an extraordinary
ugliness, colourless, withered, haggard, with a look of extreme age,
much increased by hair so light that it might rather pass for white
than flaxen. He is constantly arrayed in the blue cap and
old-fashioned coat, the costume of an endowed school to which he
belongs; where he sits still all day, and rushes into the field at
night, fresh, untired, and ripe for action, to scold and brawl, and
storm, and bluster. He hates Joe Kirby, whose immovable
good-humour, broad smiles, and knowing nods, must certainly be very
provoking to so fierce and turbulent a spirit; and he has himself
(being, except by rare accident, no great player) the preposterous
ambition of wishing to be manager of the sports. In short, he is a
demagogue in embryo, with every quality necessary to a splendid
success in that vocation,--a strong voice, a fluent utterance, an
incessant iteration, and a frontless impudence. He is a great
'scholar' too, to use the country phrase; his 'piece,' as our
village schoolmaster terms a fine sheet of flourishing writing,
something between a valentine and a sampler, enclosed within a
border of little coloured prints--his last, I remember, was
encircled by an engraved history of Moses, beginning at the finding
in the bulrushes, with Pharaoh's daughter dressed in a rose-coloured
gown and blue feathers--his piece is not only the admiration of the
school, but of the parish, and is sent triumphantly round from house
to house at Christmas, to extort halfpence and sixpences from all
encouragers of learning--Montem in miniature. The Mosaic history
was so successful, that the produce enabled Jem to purchase a bat
and ball, which, besides adding to his natural arrogance (for the
little pedant actually began to mutter against being eclipsed by a
dunce, and went so far as to challenge Joe Kirby to a trial in
Practice, or the Rule of Three), gave him, when compared with the
general poverty, a most unnatural preponderance in the cricket
state. He had the ways and means in his hands (for alas! the hard
winter had made sad havoc among the bats, and the best ball was a
bad one)--he had the ways and means, could withhold the supplies,
and his party was beginning to wax strong, when Joe received a
present of two bats and a ball for the youngsters in general and
himself in particular--and Jem's adherents left him on the spot--
they ratted, to a man, that very evening. Notwithstanding this
desertion, their forsaken leader has in nothing relaxed from his
pretensions, or his ill-humour. He stills quarrels and brawls as if
he had a faction to back him, and thinks nothing of contending with
both sides, the ins and the outs, secure of out-talking the whole
field. He has been squabbling these ten minutes, and is just
marching off now with his own bat (he has never deigned to use one
of Joe's) in his hand. What an ill-conditioned hobgoblin it is!
And yet there is something bold and sturdy about him too. I should
miss Jem Eusden.

Ah, there is another deserter from the party! my friend the little
hussar--I do not know his name, and call him after his cap and
jacket. He is a very remarkable person, about the age of eight
years, the youngest piece of gravity and dignity I ever encountered;
short, and square, and upright, and slow, with a fine bronzed flat
visage, resembling those convertible signs the Broad-Face and the
Saracen's-Head, which, happening to be next-door neighbours in the
town of B., I never knew apart, resembling, indeed, any face that is
open-eyed and immovable, the very sign of a boy! He stalks about
with his hands in his breeches pockets, like a piece of machinery;
sits leisurely down when he ought to field, and never gets farther
in batting than to stop the ball. His is the only voice never heard
in the melee: I doubt, indeed, if he have one, which may be partly
the reason of a circumstance that I record to his honour, his
fidelity to Jem Eusden, to whom he has adhered through every change
of fortune, with a tenacity proceeding perhaps from an instinctive
consciousness that the loquacious leader talks enough for two. He
is the only thing resembling a follower that our demagogue
possesses, and is cherished by him accordingly. Jem quarrels for
him, scolds for him, pushes for him; and but for Joe Kirby's
invincible good-humour, and a just discrimination of the innocent
from the guilty, the activity of Jem's friendship would get the poor
hussar ten drubbings a day.

But it is growing late. The sun has set a long time. Only see what
a gorgeous colouring has spread itself over those parting masses of
clouds in the west,--what a train of rosy light! We shall have a
fine sunshiny day to-morrow,--a blessing not to be undervalued, in
spite of my late vituperation of heat. Shall we go home now? And
shall we take the longest but prettiest road, that by the green
lanes? This way, to the left, round the corner of the common, past
Mr. Welles's cottage, and our path lies straight before us. How
snug and comfortable that cottage looks! Its little yard all alive
with the cow, and the mare, and the colt almost as large as the
mare, and the young foal, and the great yard-dog, all so fat!
Fenced in with hay-rick, and wheat-rick, and bean-stack, and backed
by the long garden, the spacious drying-ground, the fine orchard,
and that large field quartered into four different crops. How
comfortable this cottage looks, and how well the owners earn their
comforts! They are the most prosperous pair in the parish--she a
laundress with twenty times more work than she can do, unrivalled in
flounces and shirt-frills, and such delicacies of the craft; he,
partly a farmer, partly a farmer's man, tilling his own ground, and
then tilling other people's;--affording a proof, even in this
declining age, when the circumstances of so many worthy members of
the community seem to have 'an alacrity in sinking,' that it is
possible to amend them by sheer industry. He, who was born in the
workhouse, and bred up as a parish boy, has now, by mere manual
labour, risen to the rank of a land-owner, pays rates and taxes,
grumbles at the times, and is called Master Welles,--the title next
to Mister--that by which Shakspeare was called;--what would man have
more? His wife, besides being the best laundress in the county, is
a comely woman still. There she stands at the spring, dipping up
water for to-morrow,--the clear, deep, silent spring, which sleeps
so peacefully under its high flowery bank, red with the tall spiral
stalks of the foxglove and their rich pendent bells, blue with the
beautiful forget-me-not, that gem-like blossom, which looks like a
living jewel of turquoise and topaz. It is almost too late to see
its beauty; and here is the pleasant shady lane, where the high elms
will shut out the little twilight that remains. Ah, but we shall
have the fairies' lamps to guide us, the stars of the earth, the
glow-worms! Here they are, three almost together. Do you not see
them? One seems tremulous, vibrating, as if on the extremity of a
leaf of grass; the others are deeper in the hedge, in some green
cell on which their light falls with an emerald lustre. I hope my
friends the cricketers will not come this way home. I would not
have the pretty creatures removed for more than I care to say, and
in this matter I would hardly trust Joe Kirby--boys so love to stick
them in their hats. But this lane is quite deserted. It is only a
road from field to field. No one comes here at this hour. They are
quite safe; and I shall walk here to-morrow and visit them again.
And now, goodnight! beautiful insects, lamps of the fairies,
good-night!

THE SHAW.

September 9th.--A bright sunshiny afternoon. What a comfort it is

to get out again--to see once more that rarity of rarities, a fine
day! We English
people are accused of talking overmuch of the weather; but the
weather, this summer, has forced people to talk of it. Summer! did
I say? Oh! season most unworthy of that sweet, sunny name! Season
of coldness and cloudiness, of gloom and rain! A worse November!--
for in November the days are short; and shut up in a warm room,
lighted by that household sun, a lamp, one feels through the long
evenings comfortably independent of the out-of-door tempests. But
though we may have, and did have, fires all through the dog-days,
there is no shutting out daylight; and sixteen hours of rain,
pattering against the windows and dripping from the eaves--sixteen
hours of rain, not merely audible, but visible for seven days in the
week--would be enough to exhaust the patience of Job or Grizzel;
especially if Job were a farmer, and Grizzel a country gentlewoman.
Never was known such a season! Hay swimming, cattle drowning, fruit
rotting, corn spoiling! and that naughty river, the Loddon, who
never can take Puff's advice, and 'keep between its banks,' running
about the country, fields, roads, gardens, and houses, like mad!
The weather would be talked of. Indeed, it was not easy to talk of
anything else. A friend of mine having occasion to write me a
letter, thought it worth abusing in rhyme, and bepommelled it
through three pages of Bath-guide verse; of which I subjoin a
specimen:--

'Aquarius surely REIGNS over the world,

And of late he his water-pot strangely has twirl'd;
Or he's taken a cullender up by mistake,
And unceasingly dips it in some mighty lake;
Though it is not in Lethe--for who can forget
The annoyance of getting most thoroughly wet?
It must be in the river called Styx, I declare,
For the moment it drizzles it makes the men swear.
"It did rain to-morrow," is growing good grammar;
 Vauxhall and camp-stools have been brought to the hammer;
A pony-gondola is all I can keep,
And I use my umbrella and pattens in sleep:
Row out of my window, whene'er 'tis my whim
To visit a friend, and just ask, "Can you swim?"'

So far my friend.* In short, whether in prose or in verse,

everybody railed at the weather. But this is over now. The sun has
come to dry the world; mud is turned into dust; rivers have
retreated to their proper limits; farmers have left off grumbling;
and we are about to take a walk, as usual, as far as the Shaw, a
pretty wood about a mile off. But one of our companions being a
stranger to the gentle reader, we must do him the honour of an
introduction.

*This friend of mine is a person of great quickness and talent, who,

if she were not a beauty and a woman of fortune--that is to say, if
she were prompted by either of those two powerful stimuli, want of
money or want of admiration, to take due pains--would inevitably
become a clever writer. As it is, her notes and 'jeux d'esprit'
struck off 'a trait de plume,' have great point and neatness. Take
the following billet, which formed the label to a closed basket,
containing the ponderous present alluded to, last Michaelmas day:--

'To Miss M.
"When this you see
Remember me,"
Was long a phrase in use;
And so I send
To you, dear friend,
My proxy, "What?"--A goose!'

Dogs, when they are sure of having their own way, have sometimes
ways as odd as those of the unfurred, unfeathered animals, who walk
on two legs, and talk, and are called rational. My beautiful white
greyhound, Mayflower,* for instance, is as whimsical as the finest
lady in the land. Amongst her other fancies, she has taken a
violent affection for a most hideous stray dog, who made his
appearance here about six months ago, and contrived to pick up a
living in the village, one can hardly tell how. Now appealing to
the charity of old Rachael Strong, the laundress--a dog-lover by
profession; now winning a meal from the lightfooted and open-hearted
lasses at the Rose; now standing on his hind-legs, to extort by
sheer beggary a scanty morsel from some pair of 'drouthy cronies,'
or solitary drover, discussing his dinner or supper on the
alehouse-bench; now catching a mouthful, flung to him in pure
contempt by some scornful gentleman of the shoulder-knot, mounted on
his throne, the coach-box, whose notice he had attracted by dint of
ugliness; now sharing the commons of Master Keep the shoemaker's
pigs; now succeeding to the reversion of the well-gnawed bone of
Master Brown the shopkeeper's fierce house-dog; now filching the
skim-milk of Dame Wheeler's cat:--spit at by the cat; worried by the
mastiff; chased by the pigs; screamed at by the dame; stormed at by
the shoemaker; flogged by the shopkeeper; teased by all the
children, and scouted by all the animals of the parish;--but yet
living through his griefs, and bearing them patiently, 'for
sufferance is the badge of all his tribe;'--and even seeming to
find, in an occasional full meal, or a gleam of sunshine, or a wisp
of dry straw on which to repose his sorry carcase, some comfort in
his disconsolate condition.

*Dead, alas, since this was written.

In this plight was he found by May, the most high-blooded and

aristocratic of greyhounds; and from this plight did May rescue
him;--invited him into her territory, the stable; resisted all
attempts to turn him out; reinstated him there, in spite of maid and
boy, and mistress and master; wore out everybody's opposition, by
the activity of her protection, and the pertinacity of her
self-will; made him sharer of her bed and of her mess; and, finally,
established him as one of the family as firmly as herself.

Dash--for he has even won himself a name amongst us, before he was
anonymous--Dash is a sort of a kind of a spaniel; at least there is
in his mongrel composition some sign of that beautiful race.
Besides his ugliness, which is of the worst sort--that is to say,
the shabbiest--he has a limp on one leg that gives a peculiar
one-sided awkwardness to his gait; but independently of his great
merit in being May's pet, he has other merits which serve to account
for that phenomenon--being, beyond all comparison, the most
faithful, attached, and affectionate animal that I have ever known;
and that is saying much. He seems to think it necessary to atone
for his ugliness by extra good conduct, and does so dance on his
lame leg, and so wag his scrubby tail, that it does any one who has
a taste for happiness good to look at him--so that he may now be
said to stand on his own footing. We are all rather ashamed of him
when strangers come in the way, and think it necessary to explain
that he is May's pet; but amongst ourselves, and those who are used
to his appearance, he has reached the point of favouritism in his
own person. I have, in common with wiser women, the feminine
weakness of loving whatever loves me--and, therefore, I like Dash.
His master has found out that he is a capital finder, and in spite
of his lameness will hunt a field or beat a cover with any spaniel
in England--and, therefore, HE likes Dash. The boy has fought a
battle, in defence of his beauty, with another boy, bigger than
himself, and beat his opponent most handsomely--and, therefore, HE
likes Dash; and the maids like him, or pretend to like him, because
we do--as is the fashion of that pliant and imitative class. And
now Dash and May follow us everywhere, and are going with us to the
Shaw, as I said before--or rather to the cottage by the Shaw, to
bespeak milk and butter of our little dairy-woman, Hannah Bint--a
housewifely occupation, to which we owe some of our pleasantest
rambles.

And now we pass the sunny, dusty village street--who would have
thought, a month ago, that we should complain of sun and dust
again!--and turn the corner where the two great oaks hang so
beautifully over the clear deep pond, mixing their cool green
shadows with the bright blue sky, and the white clouds that flit
over it; and loiter at the wheeler's shop, always picturesque, with
its tools, and its work, and its materials, all so various in form,
and so harmonious in colour; and its noise, merry workmen, hammering
and singing, and making a various harmony also. The shop is rather
empty to-day, for its usual inmates are busy on the green beyond the
pond--one set building a cart, another painting a waggon. And then
we leave the village quite behind, and proceed slowly up the cool,
quiet lane, between tall hedgerows of the darkest verdure,
overshadowing banks green and fresh as an emerald.

Not so quick as I expected, though--for they are shooting here

to-day, as Dash and I have both discovered: he with great delight,
for a gun to him is as a trumpet to a war-horse; I with no less
annoyance, for I don't think that a partridge itself, barring the
accident of being killed, can be more startled than I at that
abominable explosion. Dash has certainly better blood in his veins
than any one would guess to look at him. He even shows some
inclination to elope into the fields, in pursuit of those noisy
iniquities. But he is an orderly person after all, and a word has
checked him.

Ah! here is a shriller din mingling with the small artillery--a

shriller and more continuous. We are not yet arrived within sight
of Master Weston's cottage, snugly hidden behind a clump of elms;
but we are in full hearing of Dame Weston's tongue, raised as usual
to scolding pitch. The Westons are new arrivals in our
neighbourhood, and the first thing heard of them was a complaint
from the wife to our magistrate of her husband's beating her: it
was a regular charge of assault--an information in full form. A
most piteous case did Dame Weston make of it, softening her voice
for the nonce into a shrill tremulous whine, and exciting the
mingled pity and anger--pity towards herself, anger towards her
husband--of the whole female world, pitiful and indignant as the
female world is wont to be on such occasions. Every woman in the
parish railed at Master Weston; and poor Master Weston was summoned
to attend the bench on the ensuing Saturday, and answer the charge;
and such was the clamour abroad and at home, that the unlucky
culprit, terrified at the sound of a warrant and a constable, ran
away, and was not heard of for a fortnight.

At the end of that time he was discovered, and brought to the bench;
and Dame Weston again told her story, and, as before, on the full
cry. She had no witnesses, and the bruises of which she made
complaint had disappeared, and there were no women present to make
common cause with the sex. Still, however, the general feeling was
against Master Weston; and it would have gone hard with him when he
was called in, if a most unexpected witness had not risen up in his
favour. His wife had brought in her arms a little girl about
eighteen months old, partly perhaps to move compassion in her
favour; for a woman with a child in her arms is always an object
that excites kind feelings. The little girl had looked shy and
frightened, and had been as quiet as a lamb during her mother's
examination; but she no sooner saw her father, from whom she had
been a fortnight separated, than she clapped her hands, and laughed,
and cried, 'Daddy! daddy!' and sprang into his arms, and hung round
his neck, and covered him with kisses--again shouting, 'Daddy, come
home! daddy! daddy!'--and finally nestled her little head in his
bosom, with a fulness of contentment, an assurance of tenderness and
protection such as no wife-beating tyrant ever did inspire, or ever
could inspire, since the days of King Solomon. Our magistrates
acted in the very spirit of the Jewish monarch: they accepted the
evidence of nature, and dismissed the complaint. And subsequent
events have fully justified their decision; Mistress Weston proving
not only renowned for the feminine accomplishment of scolding
(tongue-banging, it is called in our parts, a compound word which
deserves to be Greek), but is actually herself addicted to
administering the conjugal discipline, the infliction of which she
was pleased to impute to her luckless husband.

Now we cross the stile, and walk up the fields to the Shaw. How
beautifully green this pasture looks! and how finely the evening sun
glances between the boles of that clump of trees, beech, and ash,
and aspen! and how sweet the hedgerows are with woodbine and wild
scabious, or, as the country people call it, the gipsy-rose! Here
is little Dolly Weston, the unconscious witness, with cheeks as red
as a real rose, tottering up the path to meet her father. And here
is the carroty-poled urchin, George Coper, returning from work, and
singing 'Home! sweet Home!' at the top of his voice; and then, when
the notes prove too high for him, continuing the air in a whistle,
until he has turned the impassable corner; then taking up again the
song and the words, 'Home! sweet Home!' and looking as if he felt
their full import, ploughboy though he be. And so he does; for he
is one of a large, an honest, a kind, and an industrious family,
where all goes well, and where the poor ploughboy is sure of finding
cheerful faces and coarse comforts--all that he has learned to
desire. Oh, to be as cheaply and as thoroughly contented as George
Coper! All his luxuries a cricket-match!--all his wants satisfied
in 'home! sweet home!'

Nothing but noises to-day! They are clearing Farmer Brooke's great
bean-field, and crying the 'Harvest Home!' in a chorus, before which
all other sounds--the song, the scolding, the gunnery--fade away,
and become faint echoes. A pleasant noise is that! though, for
one's ears' sake, one makes some haste to get away from it. And
here, in happy time, is that pretty wood, the Shaw, with its broad
pathway, its tangled dingles, its nuts and its honeysuckles;--and,
carrying away a faggot of those sweetest flowers, we reach Hannah
Bint's: of whom, and of whose doings, we shall say more another
time.

NOTE.--Poor Dash is also dead. We did not keep him long, indeed I
believe that he died of the transition from starvation to good feed,
as dangerous to a dog's stomach, and to most stomachs, as the less
agreeable change from good feed to starvation. He has been
succeeded in place and favour by another Dash, not less amiable in
demeanour and far more creditable in appearance, bearing no small
resemblance to the pet spaniel of my friend Master Dinely, he who
stole the bone from the magpies, and who figures as the first Dash
of this volume. Let not the unwary reader opine, that in assigning
the same name to three several individuals, I am acting as an humble
imitator of the inimitable writer who has given immortality to the
Peppers and the Mustards, on the one hand; or showing a poverty of
invention or a want of acquaintance with the bead-roll of canine
appellations on the other. I merely, with my usual scrupulous
fidelity, take the names as I find them. The fact is that half the
handsome spaniels in England are called Dash, just as half the tall
footmen are called Thomas. The name belongs to the species.
Sitting in an open carriage one day last summer at the door of a
farmhouse where my father had some business, I saw a noble and
beautiful animal of this kind lying in great state and laziness on
the steps, and felt an immediate desire to make acquaintance with
him. My father, who had had the same fancy, had patted him and
called him 'poor fellow' in passing, without eliciting the smallest
notice in return. 'Dash!' cried I at a venture, 'good Dash! noble
Dash!' and up he started in a moment, making but one spring from the
door into the gig. Of course I was right in my guess. The
gentleman's name was Dash.

NUTTING.

September 26th.--One of those delicious autumnal days, when the air,

the sky, and the earth seem lulled into a universal calm, softer and
milder even than May. We sallied forth for a walk, in a mood
congenial to the weather and the season, avoiding, by mutual
consent, the bright and sunny common, and the gay highroad, and
stealing through shady, unfrequented lanes, where we were not likely
to meet any one,--not even the pretty family procession which in
other years we used to contemplate with so much interest--the
father, mother, and children, returning from the wheat-field, the
little ones laden with bristling close-tied bunches of wheat-ears,
their own gleanings, or a bottle and a basket which had contained
their frugal dinner, whilst the mother would carry her babe hushing
and lulling it, and the father and an elder child trudged after with
the cradle, all seeming weary and all happy. We shall not see such
a procession as this to-day; for the harvest is nearly over, the
fields are deserted, the silence may almost be felt. Except the
wintry notes of the redbreast, nature herself is mute. But how
beautiful, how gentle, how harmonious, how rich! The rain has
preserved to the herbage all the freshness and verdure of spring,
and the world of leaves has lost nothing of its midsummer
brightness, and the harebell is on the banks, and the woodbine in
the hedges, and the low furze, which the lambs cropped in the
spring, has burst again into its golden blossoms.

All is beautiful that the eye can see; perhaps the more beautiful
for being shut in with a forest-like closeness. We have no prospect
in this labyrinth of lanes, cross-roads, mere cart-ways, leading to
the innumerable little farms into which this part of the parish is
divided. Up-hill or down, these quiet woody lanes scarcely give us
a peep at the world, except when, leaning over a gate, we look into
one of the small enclosures, hemmed in with hedgerows, so closely
set with growing timber, that the meady opening looks almost like a
glade in a wood; or when some cottage, planted at a corner of one of
the little greens formed by the meeting of these cross-ways, almost
startles us by the unexpected sight of the dwellings of men in such
a solitude. But that we have more of hill and dale, and that our
cross-roads are excellent in their kind, this side of our parish
would resemble the description given of La Vendee, in Madame
Laroche-Jacquelin's most interesting book.* I am sure if wood can
entitle a country to be called Le Bocage, none can have a better
right to the name. Even this pretty snug farmhouse on the hillside,
with its front covered with the rich vine, which goes wreathing up
to the very top of the clustered chimney, and its sloping orchard
full of fruit--even this pretty quiet nest can hardly peep out of
its leaves. Ah! they are gathering in the orchard harvest. Look at
that young rogue in the old mossy apple-tree--that great tree,
bending with the weight of its golden-rennets--see how he pelts his
little sister beneath with apples as red and as round as her own
cheeks, while she, with her outstretched frock, is trying to catch
them, and laughing and offering to pelt again as often as one bobs
against her; and look at that still younger imp, who, as grave as a
judge, is creeping on hands and knees under the tree, picking up the
apples as they fall so deedily,** and depositing them so honestly in
the great basket on the grass, already fixed so firmly and opened so
widely, and filled almost to overflowing by the brown rough fruitage
of the golden-rennet's next neighbour the russeting; and see that
smallest urchin of all, seated apart in infantine state on the turfy
bank, with that toothsome piece of deformity a crumpling in each
hand, now biting from one sweet, hard, juicy morsel and now from
another--Is not that a pretty English picture? And then, farther up
the orchard, that bold hardy lad, the eldest born, who has scaled
(Heaven knows how) the tall, straight upper branch of that great
pear-tree, and is sitting there as securely and as fearlessly, in as
much real safety and apparent danger, as a sailor on the top-mast.
Now he shakes the tree with a mighty swing that brings down a
pelting shower of stony bergamots, which the father gathers rapidly
up, whilst the mother can hardly assist for her motherly fear--a
fear which only spurs the spirited boy to bolder ventures. Is not
that a pretty picture? And they are such a handsome family too, the
Brookers. I do not know that there is any gipsy blood, but there is
the true gipsy complexion, richly brown, with cheeks and lips so
red, black hair curling close to their heads in short crisp rings,
white shining teeth--and such eyes!--That sort of beauty entirely
eclipses your mere roses and lilies. Even Lizzy, the prettiest of
fair children, would look poor and watery by the side of Willy
Brooker, the sober little personage who is picking up the apples
with his small chubby hands, and filling the basket so orderly, next
to his father the most useful man in the field. 'Willy!' He hears
without seeing; for we are quite hidden by the high bank, and a
spreading hawthorn bush that overtops it, though between the lower
branches and the grass we have found a convenient peep-hole.
'Willy!' The voice sounds to him like some fairy dream, and the
black eyes are raised from the ground with sudden wonder, the long
silky eyelashes thrown back till they rest on the delicate brow, and
a deeper blush is burning on those dark cheeks, and a smile is
dimpling about those scarlet lips. But the voice is silent now, and
the little quiet boy, after a moment's pause, is gone coolly to work
again. He is indeed a most lovely child. I think some day or other
he must marry Lizzy; I shall propose the match to their respective
mammas. At present the parties are rather too young for a wedding--
the intended bridegroom being, as I should judge, six, or
thereabout, and the fair bride barely five,--but at least we might
have a betrothment after the royal fashion,--there could be no harm
in that. Miss Lizzy, I have no doubt, would be as demure and
coquettish as if ten winters more had gone over her head, and poor
Willy would open his innocent black eyes, and wonder what was going
forward. They would be the very Oberon and Titania of the village,
the fairy king and queen.

*An almost equally interesting account of that very peculiar and

interesting scenery, may be found in The Maid of La Vendee, an
English novel, remarkable for its simplicity and truth of painting,
written by Mrs. Le Noir, the daughter of Christopher Smart, an
inheritrix of much of his talent. Her works deserve to be better
known.
**'Deedily,'--I am not quite sure that this word is good English;
but it is genuine Hampshire, and is used by the most correct of
female writers, Miss Austen. It means (and it is no small merit
that it has no exact synonym) anything done with a profound and
plodding attention, an action which engrosses all the powers of mind
and body.

Ah! here is the hedge along which the periwinkle wreathes and twines
so profusely, with its evergreen leaves shining like the myrtle, and
its starry blue flowers. It is seldom found wild in this part of
England; but, when we do meet with it, it is so abundant and so
welcome,--the very robin-redbreast of flowers, a winter friend.
Unless in those unfrequent frosts which destroy all vegetation, it
blossoms from September to June, surviving the last lingering
crane's-bill, forerunning the earliest primrose, hardier even than
the mountain daisy,--peeping out from beneath the snow, looking at
itself in the ice, smiling through the tempests of life, and yet
welcoming and enjoying the sunbeams. Oh, to be like that flower!

The little spring that has been bubbling under the hedge all along
the hillside, begins, now that we have mounted the eminence and are
imperceptibly descending, to deviate into a capricious variety of
clear deep pools and channels, so narrow and so choked with weeds,
that a child might overstep them. The hedge has also changed its
character. It is no longer the close compact vegetable wall of
hawthorn, and maple, and brier-roses, intertwined with bramble and
woodbine, and crowned with large elms or thickly-set saplings. No!
the pretty meadow which rises high above us, backed and almost
surrounded by a tall coppice, needs no defence on our side but its
own steep bank, garnished with tufts of broom, with pollard oaks
wreathed with ivy, and here and there with long patches of hazel
overhanging the water. 'Ah, there are still nuts on that bough!'
and in an instant my dear companion, active and eager and delighted
as a boy, has hooked down with his walking-stick one of the lissome
hazel stalks, and cleared it of its tawny clusters, and in another
moment he has mounted the bank, and is in the midst of the nuttery,
now transferring the spoil from the lower branches into that vast
variety of pockets which gentlemen carry about them, now bending the
tall tops into the lane, holding them down by main force, so that I
might reach them and enjoy the pleasure of collecting some of the
plunder myself. A very great pleasure he knew it would be. I
doffed my shawl, tucked up my flounces, turned my straw bonnet into
a basket, and began gathering and scrambling--for, manage it how you
may, nutting is scrambling work,--those boughs, however tightly you
may grasp them by the young fragrant twigs and the bright green
leaves, will recoil and burst away; but there is a pleasure even in
that: so on we go, scrambling and gathering with all our might and
all our glee. Oh, what an enjoyment! All my life long I have had a
passion for that sort of seeking which implies finding (the secret,
I believe, of the love of field-sports, which is in man's mind a
natural impulse)--therefore I love violeting,--therefore, when we
had a fine garden, I used to love to gather strawberries, and cut
asparagus, and above all, to collect the filberts from the
shrubberies: but this hedgerow nutting beats that sport all to
nothing. That was a make-believe thing, compared with this; there
was no surprise, no suspense, no unexpectedness--it was as inferior
to this wild nutting, as the turning out of a bag-fox is to
unearthing the fellow, in the eyes of a staunch foxhunter.
Oh, what enjoyment this nut-gathering is! They are in such
abundance, that it seems as if there were not a boy in the parish,
nor a young man, nor a young woman,--for a basket of nuts is the
universal tribute of country gallantry; our pretty damsel Harriet
has had at least half a dozen this season; but no one has found out
these. And they are so full too, we lose half of them from
over-ripeness; they drop from the socket at the slightest motion.
If we lose, there is one who finds. May is as fond of nuts as a
squirrel, and cracks the shell and extracts the kernel with equal
dexterity. Her white glossy head is upturned now to watch them as
they fall. See how her neck is thrown back like that of a swan, and
how beautifully her folded ears quiver with expectation, and how her
quick eye follows the rustling noise, and her light feet dance and
pat the ground, and leap up with eagerness, seeming almost sustained
in the air, just as I have seen her when Brush is beating a
hedgerow, and she knows from his questing that there is a hare
afoot. See, she has caught that nut just before it touched the
water; but the water would have been no defence,--she fishes them
from the bottom, she delves after them amongst the matted grass--
even my bonnet--how beggingly she looks at that! 'Oh, what a
pleasure nutting is!--Is it not, May? But the pockets are almost
full, and so is the basket-bonnet, and that bright watch the sun
says it is late; and after all it is wrong to rob the poor boys--is
it not, May?'--May shakes her graceful head denyingly, as if she
understood the question--'And we must go home now--must we not? But
we will come nutting again some time or other--shall we not, my
May?'

THE VISIT.

October 27th.--A lovely autumnal day; the air soft, balmy, genial;
the sky of that softened and delicate blue upon which the eye loves
to rest,--the blue which gives such relief to the rich beauty of the
earth, all around glowing in the ripe and mellow tints of the most
gorgeous of the seasons. Really such an autumn may well compensate
our English climate for the fine spring of the south, that spring of
which the poets talk, but which we so seldom enjoy. Such an autumn
glows upon us like a splendid evening; it is the very sunset of the
year; and I have been tempted forth into a wider range of enjoyment
than usual. This WALK (if I may use the Irish figure of speech
called a bull) will be a RIDE. A very dear friend has beguiled me
into accompanying her in her pretty equipage to her beautiful home,
four miles off; and having sent forward in the style of a running
footman the servant who had driven her, she assumes the reins, and
off we set.

My fair companion is a person whom nature and fortune would have

spoiled if they could. She is one of those striking women whom a
stranger cannot pass without turning to look again; tall and finely
proportioned, with a bold Roman contour of figure and feature, a
delicate English complexion, and an air of distinction altogether
her own. Her beauty is duchess-like. She seems born to wear
feathers and diamonds, and to form the grace and ornament of a
court; and the noble frankness and simplicity of her countenance and
manner confirm the impression. Destiny has, however, dealt more
kindly by her. She is the wife of a rich country gentleman of high
descent and higher attainments, to whom she is most devotedly
attached,--the mother of a little girl as lovely as herself, and the
delight of all who have the happiness of her acquaintance, to whom
she is endeared not merely by her remarkable sweetness of temper and
kindness of heart, but by the singular ingenuousness and openness of
character which communicate an indescribable charm to her
conversation. She is as transparent as water. You may see every
colour, every shade of a mind as lofty and beautiful as her person.
Talking with her is like being in the Palace of Truth described by
Madame de Genlis; and yet so kindly are her feelings, so great her
indulgence to the little failings and foibles of our common nature,
so intense her sympathy with the wants, the wishes, the sorrows, and
the happiness of her fellow-creatures, that, with all her
frank-speaking, I never knew her make an enemy or lose a friend.

But we must get on. What would she say if she knew I was putting
her into print? We must get on up the hill. Ah! that is precisely
what we are not likely to do! This horse, this beautiful and
high-bred horse, well-fed, and fat and glossy, who stood prancing at
our gate like an Arabian, has suddenly turned sulky. He does not
indeed stand quite still, but his way of moving is little better--
the slowest and most sullen of all walks. Even they who ply the
hearse at funerals, sad-looking beasts who totter under black
feathers, go faster. It is of no use to admonish him by whip, or
rein, or word. The rogue has found out that it is a weak and tender
hand that guides him now. Oh, for one pull, one stroke of his old
driver, the groom! how he would fly! But there is the groom half a
mile before us, out of earshot, clearing the ground at a capital
rate, beating us hollow. He has just turned the top of the hill;--
and in a moment--ay, NOW he is out of sight, and will undoubtedly so
continue till he meets us at the lawn gate. Well! there is no great
harm. It is only prolonging the pleasure of enjoying together this
charming scenery in this fine weather. If once we make up our minds
not to care how slowly our steed goes, not to fret ourselves by vain
exertions, it is no matter what his pace may be. There is little
doubt of his getting home by sunset, and that will content us. He
is, after all, a fine noble animal; and perhaps when he finds that
we are determined to give him his way, he may relent and give us
ours. All his sex are sticklers for dominion, though, when it is
undisputed, some of them are generous enough to abandon it. Two or
three of the most discreet wives of my acquaintance contrive to
manage their husbands sufficiently with no better secret than this
seeming submission; and in our case the example has the more weight
since we have no possible way of helping ourselves.

Thus philosophising, we reached the top of the hill, and viewed with
'reverted eyes' the beautiful prospect that lay bathed in golden
sunshine behind us. Cowper says, with that boldness of expressing
in poetry the commonest and simplest feelings, which is perhaps one
great secret of his originality,

'Scenes must be beautiful, which, daily seen,

Please daily, and whose novelty survives
Long knowledge and the scrutiny of years.'

Every day I walk up this hill--every day I pause at the top to

admire the broad winding road with the green waste on each side,
uniting it with the thickly timbered hedgerows; the two pretty
cottages at unequal distances, placed so as to mark the bends; the
village beyond, with its mass of roofs and clustered chimneys
peeping through the trees; and the rich distance, where cottages,
mansions, churches, towns, seem embowered in some wide forest, and
shut in by blue shadowy hills. Every day I admire this most
beautiful landscape; yet never did it seem to me so fine or so
glowing as now. All the tints of the glorious autumn, orange,
tawny, yellow, red, are poured in profusion among the bright greens
of the meadows and turnip fields, till the eyes are satiated with
colour; and then before us we have the common with its picturesque
roughness of surface tufted with cottages, dappled with water,
edging off on one side into fields and farms and orchards, and
terminated on the other by the princely oak avenue. What a richness
and variety the wild broken ground gives to the luxuriant
cultivation of the rest of the landscape! Cowper has described it
for me. How perpetually, as we walk in the country, his vivid
pictures recur to the memory! Here is his common and mine!

'The common overgrown with fern, and rough

With prickly gorse, that, shapeless and deform'd
And dangerous to the touch, has yet its bloom,
And decks itself with ornaments of gold;--
--------------- there the turf
Smells fresh, and, rich in odoriferous herbs
And fungous fruits of earth, regales the sense
With luxury of unexpected sweets.'

The description is exact. There, too, to the left is my

cricket-ground (Cowper's common wanted that finishing grace); and
there stands one solitary urchin, as if in contemplation of its past
and future glories; for, alas! cricket is over for the season. Ah!
it is Ben Kirby, next brother to Joe, king of the youngsters, and
probably his successor--for this Michaelmas has cost us Joe! He is
promoted from the farm to the mansion-house, two miles off; there he
cleans shoes, rubs knives, and runs on errands, and is, as his
mother expresses it, 'a sort of 'prentice to the footman.' I should
not wonder if Joe, some day or other, should overtop the footman,
and rise to be butler; and his splendid prospects must be our
consolation for the loss of this great favourite. In the meantime
we have Ben.

Ben Kirby is a year younger than Joe, and the school-fellow and
rival of Jem Eusden. To be sure his abilities lie in rather a
different line: Jem is a scholar, Ben is a wag: Jem is great in
figures and writing, Ben in faces and mischief. His master says of
him, that, if there were two such in the school, he must resign his
office; and as far as my observation goes, the worthy pedagogue is
right. Ben is, it must be confessed, a great corrupter of gravity.
He hath an exceeding aversion to authority and decorum, and a
wonderful boldness and dexterity in overthrowing the one and
puzzling the other. His contortions of visage are astounding. His
'power over his own muscles and those of other people' is almost
equal to that of Liston; and indeed the original face, flat and
square and Chinese in its shape, of a fine tan complexion, with a
snub nose, and a slit for a mouth, is nearly as comical as that
matchless performer's. When aided by Ben's singular mobility of
feature, his knowing winks and grins and shrugs and nods, together
with a certain dry shrewdness, a habit of saying sharp things, and a
marvellous gift of impudence, it forms as fine a specimen as
possible of a humorous country boy, an oddity in embryo. Everybody
likes Ben, except his butts (which may perhaps comprise half his
acquaintance); and of them no one so thoroughly hates and dreads him
as our parish schoolmaster, a most worthy King Log, whom Ben
dumbfounds twenty times a day. He is a great ornament of the
cricket-ground, has a real genius for the game, and displays it
after a very original manner, under the disguise of awkwardness--as
the clown shows off his agility in a pantomime. Nothing comes amiss
to him. By the bye, he would have been the very lad for us in our
present dilemma; not a horse in England could master Ben Kirby. But
we are too far from him now--and perhaps it is as well that we are
so. I believe the rogue has a kindness for me, in remembrance of
certain apples and nuts, which my usual companion, who delights in
his wit, is accustomed to dole out to him. But it is a Robin
Goodfellow nevertheless, a perfect Puck, that loves nothing on earth
so well as mischief. Perhaps the horse may be the safer conductor
of the two.

The avenue is quite alive to-day. Old women are picking up twigs
and acorns, and pigs of all sizes doing their utmost to spare them
the latter part of the trouble; boys and girls groping for
beech-nuts under yonder clump; and a group of younger elves
collecting as many dead leaves as they can find to feed the bonfire
which is smoking away so briskly amongst the trees,--a sort of
rehearsal of the grand bonfire nine days hence; of the loyal
conflagration of the arch-traitor Guy Vaux, which is annually
solemnised in the avenue, accompanied with as much of squibbery and
crackery as our boys can beg or borrow--not to say steal. Ben Kirby
is a great man on the 5th of November. All the savings of a month,
the hoarded halfpence, the new farthings, the very luck-penny, go
off in fumo on that night. For my part, I like this daylight
mockery better. There is no gunpowder--odious gunpowder! no noise
but the merry shouts of the small fry, so shrill and happy, and the
cawing of the rooks, who are wheeling in large circles overhead, and
wondering what is going forward in their territory--seeming in their
loud clamour to ask what that light smoke may mean that curls so
prettily amongst their old oaks, towering as if to meet the clouds.
There is something very intelligent in the ways of that black people
the rooks, particularly in their wonder. I suppose it results from
their numbers and their unity of purpose, a sort of collective and
corporate wisdom. Yet geese congregate also; and geese never by any
chance look wise. But then geese are a domestic fowl; we have
spoiled them; and rooks are free commoners of nature, who use the
habitations we provide for them, tenant our groves and our avenues,
but never dream of becoming our subjects.

What a labyrinth of a road this is! I do think there are four

turnings in the short half-mile between the avenue and the mill.
And what a pity, as my companion observes--not that our good and
jolly miller, the very representative of the old English yeomanry,
should be so rich, but that one consequence of his riches should be
the pulling down of the prettiest old mill that ever looked at
itself in the Loddon, with the picturesque, low-browed, irregular
cottage, which stood with its light-pointed roof, its clustered
chimneys, and its ever-open door, looking like the real abode of
comfort and hospitality, to build this huge, staring, frightful,
red-brick mill, as ugly as a manufactory, and this great square
house, ugly and red to match, just behind. The old buildings always
used to remind me of Wollett's beautiful engraving of a scene in the
Maid of the Mill. It will be long before any artist will make a
drawing of this. Only think of this redness in a picture! this
boiled lobster of a house! Falstaff's description of Bardolph's
nose would look pale in the comparison.

Here is that monstrous machine of a tilted waggon, with its load of

flour, and its four fat horses. I wonder whether our horse will
have the decency to get out of the way. If he does not, I am sure
we cannot make him; and that enormous ship upon wheels, that ark on
dry land, would roll over us like the car of Juggernaut. Really--Oh
no! there is no danger now. I should have remembered that it is my
friend Samuel Long who drives the mill team. He will take care of
us. 'Thank you, Samuel!' And Samuel has put us on our way, steered
us safely past his waggon, escorted us over the bridge and now,
having seen us through our immediate difficulties, has parted from
us with a very civil bow and good-humoured smile, as one who is
always civil and good-humoured, but with a certain triumphant
masterful look in his eyes, which I have noted in men, even the best
of them, when a woman gets into straits by attempting manly
employments. He has done us great good though, and may be allowed
his little feeling of superiority. The parting salute he bestowed
on our steed, in the shape of an astounding crack of his huge whip,
has put that refractory animal on his mettle. On we go! past the
glazier's pretty house, with its porch and its filbert walk; along
the narrow lane bordered with elms, whose fallen leaves have made
the road one yellow; past that little farmhouse with the
horse-chestnut trees before, glowing like oranges; past the
whitewashed school on the other side, gay with October roses; past
the park, and the lodge, and the mansion, where once dwelt the great
Earl of Clarendon;--and now the rascal has begun to discover that
Samuel Long and his whip are a mile off, and that his mistress is
driving him, and he slackens his pace accordingly. Perhaps he feels
the beauty of the road just here, and goes slowly to enjoy it. Very
beautiful it certainly is. The park paling forms the boundary on
one side, with fine clumps of oak, and deer in all attitudes; the
water, tufted with alders, flowing along on the other. Another
turn, and the water winds away, succeeded by a low hedge, and a
sweep of green meadows; whilst the park and its palings are replaced
by a steep bank, on which stands a small, quiet, village alehouse;
and higher up, embosomed in wood, is the little country church, with
its sloping churchyard and its low white steeple, peeping out from
amongst magnificent yew-trees:--

'Huge trunks! and each particular trunk a growth

Of intertwisted fibres serpentine
Up-coiling, and invet'rately convolved.'
WORDSWORTH.

No village church was ever more happily placed. It is the very

image of the peace and humbleness inculcated within its walls.

Ah! here is a higher hill rising before us, almost like a mountain.
How grandly the view opens as we ascend over that wild bank,
overgrown with fern, and heath, and gorse, and between those tall
hollies, glowing with their coral berries! What an expanse! But we
have little time to gaze at present; for that piece of perversity,
our horse, who has walked over so much level ground, has now,
inspired, I presume, by a desire to revisit his stable, taken it
into that unaccountable noddle of his to trot up this, the very
steepest hill in the county. Here we are on the top; and in five
minutes we have reached the lawn gate, and are in the very midst of
that beautiful piece of art or nature (I do not know to which class
it belongs), the pleasure-ground of F. Hill. Never was the
'prophetic eye of taste' exerted with more magical skill than in
these plantations. Thirty years ago this place had no existence; it
was a mere undistinguished tract of field and meadow and common
land; now it is a mimic forest, delighting the eye with the finest
combinations of trees and shrubs, the rarest effects of form and
foliage, and bewildering the mind with its green glades, and
impervious recesses, and apparently interminable extent. It is the
triumph of landscape gardening, and never more beautiful than in
this autumn sunset, lighting up the ruddy beech and the spotted
sycamore, and gilding the shining fir-cones that hang so thickly
amongst the dark pines. The robins are singing around us, as if
they too felt the magic of the hour. How gracefully the road winds
through the leafy labyrinth, leading imperceptibly to the more
ornamented sweep. Here we are at the door amidst geraniums, and
carnations, and jasmines, still in flower. Ah! here is a flower
sweeter than all, a bird gayer than the robin, the little bird that
chirps to the tune of 'mamma! mamma!', the bright-faced fairy, whose
tiny feet come pattering along, making a merry music, mamma's own
Frances! And following her guidance, here we are in the dear round
room time enough to catch the last rays of the sun, as they light
the noble landscape which lies like a panorama around us, lingering
longest on that long island of old thorns and stunted oaks, the
oasis of B. Heath, and then vanishing in a succession of gorgeous
clouds.

October 28th.--Another soft and brilliant morning. But the

pleasures of to-day must be written in shorthand. I have left
myself no room for notes of admiration.

First we drove about the coppice: an extensive wood of oak, and

elm, and beech, chiefly the former, which adjoins the park-paling of
F. Hill, of which demesne, indeed, it forms one of the most
delightful parts. The roads through the coppice are studiously
wild; so that they have the appearance of mere cart-tracks: and the
manner in which the ground is tumbled about, the steep declivities,
the sunny slopes, the sudden swells and falls, now a close narrow
valley, then a sharp ascent to an eminence commanding an immense
extent of prospect, have a striking air of natural beauty, developed
and heightened by the perfection of art. All this, indeed, was
familiar to me; the colouring only was new. I had been there in
early spring, when the fragrant palms were on the willow, and the
yellow tassels on the hazel, and every twig was swelling with
renewed life; and I had been there again and again in the green
leafiness of midsummer; but never as now, when the dark verdure of
the fir-plantations, hanging over the picturesque and unequal
paling, partly covered with moss and ivy, contrasts so remarkably
with the shining orange-leaves of the beech, already half fallen,
the pale yellow of the scattering elm, the deeper and richer tints
of the oak, and the glossy stems of the 'lady of the woods,' the
delicate weeping birch. The underwood is no less picturesque. The
red-spotted leaves and redder berries of the old thorns, the scarlet
festoons of the bramble, the tall fern of every hue, seem to vie
with the brilliant mosaic of the ground, now covered with dead
leaves and strewn with fir-cones, now, where a little glade
intervenes, gay with various mosses and splendid fungi. How
beautiful is this coppice to-day! especially where the little
spring, as clear as crystal, comes bubbling out from the old
'fantastic' beech root, and trickles over the grass, bright and
silent as the dew in a May morning. The wood-pigeons (who are just
returned from their summer migration, and are cropping the ivy
berries) add their low cooings, the very note of love, to the slight
fluttering of the falling leaves in the quiet air, giving a voice to
the sunshine and the beauty. This coppice is a place to live and
die in. But we must go. And how fine is the ascent which leads us
again into the world, past those cottages hidden as in a pit, and by
that hanging orchard and that rough heathy bank! The scenery in
this one spot has a wildness, an abruptness of rise and fall, rare
in any part of England, rare above all in this rich and lovely but
monotonous county. It is Switzerland in miniature.

And now we cross the hill to pay a morning visit to the family at
the great house,--another fine place, commanding another fine sweep
of country. The park, studded with old trees, and sinking gently
into a valley, rich in wood and water, is in the best style of
ornamental landscape, though more according to the common routine of
gentlemen's seats than the singularly original place which we have
just left. There is, however, one distinctive beauty in the grounds
of the great house;--the magnificent firs which shade the terraces
and surround the sweep, giving out in summer odours really Sabaean,
and now in this low autumn sun producing an effect almost magical,
as the huge red trunks, garlanded with ivy, stand out from the deep
shadows like an army of giants. Indoors--Oh I must not take my
readers indoors, or we shall never get away! Indoors the sunshine
is brighter still; for there, in a lofty, lightsome room, sat a
damsel fair and arch and piquante, one whom Titian or Velasquez
should be born again to paint, leaning over an instrument* as
sparkling and fanciful as herself, singing pretty French romances,
and Scottish Jacobite songs, and all sorts of graceful and airy
drolleries picked up I know not where--an English improvisatrice! a
gayer Annot Lyle! whilst her sister, of a higher order of beauty,
and with an earnest kindness in her smile that deepens its power,
lends to the piano, as her father to the violin, an expression, a
sensibility, a spirit, an eloquence almost superhuman--almost
divine! Oh to hear these two instruments accompanying my dear
companion (I forgot to say that she is a singer worthy to be so
accompanied) in Haydn's exquisite canzonet, "She never told her
love,"--to hear her voice, with all its power, its sweetness, its
gush of sound, so sustained and assisted by modulations that
rivalled its intensity of expression; to hear at once such poetry,
such music, such execution, is a pleasure never to be forgotten, or
mixed with meaner things. I seem to hear it still.

As in the bursting spring time o'er the eye

Of one who haunts the fields fair visions creep
Beneath the closed lids (afore dull sleep
Dims the quick fancy) of sweet flowers that lie
On grassy banks, oxlip of orient dye,
And palest primrose and blue violet,
 All in their fresh and dewy beauty set,
Pictured within the sense, and will not fly:
So in mine ear resounds and lives again
One mingled melody,--a voice, a pair
Of instruments most voice-like! Of the air
Rather than of the earth seems that high strain,
A spirit's song, and worthy of the train
That soothed old Prospero with music rare.

*The dital harp.

HANNAH BINT.

The Shaw, leading to Hannah Bint's habitation, is, as I perhaps have

said before, a very pretty mixture of wood and coppice; that is to
say, a tract of thirty or forty acres covered with fine growing
timber--ash, and oak, and elm, very regularly planted; and
interspersed here and there with large patches of underwood, hazel,
maple, birch, holly, and hawthorn, woven into almost impenetrable
thickets by long wreaths of the bramble, the briony, and the
brier-rose, or by the pliant and twisting garlands of the wild
honeysuckle. In other parts, the Shaw is quite clear of its bosky
undergrowth, and clothed only with large beds of feathery fern, or
carpets of flowers, primroses, orchises, cowslips, ground-ivy,
crane's-bill, cotton-grass, Solomon's seal, and forget-me-not,
crowded together with a profusion and brilliancy of colour, such as
I have rarely seen equalled even in a garden. Here the wild
hyacinth really enamels the ground with its fresh and lovely purple;
there,

'On aged roots, with bright green mosses clad,

Dwells the wood-sorrel, with its bright thin leaves
Heart-shaped and triply folded, and its root
Creeping like beaded coral; whilst around
Flourish the copse's pride, anemones,
With rays like golden studs on ivory laid
Most delicate; but touch'd with purple clouds,
Fit crown for April's fair but changeful brow.'

The variety is much greater than I have enumerated; for the ground
is so unequal, now swelling in gentle ascents, now dimpling into
dells and hollows, and the soil so different in different parts,
that the sylvan Flora is unusually extensive and complete.

The season is, however, now too late for this floweriness; and
except the tufted woodbines, which have continued in bloom during
the whole of this lovely autumn, and some lingering garlands of the
purple wild vetch, wreathing round the thickets, and uniting with
the ruddy leaves of the bramble, and the pale festoons of the
briony, there is little to call one's attention from the grander
beauties of the trees--the sycamore, its broad leaves already
spotted--the oak, heavy with acorns--and the delicate shining rind
of the weeping birch, 'the lady of the woods,' thrown out in strong
relief from a background of holly and hawthorn, each studded with
coral berries, and backed with old beeches, beginning to assume the
rich tawny hue which makes them perhaps the most picturesque of
autumnal trees, as the transparent freshness of their young foliage
is undoubtedly the choicest ornament of the forest in spring.

A sudden turn round one of these magnificent beeches brings us to

the boundary of the Shaw, and leaning upon a rude gate, we look over
an open space of about ten acres of ground, still more varied and
broken than that which we have passed, and surrounded on all sides
by thick woodland. As a piece of colour, nothing can be well finer.
The ruddy glow of the heath-flower, contrasting, on the one hand,
with the golden-blossomed furze--on the other, with a patch of
buck-wheat, of which the bloom is not past, although the grain be
ripening, the beautiful buck-wheat, whose transparent leaves and
stalks are so brightly tinged with vermilion, while the delicate
pink-white of the flower, a paler persicaria, has a feathery fall,
at once so rich and so graceful, and a fresh and reviving odour,
like that of birch trees in the dew of a May evening. The bank that
surmounts this attempt at cultivation is crowned with the late
foxglove and the stately mullein; the pasture of which so great a
part of the waste consists, looks as green as an emerald; a clear
pond, with the bright sky reflected in it, lets light into the
picture; the white cottage of the keeper peeps from the opposite
coppice; and the vine-covered dwelling of Hannah Bint rises from
amidst the pretty garden, which lies bathed in the sunshine around
it.

The living and moving accessories are all in keeping with the
cheerfulness and repose of the landscape. Hannah's cow grazing
quietly beside the keeper's pony; a brace of fat pointer puppies
holding amicable intercourse with a litter of young pigs; ducks,
geese, cocks, hens, and chickens scattered over the turf; Hannah
herself sallying forth from the cottage-door, with her milk-bucket
in her hand, and her little brother following with the
milking-stool.

My friend, Hannah Bint, is by no means an ordinary person. Her

father, Jack Bint (for in all his life he never arrived at the
dignity of being called John, indeed in our parts he was commonly
known by the cognomen of London Jack), was a drover of high repute
in his profession. No man, between Salisbury Plain and Smithfield,
was thought to conduct a flock of sheep so skilfully through all the
difficulties of lanes and commons, streets and high-roads, as Jack
Bint, aided by Jack Bint's famous dog, Watch; for Watch's rough,
honest face, black, with a little white about the muzzle, and one
white ear, was as well known at fairs and markets as his master's
equally honest and weather-beaten visage. Lucky was the dealer that
could secure their services; Watch being renowned for keeping a
flock together better than any shepherd's dog on the road--Jack, for
delivering them more punctually, and in better condition. No man
had a more thorough knowledge of the proper night stations, where
good feed might be procured for his charge, and good liquor for
Watch and himself; Watch, like other sheep dogs, being accustomed to
live chiefly on bread and beer. His master, though not averse to a
pot of good double X, preferred gin; and they who plod slowly along,
through wet and weary ways, in frost and in fog, have undoubtedly a
stronger temptation to indulge in that cordial and reviving
stimulus, than we water-drinkers, sitting in warm and comfortable
rooms, can readily imagine. For certain, our drover could never
resist the gentle seduction of the gin-bottle, and being of a free,
merry, jovial temperament, one of those persons commonly called good
fellows, who like to see others happy in the same way with
themselves, he was apt to circulate it at his own expense, to the
great improvement of his popularity, and the great detriment of his
finances.

All this did vastly well whilst his earnings continued proportionate
to his spendings, and the little family at home were comfortably
supported by his industry: but when a rheumatic fever came on, one
hard winter, and finally settled in his limbs, reducing the most
active and hardy man in the parish to the state of a confirmed
cripple, then his reckless improvidence stared him in the face; and
poor Jack, a thoughtless, but kind creature, and a most affectionate
father, looked at his three motherless children with the acute
misery of a parent who has brought those whom he loves best in the
world to abject destitution. He found help, where he probably least
expected it, in the sense and spirit of his young daughter, a girl
of twelve years old.

Hannah was the eldest of the family, and had, ever since her
mother's death, which event had occurred two or three years before,
been accustomed to take the direction of their domestic concerns, to
manage her two brothers, to feed the pigs and the poultry, and to
keep house during the almost constant absence of her father. She
was a quick, clever lass, of a high spirit, a firm temper, some
pride, and a horror of accepting parochial relief, which is every
day becoming rarer amongst the peasantry; but which forms the surest
safeguard to the sturdy independence of the English character. Our
little damsel possessed this quality in perfection; and when her
father talked of giving up their comfortable cottage, and removing
to the workhouse, whilst she and her brothers must go to service,
Hannah formed a bold resolution, and without disturbing the sick man
by any participation of her hopes and fears, proceeded after
settling their trifling affairs to act at once on her own plans and
designs.

Careless of the future as the poor drover had seemed, he had yet
kept clear of debt, and by subscribing constantly to a benefit club,
had secured a pittance that might at least assist in supporting him
during the long years of sickness and helplessness to which he was
doomed to look forward. This his daughter knew. She knew also,
that the employer in whose service his health had suffered so
severely, was a rich and liberal cattle-dealer in the neighbourhood,
who would willingly aid an old and faithful servant, and had,
indeed, come forward with offers of money. To assistance from such
a quarter Hannah saw no objection. Farmer Oakley and the parish
were quite distinct things. Of him, accordingly, she asked, not
money, but something much more in his own way--'a cow! any cow! old
or lame, or what not, so that it were a cow! she would be bound to
keep it well; if she did not, he might take it back again. She even
hoped to pay for it by and by, by instalments, but that she would
not promise!' and, partly amused, partly interested by the child's
earnestness, the wealthy yeoman gave her, not as a purchase, but as
a present, a very fine young Alderney. She then went to the lord of
the manor, and, with equal knowledge of character, begged his
permission to keep her cow on the Shaw common. 'Farmer Oakley had
given her a fine Alderney, and she would be bound to pay the rent,
and keep her father off the parish, if he would only let it graze on
the waste;' and he too, half from real good nature--half, not to be
outdone in liberality by his tenant, not only granted the requested
permission, but reduced the rent so much, that the produce of the
vine seldom fails to satisfy their kind landlord.

Now Hannah showed great judgment in setting up as a dairy-woman.

She could not have chosen an occupation more completely unoccupied,
or more loudly called for. One of the most provoking of the petty
difficulties which beset people with a small establishment in this
neighbourhood, is the trouble, almost the impossibility, of
procuring the pastoral luxuries of milk, eggs, and butter, which
rank, unfortunately, amongst the indispensable necessaries of
housekeeping. To your thoroughbred Londoner, who, whilst grumbling
over his own breakfast, is apt to fancy that thick cream, and fresh
butter, and new-laid eggs, grow, so to say, in the country--form an
actual part of its natural produce--it may be some comfort to learn,
that in this great grazing district, however the calves and the
farmers may be the better for cows, nobody else is; that farmers'
wives have ceased to keep poultry; and that we unlucky villagers sit
down often to our first meal in a state of destitution, which may
well make him content with his thin milk and his Cambridge butter,
when compared to our imputed pastoralities.

Hannah's Alderney restored us to one rural privilege. Never was so

cleanly a little milkmaid. She changed away some of the cottage
finery, which, in his prosperous days, poor Jack had pleased himself
with bringing home, the china tea-service, the gilded mugs, and the
painted waiters, for the useful utensils of the dairy, and speedily
established a regular and gainful trade in milk, eggs, butter,
honey, and poultry--for poultry they had always kept.

Her domestic management prospered equally. Her father, who retained

the perfect use of his hands, began a manufacture of mats and
baskets, which he constructed with great nicety and adroitness; the
eldest boy, a sharp and clever lad, cut for him his rushes and
osiers; erected, under his sister's direction, a shed for the cow,
and enlarged and cultivated the garden (always with the good leave
of her kind patron the lord of the manor) until it became so ample,
that the produce not only kept the pig, and half kept the family,
but afforded another branch of merchandise to the indefatigable
directress of the establishment. For the younger boy, less quick
and active, Hannah contrived to obtain an admission to the
charity-school, where he made great progress--retaining him at home,
however, in the hay-making and leasing season, or whenever his
services could be made available, to the great annoyance of the
schoolmaster, whose favourite he is, and who piques himself so much
on George's scholarship (your heavy sluggish boy at country work
often turns out quick at his book), that it is the general opinion
that this much-vaunted pupil will, in process of time, be promoted
to the post of assistant, and may, possibly, in course of years,
rise to the dignity of a parish pedagogue in his own person; so that
his sister, although still making him useful at odd times, now
considers George as pretty well off her hands, whilst his elder
brother, Tom, could take an under-gardener's place directly, if he
were not too important at home to be spared even for a day.

In short, during the five years that she has ruled at the Shaw
cottage, the world has gone well with Hannah Bint. Her cow, her
calves, her pigs, her bees, her poultry, have each, in their several
ways, thriven and prospered. She has even brought Watch to like
butter-milk, as well as strong beer, and has nearly persuaded her
father (to whose wants and wishes she is most anxiously attentive)
to accept of milk as a substitute for gin. Not but Hannah hath had
her enemies as well as her betters. Why should she not? The old
woman at the lodge, who always piqued herself on being spiteful, and
crying down new ways, foretold from the first she would come to no
good, and could not forgive her for falsifying her prediction; and
Betty Barnes, the slatternly widow of a tippling farmer, who rented
a field, and set up a cow herself, and was universally discarded for
insufferable dirt, said all that the wit of an envious woman could
devise against Hannah and her Alderney; nay, even Ned Miles, the
keeper, her next neighbour, who had whilom held entire sway over the
Shaw common, as well as its coppices, grumbled as much as so
good-natured and genial a person could grumble, when he found a
little girl sharing his dominion, a cow grazing beside his pony, and
vulgar cocks and hens hovering around the buck-wheat destined to
feed his noble pheasants. Nobody that had been accustomed to see
that paragon of keepers, so tall and manly, and pleasant looking,
with his merry eye, and his knowing smile, striding gaily along, in
his green coat, and his gold-laced hat, with Neptune, his noble
Newfoundland dog (a retriever is the sporting word), and his
beautiful spaniel Flirt at his heels, could conceive how askew he
looked, when he first found Hannah and Watch holding equal reign
over his old territory, the Shaw common.

Yes! Hannah hath had her enemies; but they are passing away. The
old woman at the lodge is dead, poor creature; and Betty Barnes,
having herself taken to tippling, has lost the few friends she once
possessed, and looks, luckless wretch, as if she would soon die
too!--and the keeper?--why, he is not dead, or like to die; but the
change that has taken place there is the most astonishing of all--
except, perhaps, the change in Hannah herself.

Few damsels of twelve years old, generally a very pretty age, were
less pretty than Hannah Bint. Short and stunted in her figure, thin
in face, sharp in feature, with a muddled complexion, wild sunburnt
hair, and eyes whose very brightness had in them something
startling, over-informed, super-subtle, too clever for her age,--at
twelve years old she had quite the air of a little old fairy. Now,
at seventeen, matters are mended. Her complexion has cleared; her
countenance has developed itself; her figure has shot up into height
and lightness, and a sort of rustic grace; her bright, acute eye is
softened and sweetened by the womanly wish to please; her hair is
trimmed, and curled and brushed, with exquisite neatness; and her
whole dress arranged with that nice attention to the becoming, the
suitable both in form and texture, which would be called the highest
degree of coquetry, if it did not deserve the better name of
propriety. Never was such a transmogrification beheld. The lass is
really pretty, and Ned Miles has discovered that she is so. There
he stands, the rogue, close at her side (for he hath joined her
whilst we have been telling her little story, and the milking is
over!)--there he stands--holding her milk-pail in one hand, and
stroking Watch with the other; whilst she is returning the
compliment by patting Neptune's magnificent head. There they stand,
as much like lovers as may be; he smiling, and she blushing--he
never looking so handsome nor she so pretty in all their lives.
There they stand, in blessed forgetfulness of all except each other;
as happy a couple as ever trod the earth. There they stand, and one
would not disturb them for all the milk and butter in Christendom.
I should not wonder if they were fixing the wedding day.

THE FALL OF THE LEAF.

November 6th.--The weather is as peaceful to-day, as calm, and as

mild, as in early April; and, perhaps, an autumn afternoon and a
spring morning do resemble each other more in feeling, and even in
appearance, than any two periods of the year. There is in both the
same freshness and dewiness of the herbage; the same balmy softness
in the air; and the same pure and lovely blue sky, with white fleecy
clouds floating across it. The chief difference lies in the absence
of flowers, and the presence of leaves. But then the foliage of
November is so rich, and glowing, and varied, that it may well
supply the place of the gay blossoms of the spring; whilst all the
flowers of the field or the garden could never make amends for the
want of leaves,--that beautiful and graceful attire in which nature
has clothed the rugged forms of trees--the verdant drapery to which
the landscape owes its loveliness, and the forests their glory.

If choice must be between two seasons, each so full of charm, it is

at least no bad philosophy to prefer the present good, even whilst
looking gratefully back, and hopefully forward, to the past and the
future. And of a surety, no fairer specimen of a November day could
well be found than this,--a day made to wander

'By yellow commons and birch-shaded hollows,

And hedgerows bordering unfrequented lanes;'

nor could a prettier country be found for our walk than this shady
and yet sunny Berkshire, where the scenery, without rising into
grandeur or breaking into wildness, is so peaceful, so cheerful, so
varied, and so thoroughly English.

We must bend our steps towards the water side, for I have a message
to leave at Farmer Riley's: and sooth to say, it is no unpleasant
necessity; for the road thither is smooth and dry, retired, as one
likes a country walk to be, but not too lonely, which women never
like; leading past the Loddon--the bright, brimming, transparent
Loddon--a fitting mirror for this bright blue sky, and terminating
at one of the prettiest and most comfortable farmhouses in the
neighbourhood.

How beautiful the lane is to-day, decorated with a thousand colours!

The brown road, and the rich verdure that borders it, strewed with
the pale yellow leaves of the elm, just beginning to fall; hedgerows
glowing with long wreaths of the bramble in every variety of
purplish red; and overhead the unchanged green of the fir,
contrasting with the spotted sycamore, the tawny beech, and the dry
sere leaves of the oak, which rustle as the light wind passes
through them; a few common hardy yellow flowers (for yellow is the
common colour of flowers, whether wild or cultivated, as blue is the
rare one), flowers of many sorts, but almost of one tint, still
blowing in spite of the season, and ruddy berries glowing through
all. How very beautiful is the lane!

And how pleasant is this hill where the road widens, with the group
of cattle by the wayside, and George Hearn, the little post-boy,
trundling his hoop at full speed, making all the better haste in his
work, because he cheats himself into thinking it play! And how
beautiful, again, is this patch of common at the hilltop with the
clear pool, where Martha Pither's children,--elves of three, and
four, and five years old,--without any distinction of sex in their
sunburnt faces and tattered drapery, are dipping up water in their
little homely cups shining with cleanliness, and a small brown
pitcher with the lip broken, to fill that great kettle, which, when
it is filled, their united strength will never be able to lift!
They are quite a group for a painter, with their rosy cheeks, and
chubby hands, and round merry faces; and the low cottage in the
background, peeping out of its vine leaves and china roses, with
Martha at the door, tidy, and comely, and smiling, preparing the
potatoes for the pot, and watching the progress of dipping and
filling that useful utensil, completes the picture.

But we must go on. No time for more sketches in these short days.
It is getting cold too. We must proceed in our walk. Dash is
showing us the way and beating the thick double hedgerow that runs
along the side of the meadows, at a rate that indicates game astir,
and causes the leaves to fly as fast as an east-wind after a hard
frost. Ah! a pheasant! a superb cock pheasant! Nothing is more
certain than Dash's questing, whether in a hedgerow or covert, for a
better spaniel never went into the field; but I fancied that it was
a hare afoot, and was almost as much startled to hear the whirring
of those splendid wings, as the princely bird himself would have
been at the report of a gun. Indeed, I believe that the way in
which a pheasant goes off, does sometimes make young sportsmen a
little nervous, (they don't own it very readily, but the observation
may be relied on nevertheless), until they get as it were broken in
to the sound; and then that grand and sudden burst of wing becomes
as pleasant to them as it seems to be to Dash, who is beating the
hedgerow with might and main, and giving tongue louder, and sending
the leaves about faster than ever--very proud of finding the
pheasant, and perhaps a little angry with me for not shooting it; at
least looking as if he would be angry if I were a man; for Dash is a
dog of great sagacity, and has doubtless not lived four years in the
sporting world without making the discovery, that although gentlemen
do shoot, ladies do not.

The Loddon at last! the beautiful Loddon! and the bridge, where
every one stops, as by instinct, to lean over the rails, and gaze a
moment on a landscape of surpassing loveliness,--the fine grounds of
the Great House, with their magnificent groups of limes, and firs,
and poplars grander than ever poplars were; the green meadows
opposite, studded with oaks and elms; the clear winding river; the
mill with its picturesque old buildings, bounding the scene; all
glowing with the rich colouring of autumn, and harmonised by the
soft beauty of the clear blue sky, and the delicious calmness of the
hour. The very peasant whose daily path it is, cannot cross that
bridge without a pause.

But the day is wearing fast, and it grows colder and colder. I
really think it will be a frost. After all, spring is the
pleasantest season, beautiful as this scenery is. We must get on.
Down that broad yet shadowy lane, between the park, dark with
evergreens and dappled with deer, and the meadows where sheep, and
cows, and horses are grazing under the tall elms; that lane, where
the wild bank, clothed with fern, and tufted with furze, and crowned
by rich berried thorn, and thick shining holly on the one side,
seems to vie in beauty with the picturesque old paling, the bright
laurels, and the plumy cedars, on the other;--down that shady lane,
until the sudden turn brings us to an opening where four roads meet,
where a noble avenue turns down to the Great House; where the
village church rears its modest spire from amidst its venerable yew
trees: and where, embosomed in orchards and gardens, and backed by
barns and ricks, and all the wealth of the farmyard, stands the
spacious and comfortable abode of good Farmer Riley,--the end and
object of our walk.

And in happy time the message is said and the answer given, for this
beautiful mild day is edging off into a dense frosty evening; the
leaves of the elm and the linden in the old avenue are quivering and
vibrating and fluttering in the air, and at length falling crisply
on the earth, as if Dash were beating for pheasants in the
tree-tops; the sun gleams dimly through the fog, giving little more
of light and heat than his fair sister the lady moon;--I don't know
a more disappointing person than a cold sun; and I am beginning to
wrap my cloak closely round me, and to calculate the distance to my
own fireside, recanting all the way my praises of November, and
longing for the showery, flowery April, as much as if I were a
half-chilled butterfly, or a dahlia knocked down by the frost.

Ah, dear me! what a climate this is, that one cannot keep in the
same mind about it for half an hour together! I wonder, by the way,
whether the fault is in the weather, which Dash does not seem to
care for, or in me? If I should happen to be wet through in a
shower next spring, and should catch myself longing for autumn, that
would settle the question.

End of the Project Gutenberg eText of Our Village.