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IDLEHURST

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY

IDLEHURST

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY

BY

JOHN HALSHAM

"Haec tibi dictabam post fanum putre Vacunae"

LONDON
SMITH, ELDER & CO., 15, WATERLOO PLACE

1898

{All rights reserved)

IDLEHURST:

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY.

INTRODUCTORY.

MY DEAR PATERSON

That old question of ours, whether the
world were larger to him who travelled far and wide,
or to him who sat at home dreaming of the unknown
lands, seems no nearer settlement after half a life of
experiment than when it was first propounded in
Blue Boar Lane sittings, or walks to Wheatley.
Fixed here in the Sussex Weald, seldom moving out
of the circle of the hills, often keeping within the
village bounds for months together, I still maintain
my unvisited world to be greater than all the seas
and isles which you have profaned.

You will remember that when you had spent some
ten years in Borneo, and it seemed probable that you

B

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2 IDLEHURST:

would end your days there, you so far failed from
your old vagrant principles (or was it that the old
country had now become the stranger land ?) as
to look back to England, and to ask me for some
account of our country life at home. You were
pleased with the idea of a little chronicle of our
Arnington days which I proposed to make you, as
the readiest way I could find of presenting our
country and people. Before my summer's journal
is well ended, here you are in England again ! But
since you are tied in London, where a man is merged
and lost, for sure, as wholly as he can be in Sarawak
— in London that seems farther from Arnington
quietude than your eastern isles — I think you may
still entertain my compilation. It may serve in
some measure to bring before you in Hampstead the
life of the Weald— a life, I am afraid, that is un-
distinguished, commonplace enough ; and yet the
length between that and the pattern-moulded world
you look down upon from the Heath ! Being so little
a traveller, I owe my knowledge of considerable
portions of rural England to modern novels ; and
I learn from this source that Titanic passions, salient
immorality, and an unintelligible dialect distinguish,
singly or in combination, the peasantry of various
parts of the British Isles with which I happen to be

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 3

unacquainted. In Sussex we do not possess these
differentia* An odd transitional state between the
old rural economy and a pervading plutocracy has
apparently produced a rather respectable and soulless
population, protected in its morals by a singular vis
inertia, and speaking almost universally that dreadful
New English which flows from Thames about the world.
Under the attrition of London on the one side
and Brighton on the other, we are taking upon us
a general polish, and losing all individual character.
With hardly an exception, the old great families
of the county are extinct and their houses have
passed into the hands of the bankers, the stockbrokers,
the distillers. The names which abide are the
common people's — the Bottings and Tomsetts that
fill our registers of 1557. There live in Arnington
to-day three generations of Thomas Pococks ; and a
Thomas Pocok appears in the roll of the Sussex
archers who were at Agincourt. But beyond the
names, little abides. Uniformity of school-methods
is wearing down any small excrescences of individual
character ; the very forces of heredity seem power-
less beneath the flattening weight of the Standards.
Almost every recent legislative change has helped to
obliterate the ancient distinctions ; with a certain
class of our village politicians the effacing of the old

4 IDLEHURST :

inscriptions seems almost a religion. Whatsoever the
merits of the emerging Cosmos may be, monotony of
the most tyrannous kind must follow the present
course of development.

Under these conditions of change the chief interest
lies in watching the collision between old and new ;
in finding survivals and tracing links with a far off
past ; in the refreshing worth and salt of the passing
generation, which after a few more winters will be
wholly gone. There are differences of standpoint
between aged labourers in Arnington and their
grandsons, greater perhaps than the same interval
of generation could show in any part of the world's
history. The railroad embankments, as Thackeray
says, have shut off the old world that was behind
them. The rare survivors of the pre-railroad age
are almost as strange to us as a revived Jacobite or
Fifth-Monarchy man could be among us to-day.
And the interest of transition belongs, alas ! to the
scene as well as to the characters.

Our Sussex landscape is naturally most beautiful ;
a landscape of wide horizons and splendid distances,
a mingling of heathy hills and valley meadows,
woodland and tillage, that can compare with any
champaign beneath the sun. But it is being steadily
and in great part irrevocably defiled. Places of

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 5

wider fame, richer in historic interest are, to some
extent, guarded by a special public opinion, or what
passes for it ; but our incomparable Arcadia must be
destroyed without a word of protest. The constant
sap of brick and mortar, corrugated iron, and match-
boarding advances ; speculative builders satisfy and
foment the desire of the Cockney for a new red villa
on a hill ; the villages year by year spread their
fringe of abominable cottage and backyard ; the
Government which looks after the art-instincts of
our school children is engaged in blocking out some
of the noblest of our landscapes with its black
telephone-posts thirty feet high. All pleasure that
is possible in watching Nature lies in survivals. The
remnant is still amply sufficient to make us forget,
in the more vivid moments, what is desecrated and
lost ; but as year to year the mischief works, that
" piteous lot " draws nearer " to flee from man, yet
not rejoice in nature " — not of choice, but of miser-
able necessity.

With such aspects of the land and the people as
these my journal deals : too little hopeful of the
future perhaps ; inevitably puzzled by the present's
marvellous tangle of good and ill ; tuned, no doubt,
somewhat to that regretful regard of the past, which
is so easy for the sliding forties. You will find

6 IDLEHURST :

vignettes of the garden and the fields, sketches of
the old people and the new, perspectives of our work
and our play ; my favourites presented, I hope,
without excessive touches of rose -madder; my
aversions etched without overmuch acid. You will
not account impertinent a few private judgments
here and there upon matters beyond our village
horizon ; dicta which are the product of the genuine
Arcadian mind. Some one (Eduard Kohler, I think,
in " Fantasiereisen >J) has an apologue of a Scythian
tribe accustomed to turn out an anchorite into the
desert for a term of years, and to receive on his
return his strictures upon their manners and the
constitution of their state with the consideration due
to abstracted and unprejudiced criticism. Now I
have been, for longer than I care to think, a rigid
hermit in the wilderness ; I am pure of the taint of
Pall Mall ; I am untouched by propagandist romances
and the weightiest of reviews. You will allow these
impressions of mine as the outcome of a seclusion
at once fortunate and wilful ; my fact and fancy both
come out of that world you have barred yourself
from, the aprica rura which I think still sometimes
touch your heart, through the smoke cloud or the
tropic sky, with the half-reproachful sweetness of
first-love remembered after forty years.

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY.

THE JOURNAL.

February 2^th. — Yesterday was so fair a day for
February, that I left my gardening half-way through
the morning, and went down to the village, taking a
sort of small holiday I keep for such occasions. The
forenoon was almost too beautiful for the season,
bringing up something of an old schoolboy appre-
hension of make-weight unhappiness hard at hand.
I had worked an hour or so on a south border, where
the dry loam, knocked crumbling into the sunshine
out of its November ridges, demanded the early pea
and the ashleaf ; but the periods of back-straighten-
ing, leaning on the hoe, and considering the blue
breadths of distance, became more and more neces-
sary ; and at last I left the business three-parts done,
and decided to walk down the hill to the village.
I had an end of reason, if conscience brought up
the unfinished border, inasmuch as I wanted to
see the Rector in the matter of one Phineas
Tomsett, a labourer living near me, whose eighty

8 IDLEHURST :

rheumatic years are getting too strong for him,
and threaten altogether to stop his shaky old hands
at their superannuated hedging and ditching, and
to send him to the Union for his little end of
leisure.

All the way down the sandy road the south wind
met me steadily in the face, a breath like April. The
chaffinches trilled their ceaseless little roulade in
every hedge-oak, a blackbird was singing in the copse
at the Tanyard corner. The distance lay like a sea
of hazy blue, the nearer wooded ridges standing like
islands in the vaporous levels : everything persuaded
to a quiet mind, conscious of winter behind one and
life stirring before. But as I went, the thought of
oldTomsett would now and again disperse the pleasant
influences of the day. The old fellow has seen so
many springs like this, so many high summers, so
many nipping winters ; he has lived cleanly and
honestly eighty years ; has raised and got so many
quarters of corn, himself always within distance of
absolute want, nearly starved in the old war-times.
He has brought up sons ; two of them soldiers, dead
in India, one vanished in Manitoba ; girls who married
well or ill, died or drifted into London. He never
poached ; he very rarely was drunk. Now, crooked
with rheumatism, and utterly exhausted with long

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. Q

labour, he earns short wages about Lycetts farm,
turning out at half-past five in the morning in
all weathers, until some small mischance— a cut
finger "kind o' pisoned-like," or the thousand-and-
first drenching, has brought him " on his club," and
he begins to see the end. A year or so will be eked
out between the parish half-crown, and the parson's
" ticket ; " and then, " he don't care how soon he goes."
The long life of serviceableness to the country,
closing so painfully, sets itself in my mind against a
dozen sorts of prosperous nuisance ; and the contrast
takes the pleasure out of the day, even as an east
wind will suck the light and colour out of wood and
field.

The smell of wood fires and stabledom succeeds
to the fresh earthy scent of the lane, as I come to
the top of the street. Our village is one long road,
crooked S-shaped, lined with cottages, some of which
call themselves shops, with a show of oranges or
boot-uppers on the window-sill, behind the little
paled gardens. The Greyhound, a square three-
storied relic of the coach-days, stands half-way down,
where the road widens to the forum, an irregular
oval, designed for cattle-dealing at certain seasons.
Then come old houses with round bay windows, and
green trellis-work on their glazed-brick fronts — once

10 IDLEIIURST:

the dwellings of the practitioner and the attorney
— mixed with real shops possessing plate-glass
windows and enamelled-iron advertisements. Here
a passage turns to the left, leading to a lych-gate
and the oak-shingled spire of the church rising
beyond two vast yews. A pathway flagged with
old tombstones winds through the churchyard to
a wicket in a box-hedge ; and by the wicket I
enter the Rectory garden in search of the Rector.
The garden is in close touch with the village, as is
fitting ; not like mine, swept in every wind by smells
of firs or clover, or in dead calms breathing its own
sweetness : here on malting days comes the admir-
able aroma of the brewery ; the cottages in Mill
Lane send their saecular reek of wood-smoke and
soaped linen ; with certain winds the dusty smell
of meal floats from the little mill that endlessly
thumps in the bottom by the brook. Here one can
tell whose chimney needs the holly-bush most : at
warm noons a hundred dinners pervade the walks,
not always altogether unsuitably — hints of pork and
greens and onions, the generous blend of the cabbage-
nets in the copper. All this speaks of human
interests, and is very proper to a priest's close : the
Rector himself, I believe, prefers it to all the cloves
and mignonette that his wife tends.

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. II

Our Rector is one of those singularly able and
admirable men who are sometimes to be found in
obscure country livings — probably left there with
intention of showing to the lay mind what com-
parative heights of merit are necessary to the attain-
ment of the higher stations in the Church. Out of
his parish he is little known ; at the Ruridecanal
Chapter he is not very popular — is, perhaps, a little
feared — by reason of a discomforting directness of
apprehension, and a power of bringing men's cor-
porate foolishness home to them singly in a very
perspicuous way. Within his own marches he works
incessantly ; silent, subterranean, for the most part :
"no organiser" his neighbours call him, because
he is not caught running to and fro, talking and
begging ; because they cannot comprehend his
serene economies of time, his far-laid planning and
deep-rooted purpose. Some people say he would
have made a grand General ; and as I came upon
him, after some chase, in the fruit-quarters of the
kitchen-garden, he looked military enough with his
square figure, close grey hair and moustache, and
eyes keen and steady beyond comparisons. He
was pruning his greengages ; and according to his
custom, had cut away barrowfuls of fruit-budded spray
— the ground was strewn with lost hopes of Early

12 IDLEHURST:

Transparents. He and I have an understanding never
to criticise one another in our hobbies, but only in our
main businesses — so that I never correct his system
of pruning (and much else in his long-suffering
garden), whilst he, every time he comes to see my
paradise, the work of my life, airs some new theory,
quaint and fatal, upon rose-budding, or the likes and
dislikes of liliums. In return, he would let me
make as many false quantities in Virgil as I liked ;
and I have a free hand with all the concerns of the
parish. Therefore he goes on with his knife, whilst
I propound my ideas about old Tomsett at Lycetts.
Can we contrive a sort of pensionary holiday for
his last year or two, keeping him out of the hedge-
bottoms and the House? The Rector, looking
reflectively at his radically pruned spurs, tells me
that Dr. Culpeper saw him yesterday, and thinks
he will be at work again in a day or two, helping
with the clearing of Kiln Wood. Then it is to be
hoped, as the kindlier year opens, that he may
hobble about the fields and find little jobs in hay-
time and harvest. There is a small fund in the
parish coffers, which will keep the old man in his
chimney corner through the fall, providing the
eighteenpenny rent, the ounces of tea and sugar
and tobacco. And the Doctor says he will need no

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 13

providing for after the first cold turn of the winter ;
and Dr. Culpeper's death-warrants, when he rarely
signs one, are so sure in Arnington experience that
we agree without doubts to enlarge the tobacco allow-
ance, and spend the little balance improvidently
before March twelvemonth.

Yesterday, the Rector tells me, he was out at
Jolland's Corner, with Obed Backshell when he died ;
another of the old race, a survivor of a world as far
from ours as the Renaissance, the world before the
railways, with wide margins and easy paces, wherein
the labourers, to judge from such relics as Backshell
and Tomsett, were more courteous than half the new
gentry now upon the land, and, in one direction at
least, much better instructed ; a world the Rector and
I conspire to regret. Old Backshell died with that
fine apathy common to his race. As year by year
the knell rings for such and such an acquaintance,
the old men will moralise, " Us must go when we be
called ; " and when at last they know that to-night
or to-morrow the clerk will slowly climb the crooked
stairs, and pull the old rope for their own knell,
they take it with a wonderful sense of proportion,
with a sense of their place in the natural course of the
world, which eighty years' monotonous labour on the
land, under the changeless change of the seasons,

14 IDLEHURST :

seems to impress on the mind as no other experience
can. Old Backshell departs, clear-minded almost to
the last, neither glad nor sorry, to all appearance
fearless even, unconcerned for the Beyond ; no pro-
testations of salvation, no solicitude for those he
leaves ; merely the quiet acceptance of a common
fact, a homely, even grotesque understanding of the
matter, which shuts out any touch of awe. The
Rector leaves the fruit-wall, and we saunter towards
the wicket into the churchyard. As a young man,
he tells me, he held theories that no one had a right
to come to threescore and ten : that any one who had
worked his utmost and suffered his possible would
earn his discharge effectually before then. " I ex-
cluded politicians," he says, " and ecclesiastical
persons, of course, and so on. But these old people
—Backshell, and Tomsett, and Widow Roser — have
upset the theory for me. Perhaps really honest head-
work might act as I fancied, with Tomsett's hours
and meals. Nothing to prevent you and me from
reaching a hundred, at any rate ! "

As I mount the hill on my way home, the hard
way of my neighbours, in life and death, tugs at me
more than the gradient ; and not till I reach the
turning into my domain by the tall firs on the crest
of the ridge, does the mind sink back into the lower

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 15

levels of content. The soughing of the fir-boughs,
the noise of the poultry-yard and the pigeon-loft,
the champ-champ of the chaff-cutter and the chance
ring of a dairy pail, a score of homely sounds bring
back the warmth of life.

I reflect that Tomsett is by this filling his pipe, the
kettle singing under the blue checkered vallance of
the chimney-breast ; for the time he is as happy as
any other in the county. If he understood these
vague philanthropies and vicarious discomfortings
of ours, perhaps the balance of pity might not be
altogether easily struck between us.

March ist. — This morning we found the wind had
gone " up," as they say here, into the north, and
blown away all the cheer of the hint of Spring. The
light was dull and hueless ; a smoky haze hung
between the lawn and the nearest fir-trunks ; a raw,
damp air stirred the dead leaves in the hedges. The
incessant trill and whistle of the birds which has
filled the garden for a week past ceased at once.
There is something more than raw air and leaden
cloud in these days of early Spring when the wind
is " up." " London smoke," people used to call the
specific haze, as Gilbert White notes, long before the
sea-coal fires could do much in the way of fumigating

16 IDLEHURST :

the Home Counties ; now that a canopy of soot
hangs over a hundred square miles of flues, and
streams away on the wind like a vast black flag, they
call it " blight," and think it brings the caterpillars
to the apple trees. In fine, bright weather, the north
wind must blow the smoke up and away into space,
for then it hardly reaches us at Arnington ; but,
when the air is damp and heavy and the clouds keep
down, two hours of north wind bring us the brown
haze and unmistakable smell. Many people ridicule
the idea that smoke can travel so far ; but no one
who has seen the smoke of a gorse-fire carried in a
horizontal bar half over a county on a still after-
noon, or watched the twenty-mile streak of smoke
from a -liner in the Channel, or made observations
upon the graduated darkness which sometimes covers
the forty miles between Arnington and Hyde Park
Corner, will have much doubt about the cause of the
plague. The meteor comes on with definite front
and flanks ; if the wind is a little across, here in the
sunshine we can see the hills east or west of Arnington
blotted out by the drifting veil ; it lowers the tem-
perature as it comes, and fills the nostrils with a tang
of soot and sulphur; in certain conjunctions with
sleet-squalls or thundery cloud it can produce almost
appalling effects of colour and gloom. Animal life

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. I/

hushes and hides before it ; and I believe that to any
observant man its unnatural features must always be
disquieting and depressing.

On bright, frosty mornings, when I go up to the
top of the hilly common behind the house, I see all
along the northern horizon a broad, dun bank of
cloud, orange-coppery fading to ashy-brown, the
coast of that land of London Particular, where it is
freezing rawly, where the gas-jets are burning murky-
yellow in the olive-coloured air, and where three
million pair of lungs are drawing the biting carbonic
and sulphurous acids. Down here the rime is just
turned to dew and flashes crimson and green on the
points of the furze and the cobwebs ; and in the
dead calm the sun strikes warm in the face, and
draws out the intense sweetness of the fine heath-
grass. Even as one is commiserating the people
whose morning trains are stuck in a blank yellow
world at Battersea or Vauxhall, amid a cannonade
of fog-signals, the wind begins to veer and shift
northerly ; and before noon the light in Arnington is
as the light of the Embankment, with a smell as of
Brompton Road.

This censing of the country by the town is pestilent
enough to all whose senses are practised in tolerably
clean and unsophisticated media ; but it probably

c

I 8 IDLEHURST:

has further influence than discomfort. All the old
people agree in calling our present seasons degenerate ;
they can remember the times when the grapes ripened
handsomely on almost every house in the village,
when there was a functionary who attended on the
pruning and care of the vines in the commune,
receiving a proportion of the crop as his pay. There
are few years now when the school-children would
care to set their teeth in the clusters. The summers
have changed for the worse ; and perhaps such
influences as this smoke-cloud and all it is the sign
of, draining and drying of the land, vanishing of
woods and brushwood, replacing of the naturally
filtering and radiating turf and foliage by square
mileage of slate roof and chimney pots, may be
enough to account for the change. We know the
specific differences of atmosphere produced over
small areas of country — down, river-valley, fen ;
London, from Woolwich to Kew, from Highgate
to Streatham, a stupendous volcano with a million
fumaroles, is sufficient to defile the Home Counties
at least; and the Black Country will account for
much of the rest.

The alteration of the seasons lies, I think, not so
much in differences of temperature which could be
shown in tables of averages, as in the prevalence' of

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. Ip

coarser transitions, abrupt variations, separation of
extremes in rainfall and temperature ; in the lack of
what Gilbert White calls " delicate weather."

People with ordinary Londoner's instincts cannot
even understand these distinctions ; to them, one of
our late summers of brazen drought is the ideal of
charming weather ; while to the real countryman
who knows and loves the face of the land, nothing
is so bitter as the lingering death of green things
morning after morning under the cloudless, pitiless
blue. And there are not many people now who
have not in some degree the Londoner's instincts.
The town has overpowered and swallowed up the
country — we are cockney from sea to sea. The
change is to be traced in quite recent times ; relics
of the older state yet remain. Rural sentiment, the
bobus exercet suis feeling for the jolly farmer and the
fine peasantry, by all test of literature, came not so
long ago out of the fields and into the streets ; to-day
the wind sets the other way, the smell of the foot-
lights come across the hay ; London air blows into
the smallest village in Arcadia. Charles Lamb at
Enfield is far less a cockney than Mr. Hardy in
" Wessex," or Mr. Crockett in Ayrshire. We country
folk are taught, diverted, governed from Town ; the
little businesses proper to our conditions are directed

20 IDLEHURST :

by gentlemen in London offices, who know of the
necessities of the countryside as much as old Tomsett
or my gardener Bish does of regulating the traffic in
Piccadilly. We, who live the year round in Arcadia,
under the snow and through the rain, who have no
town houses and London seasons, are almost aliens
to the cultured race ; these, when they visit our
haunts, treat us as merely the setting of their holiday ;
they never seem to apprehend that there may be
souls whose whole life is fixed in these picturesque
but dull environs. Therefore they eat buns, sitting
on our front doorsteps, and saunter or recline in our
standing hay-grass, and pitch their cameras and
easels in our little thoroughfares ; and perchance,
grumble at our unpicturesqueness in the composition.
They seem to consider the country as merely a useful
adjunct to town life — the air a good tonic, the quiet
as making for sleep when sleep has become necessary.
More and more Arcady becomes a ventilating-
system for the West End, a bath to remove the
season's grubbiness, a rubbing-post for metropolitan
cacoethes. This view is systematised in the plan of
sending children from unhealthier quarters of London
into our sanatory Weald. Some of the immigrants,
chiefly workhouse orphans, are permanently lodged
with us ; others, arrive in the summer for a fortnight's

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 21

expatiation. The first class, no doubt, gain vastly
in health and well-being ; but make a very ill return
to us their hosts. The brief holiday of the summer
visitors is not enough to help their bodily ailments ;
and if they go home better in mind, one can only
shudder for those who stayed behind. In spite of
systems of oversight and visitation, it constantly
happens that a couple of little Mile-Enders are
superimposed upon a half-dozen small Joskins in
the cramped and fusty cottage bedrooms, already
thrice overcrowded. And I find by research, that
the invaders are generally far from being happy ;
they find the country insipid, like their betters ; they
miss the opes strepitumque> the flaring, roaring streets,
the fried-fish, and the dainties out of tin cans. They
hate and are hated by the autochthones of their own
inches ; they scorn the menu of their entertainers ;
fry of the salt deeps, they sicken in the fresh shallows
of Alpheus. If it ended here, and the summer-
holiday plan was only a philanthropic waste, Arcadians
might suffer gladly the activities of the energetic
lady-committees, and the criticisms of their proteges ;
but naturally that part of town-infections which the
visitors rub off among the pastures new, they
effectually leave with us here. One is apt to grow
not a little angry at the complete ignoring of the

22 IDLEHURST :

case of our own youngsters ; for the refection of
the youth of Rats' Rents, our little Jockeys and
Jennies are to be denied their chance of innocence —
the arts and sciences of the slums are to be brought
to them at first hand.

The matter has a side to it which may fairly be
called diabolical : — the use of " modern advantages "
to throw out into the wilderness very subtle seed
of all the vileness which centripetally gathers round
St. Paul's. And it is a blunder. London, for its
own sake, must leave us fairly clean and undistracted,
the result of our own heaven and earth. It produces
no raw material, but only manufactures from imports
— imports of sound country bodies and minds year
by year, which enable it to live — made into its
policemen, porters, and navvies, its wholesome maids,
even its clerks and shopmen. It must leave some
corners and breadths unvexed by railway whistles
and steam hooters, clear of tall chimneys and forges ;
it must suppress the busy folk who are always
boring for coal in Kent ; it must keep watch on the
steady process of de-naturalisation going on in all parts
of the land ; this and more it must do if it will keep
for itself a place of refreshing and a breeding-ground
of healthy frames for its necessary consumption.
At present, the golden goose is being slaughtered

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 23

with much complacency. Years hence will come
endeavours to reproduce lost features — one can fancy
the planting of woods by local authorities and sowing
of grass-seeds in the midst of interlacing slum-suburbs ;
even as they plant to-day their little lime-tree rows
and lay out a be-pathed desert by the name of
" Bink's Park " in the congested districts of Balham
or Hackney. The typical "open space" of modern
Greater London is such a dread production that one
may well wish to conserve examples of native soil
already existing. I wish that some part of the
present care for ancient monuments could be ex-
tended to modern landscape, and that naturalists
would expand their right solicitude for birds' eggs
and ferns into protection for whole heaths, woods,
hillsides, and rivers. It might be possible to dedicate
some parcels of typical country as museums — for-
bidding new buildings and extension of trades
therein, and rigorously guarding not only the fauna
and flora, but the mere beauty of grass and heather,
rock and pool. One such natural museum might
be made between Derwentwater, Scafell, and Helvel-
lyn ; one on Dartmoor ; another about the upper
Thames, enclosing Oxford ; another in the Fens ;
and certainly one including part of the South Downs
and the Weald — say, within a radius of twelve

24 IDLEHURST :

miles from the high fir-clump behind my garden.
Such a harbourage for shy things, bird, beast, and
herb, would be a delight for the physiologists ; to it
all quaint obsolescent natures would make their way ;
among them, perhaps, that almost extinct species,
the innate rustic, eternally expecting until the stream
of progress shall have run down.

So I meditated, walking off ill humours in wet
lanes ; turning my back at last on the smoky wind
and drizzling rain as a rift of dun light in the west
presented sunset, and consoling myself with the
thought of early shutters and candles, and the well-
burned slippers, and Horace — Horace or Elia — over
the oak-log fire.

2nd. — Waking before daylight I heard the church
clock chime clear, and turned over with pleasant,
sleepy apprehension that the wind was back in the
south again. The morning broke as though no
smoke had ever come our way, and all the forenoon
was of rememberable beauty. All the true good
weather comes out of the south : rainy on the eastern
side, windy on the westerly, and pure halcyon days
from the meridian. I idled in the garden at small
businesses of tying and nailing, leaving severer works
for a darker day. The crocuses spread themselves
wide to the sun, lines and mounds of yellow fire ; but

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 25

no bees came to sprawl in their cups. Hoverer-flies
buzzed about the clumps ; the hoverer which in its
middle place between the over-virtuous bee and the
criminal wasp, represented to my childish fancy a
not unfriendly type of the mean ; dare I say, some
sort of personal ideal ? Everywhere rang the metallic
" pink-pink " of the chaffinch and the " pitcher-wee "
of the greater tit. Of late that " pink-pink," indis-
solubly connected with the scientific, industrious, and
enormous destruction of fruit-buds on the plum-trees,
has so grated on my ears as to suggest the clink of
the ramrod in the old muzzle-loader, the brutum
fulmen I keep for such thieves ; but to-day in the
bland air and warmth it has a softer descant. The
modern gardener has need of soothing hours such as
these to maintain his patience in the endless war with
nature and with art, with weed and blight and grub
and bird, with the destroyed balance of evil that
man is answerable for, with the boy-bandit and the
prowling, excavating tabby. If only the boy would
catapult the cat effectually, or the cat catch the finch,
or the finch eat the caterpillar! But ay me! the
chaffinch and the bullfinch trim out the fat bloom-
buds, and tear the crocuses for fun, the mouse noses
down to the new-sown peas, the cat gambols upon
one's choicest seedlings, and the boy in the season of

26 IDLEHURST :

the year visits the cherry trees ; and so the vicious
circle speeds — a part of the great gardener's paradox
(which prevails this side of the hedge of Eden), the
paradox that all gardening is a deadly war with
Nature, needing a mind always alert to guard or
attack,— and yet when all's done we avail nothing ;
Nature strikes her balances and of her bounty gives
us so much or so little, for all our pains.

My attempts upon the paradox, in the way of
laying in peach-shoots on the south wall, tacking the
sprays so that the silky buds lay close to the old red-
brick and yellow lichens, yet so that the reddening fruit
should swell at ease in time to come — my lazy labours
gave way about noon to a promenade up and down
the long grass walk that runs through the middle
of the kitchen garden, a straight eighty yards or so,
three yards wide, scythe-mown, not too close ; on
either side a wide flower border, then espalier apples,
and behind them the worts and roots which here
claim their kin with the parterre, and are nowise
discordant. One end of this walk widens out round
a stone sundial without a gnomon ; the other drops
to the meadow gate, the pastoral hillside, and the
outer world. In the borders to-day are great tufts of
yellow crocus ; clumps of daffodil are already bristling
with flower sheaths, the old fat-headed sort, with the

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 27

nutmeg and cinnamon smell, and with English names,
Butter -and -Eggs, Codlins-and- Cream. The later
breeds, lovely slender trumpets and stars, with all
hideous names of Boggsii and Jinksii, grow by them-
selves in a private quarter. Violets, mere allowed
trespassers, tangle about the roots of the espaliers.
The crown-imperials are thrusting their bright green
domes through the ground. After the daffodils will
come the old tall tulips ; in May the flag-iris will
follow ; in June white lilies ; in July a host of old
common roses. It is a walk of old flowers altogether
— the blossoms of the classics. I please myself with
the fancy that if Shakespere were to come along it
he would find there nothing strange. But assuredly
many things would be missing, that have died out
of use and memory, extinct before there were cata-
logues. We can guess that the flowers of three
centuries ago were mostly small, as we should think ;
purely, a little palely coloured ; very delicately sweet.
There is loss as well as gain in the evolution of the
exhibition carnation and the fancy pansy, as in all
other. When all is said, no finest Mrs. John Laing
or L'Ideale comes near the brier-rose in the hedges
for colour or sweetness — to those at least who can
hold the balance between force and delicacy, or
rather, see the true strength in the fineness ; as we

28 IDLEHURST :

find six square inches of Turner vignette obliterate
a half-acre of palette-knife energies from last year's
Academy, or a bit of old ballad refrain abolish an
epic glorious in special type and a limited edition of
signed and numbered copies.

Nothing is sacred to the florist ; but by help of
cottage gardens and the obscure amateur some certain
beauties have escaped him : damask roses, white
thorn, queen lilies survive his dealings and the
epidemics induced by his in-breeding and fantastic
selection. In my double border I conserve something
of the unimproved, the unrectified (as the fulip-
breeders say) Flora. Elsewhere I have plots for
the last certificated hybrid and the seedling with
three crosses to its name, for I desire to prove all
things; but in my grass walk I hold fast the good
of twenty generations, Chaucer's posy, Spenser's
odours, Shakespere's tinctures, a harmonious com-
pany of blossoms, unvexed by the upstarts of the
age, the cosmopolitan canaille, aliens from Cathaya,
or that whole World which is New. It is no small
instruction to idle round the quarters, even at this
naked opening of the year, when headstone labels
so largely represent the dormant life ; to pace from
the solitary primrose to the home of Primula
Himalaica, from cabbage-roses to the Teas of '95 ;

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 29

and to reflect how much of all the garden holds
was dear to one's grandfather, how very much our
grandsons will despise. The true catholic, the man
in the mean state, judicious between ancestry and
descendants, finds sufficient delight, even in the early
essays of the opening year, to compensate many a
loss. The winter may have destroyed his favourite
pentstemon ; but here are the snowdrops, thicker
than ever, under the hazels and the holly hedge.

ijth. — Dull weather, with low clouds and windless
air, has for the last week drowned all the landscape
in blue-grey haze, but once or twice pierced by shafts
of sun which touched out wonderful contrasts of
willow-rows or tufted hill flushing against the purple
distance. Then one night a stormy sunset, flaming
in the west and firing all the ring of the horizon,
foretold change. Under the tossed-up waves of
crimson, scudded little ragged vapours already in the
night, grey and dismal. It signified both wet and
wind ; the more certainly as Bish the gardener
thought we wouldn't get a change before the next
quarter of the moon ; for Bish's predictions are
frequently right, when inverted.

One might naturally expect country folk in the
Weald to grow up to some judgment of the weather.
Observations through plate-glass windows, and by

30 IDLEHURST :

means of telegrams, are of course without educational
force ; but here, living mostly sub Jove, and with all
the heaven from Ditchling Beacon to Camp Hill to
study, we are miserable meteorologists. The main
difference, the Rector says, between most modern
Christians and the Jews of the New Testament, lies
in the ability credited to the latter of reading the
physical weather. Bish, as far as my observation
goes, fairly represents the village mind in the matter.
He has large faith in the Almanack. " The Almanack
says as how we shall have floods in June ; " and in
the June drought — "dryth," Bish calls it — a new
interest wakes in the Almanack's prediction of snow
for the end of August. He believes in the influence
of the moon : if you will tell him what day the moon
" changes " (he is quite unable to make the observation
for himself) he will announce such and such conse-
quential disturbances. He tells me that in whatsoever
point the wind sits when the sun " crosses the line,"
thence it will prevalently blow for the quarter. Other
guides he has, as that a certain star (he is not sure
which, but once pointed out Vega in a doubtful way)
governs the winds at certain junctures ; that the
reflection of the fire in a room, seen brightly on the
window panes, presages rain ; and, of course, that
curious and universal belief that the visit of a German

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 31

band (" them Germans," we call them), and the lifting
up of their agonizing Volkslieder, is a sure prognostic
of a " fall." His professed ability to smell the icebergs
in cold weather is probably some remnant of un-
digested natural history books ; but his self-support-
ing theory that wind causes thunder and thunder
wind ; his elastic definition of " frostes " — from a
heavy August dew to a January blizzard — his
formula as to the " sun and wind getting together ; "
his belief that the " breaking up of the springs " is
connected with storms at sea : all this is a marvel of
absurdity in a man with eyes, free of the open sky
from dawn to dark. In the Meteorological Depart-
ment these theories of the inner consciousness might
be looked for ; but in country people I can only
explain the thing by supposing it part of the law
whereby, rather than remain braced and keen to
watch the world accurately, and take every appearance
on its own merits, the lazy intellect declines upon
generalisation, formalised rules, and Laws of Nature.
The day following the wild sunset was blotted out
by driving rain that moved in curving pillars up the
valley all the morning. At noon the grey veil was
broken up, and great masses of cloud, thundery-white
at the crest and a deep blue-grey at the bellying base,
drew like an aerial fleet out of the south-west, falling

32 IDLEHURST :

presently into separate columns, five or six from
horizon to horizon, with wide interspaces of very clear
sky. This formation, with the steady sailing motion
of the masses, suggests the thought of warships in
line, the old three-deckers with mountainous canvas,
not the present Vulcanian workshops. The wind
still blew fresh ; and after the exhausted rain every
distance and tone of the landscape was intensely
clear in a dead broad daylight, the sun held behind
one of those processions of towering cloud. In the
afternoon I walked over to Lycetts Farm to see old
Tomsett, and as I went every ploughed field, copse,
clump of bloomy tufted palm, or crook of road was a
piece of pure colour, purple or red-grey or creamy
white. A newly-rolled meadow on the hillside, seen
between fir trees near at hand, was a square of green
so vivid and full as almost to impress the eye like
flame. As I reached the crown of the hill, the
Forest Ridge rose into sight in the north, keenly
clear at the edge and glooming under the packing
clouds, a dark bar between a streak of pale green sky
and the strong inlay of colour in field and wood on
the nearer hills. The clouds, though broken from
their serried lines into detached mounds and rounded
piles — the " herded elephants " of Keats — still veiled
the sun, and it was the hour of local colour at the

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 33

height. I turned from the majestic apparatus of
clouds and the salient beauty of the land into the
dark of Tomsett's cottage not quite contentedly.
The room is a kitchen of the common pattern, a low
ceiling of dusty plaster and black timbers, rickety
windows with leaded panes, one battered door to the
outer air. The sempiternal kettle bubbled on the
stove ; a cat dozed on the faded patchwork cushion
in the armchair ; a couple of photographs and a stuffed
plover graced the walls. Over all hung the dull
fustiness mixed of damp foundations, rotting thatch,
wood fires, cooking, and old corduroy. The lattice,
patched with brown paper, looked on the garden-plot
of wintered kale-stumps and a moss-smothered apple
tree.

By the fire, sitting upright, stick in hand, in round
frock, long gaiters, and an ancient billycock hat, was
Tomsett. The old man is good-looking, as looks go
among our plain-featured people — has a strong brow,
winter-apple cheeks, and a fringe of white whisker
under his jaw ; his eyes have the weary, patient look
that so many old eyes have here — one of the saddest
looks I know.

He tried to say something by way of thanks for
the trouble people had taken for him. Muster Lewk-
nor — they never call him the Rector in the cottages—

D

34 IDLEHURST :

had been to see him, and told him as how it would
be all right for the winter ; but clearly life was so
much on the lees that nothing greatly mattered. I
made him fill his pipe, and talk of other things.
Like all the old fellows of his date, he is nothing
less in the world than landator temporis acti, on
principle. The old folk are always ready to point
out the improvements they have seen ; they are even
cruelly careless about the destruction of old houses
or old scenes ; old associations hardly appeal to
them. But with appreciation founded on solid
advantage, they regretfully recall the days of their
youth, and most considerately take exception to the
common conceptions of advance. " 'Sims as no one
don't want me now," says old Tomsett, raking out
a coal for his pipe. "'Cep'n in hayin' there's hardly
a job to be got. Ruinin' the land ; that's what it is !
No mendin', no cleanin' ! Why, there's enough stuff
in they dicks to mend all the land, if they'd clean
'em out. Look what that does to a meada ! Why,
you can see where there's bin naun but a cooch-fire
for two years after. Ruinin' all the land, that's what
it is ! " He shakes his head and muses sadly, no
doubt, on the clean busy farming of the fifties.

" But you'd bad times, some years ? " I suggest.

"Ay," he says, "but they weren't that close as

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 35

they be now. They'd give you bread and drippin'
at any farmhouse ; and taters was that cheap, afore
the blight come, — why, you could have almost as
many as you wanted. And then, look at the work !
After harvest, we'd sometimes be threshin' all the
year till the seed-cuttin' began ; and then if the
weather was rough, we could alias go back to the
barn again ; sometimes we had to thresh out to
make room for the new corn. Of course, you see,
that was always money comin' in. Now, when they
threshes with the machine, 'tis all done in a week.
And, oh dear, the waste of it too ! The corn falls into
the cavin's, and when that's laid a few months you
can see it all comin' up green with the wheat. In
the old time, if a man was threshin' and let his corn
get in the cavin's, in the barn, why, he'd hear on it !
It was the same-like with harvest, and hayin', too.
That was harvest ; all mowin' — no swappin' or
baggin'. The young chaps 'ud go upwards hay-
cuttin' : six shillin's a day we got, and as much stout
as we could drink ; and after that we'd time to get
back and do the cuttin' at home. I rec'lec' once
cuttin' all over where they built the Crystial Pallis ;
they let us have all the rabbits that was turned out—
a lot on them there was, to be sure ! And once I
was mowin' at Nonsuch Park in Surrey, as you may

36 IDLEHURST :

have heard on ; well, there was four chaps there as
called themselves the Flyaway Mowers ; they said
nobody could cut so much in a week as they could.
They'd got a barrel of beer of their own under a tree,
and that. I was mowin' after them, and I wasn't
not very far behind 'em, all day."

I can believe it, for all the shrunken limbs and
knotted rheumatic hands. After a longish silence,
sacred perhaps to waking memories, the old man
hobbles across the room to the fire to shift the kettle
and relight his stumpy clay. " I aches," he explains,
as he settles stiffly back into his seat ; " I be that
stiff-like in the knees."

I suggest it is time he took a rest ; he began so
early.

" I started on work when I was turned seven/' he
says. " I had to walk from Hornlye to Blackhatch
to my work every day, for eighteenpence. a week ;
sometimes, hayin' and such like, I'd not be in bed
three nights together; just lay down in the stable
for an hour or so : and then get thirty shillin's for
six months of that."

He stops to draw at his rattling pipe, and then
goes on : " That was when the work'us used to be
where Muster Dickes lives now — Dickes' Folly, they
calls it: it was called the Clappers, then. All the

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 37

lads on the parish was put out to farmin' when they
was ten or eleven. They had a meetin' in the evenin'
in the long room at the Greyhound, at Martinmas,
and at Lady Day : all the lads 'ud be there, and
the farmers, and the auctioneer. They'd ask a lad,
1 What can you do ? ' and he'd say, ' I can drive a
plough, and hedge, and cut wood, or go with a team
o' bullocks ; ' and then the auctioneer he'd say,
' Fifty shillin's ! ' and one farmer he'd say, ' Three
pound ; ' and so they'd go up to five pound or so,
and he'd be hired for the half year, and be right off
the work'us. If he took a job afore that, the parish
took all the money as he earned, and found him in
clothes. And they used to put out pigs to be fatted
in the parish ; there was one old Denman had, as
used to be the blacksmith ; I never see sech a hog
as that were. Ah, it was good times then !

"And it's good times for some on 'em now," he
went on, " but not for them as is on the land. I
reckon when I'm about again, I can do as good
a day's job as the young chaps ; but it's all cuttin'
off here, and puttin' down there, and there's naun
left for such as I be. Well, I shan't be here
much longer ; but the young 'uns won't be better
off nor what we was, nor so well, for all their chat.
Muster Lewknor, he was a-sayin' as how things

38 IDLEHURST :

goes in a circle like, and everything comes back
some day just where it was. If the young chaps
could see what it was like when I was a boy, they
wouldn't talk like they does. Good times, they was,
and no mistake."

At this point came in Widda Packham, a sort of
far-off relation of Tomsett's, a cheery, tublike little
woman who looks after him at spare moments, and I
think amends his tea with small extras of her own.
After an easy curtsey to me, she turned to Tomsett
almost as to a child —

" There you be again with that pipe o' yourn, Mars'
Tomsett ! And you know as chewin's a sight better
for your lights ! " Then, as her sleeves were already
up to her hard red elbows, and a comprehensive
" clean-up " was evidently in view, I retired.

Thinking much of Tomsett's "old times" on my
way home, I hardly noticed how the colour had gone
from sky and land and a grey evening was shrouding
the world, with promise of a night of rain. Easy
enough to say that so the colour dies out of life
towards the close ; but in converse with the old
people I gain a clear impression that they judge very
largely things on their own merits ; and that for the
farm labourer the former days were really better than
these. And among our hymns to Progress, advancing

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 39

along a thousand various lines of national life, let us
admit, if for mere contrast's sake, one little lament
for a fallen glory, the sad complaint of old Tomsett
and his kind.

25/7*. — A lovely variant of early Spring days; not
that perfect thing when sun and wind are on the
meridian together, with soft warmth and sailing clouds,
but a noon of still air, the sun hot upon the face, so
that the little ruffling breeze from the south-east which
blows and falls once in a minute is none too cool. In
the garden-walks the tortoiseshell butterflies got up
under my feet, and hovered by sixes and sevens at
once on the white carpet of the arabis, where the bees
kept up a steady drone. The sky was cloudless,
save where low down in the west streaks and streamers
of vapour lay all day, showing here and there against
their horizontal lines the rounded shapes whose
lightly crisped and hardened edge is the first faint
sign of thunder. The sunlight was broad and pure ;
every shadow was full of vivid colour. The mind,
which perhaps has need of the semblance of fixed
points in the smooth lapse of being, draws the white
chalk score under to-day, as definitely this year's
opening day of Spring.

The day before, I had met the Rector and his wife
in the village ; and Mrs. Lydia had called to me that

40 IDLEHURST :

Alice was coming home that night. I knew that on
such a morning as this she would be early up the
hill and in the garden, with a hundred histories of
her travels, and uncounted questions about old friends
of the flowers and beasts. I was sitting under the
yew hedge, and had just allowed the protest which
all the temper of the day seemed to make against the
Euripides I had opened half an hour before, when
I saw her come in at the meadow gate — a vision of
pink frock and yellow hair unbound, the one some
inches lower, the other as much higher in the world
than at our last meeting, as befits eleven. She
did not see me ; and as she came up the grass walk
she first of all fell on her knees beside the great
clump of daffodils at the corner, with an odd little
cry of endearment, and a caressing way with the
hands that nobly refrained from picking and stealing.
The moment after she sprang to her feet, and began
to dance up the path, at first perhaps with some little
toe-pointing and the school-chassez not wholly for-
gotten, but after the first three steps with nothing
more than the hop-skip-and-jump of a child too
happy to be still, the expression of delight in per-
fectly light and graceful motion. She had a bunch
of wild daffodils in her hand which acted thyrsus ;
and pink frock, hair ribbon, shoe-strap and all, she

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 4!

might have been the forerunner of the gayest Spring
procession that ever wound across Greek frieze or
vase. A moment after, with a fervid grasp of the
small fingers on my own, before our greetings were
well over, I was swept away to visit the pigeon-house,
and the calf in the yard, and Zero the terrier, amid
a torrent of question and answer at once, pointed by
the little toss of the head which shakes the hair out
of the blue eyes and gives a breathing pause for the
next remark.

The pigeons rose a hundred strong with a thun-
derous rattle of wings as we came to the barn, beat
up against the wind till they cleared the fir clump,
then swung round till the wind was behind them, and
came headlong down the sky in a storm of flashing
plumes, to settle fluttering on the red roof again and
renew the exercises we had interrupted, with glis-
tening throat and pompous step —

" girando e mormorando."

We recognise with shrill delight all the old friends,
the chocolatey tumbler with no hair on his head, and
the great old runt, and the nun that wouldn't leave
his wife to fly with the others, because she had the
rheumatism and had to stay behind. The calf
danced round the straw-yard for us, because he

42 IDLEHURST :

wouldn't be allowed to dance when he was a grown-
up cow ; and Zero signified unchanged devotion by
a long-drawn grunting sigh, half-choked by the arm
round his neck. Then we came upon a rabbit-hutch,
where no rabbit-hutch used to be, some private
concern of the boot-boy's, containing a Himalayan
mamma and a small family ; and I found myself
forgotten while Alice hauled out the litter by their
ears, each diviner than the last, and Zero looked up
with trembling tail which meant that he loved Alice
even more than them.

At this point arrived Mrs. Lydia, in chase of her
niece ; and I turned back to the garden with her,
leaving Alice to her new friends. Mrs. Lydia has no
children of her own now, and spends all upon the
child of her sister in India. If strong devotion mixed
with the rarest kind of serene wisdom can do anything
to shape the growing life, little Alice should one day
be a princess of the right fairy-tale line. The Rectory
rearing, together with her own inheritances, already
seems to show itself. I see Mrs. Lydia often watch-
ing the child with a kind of soft prophetic smile,
noting the little ways of manner and carriage, the
clear truth looking from the eyes, the fine scornful
anger of the mouth and chin.

As we pace the walks, we talk about Alice, as

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 43

Mrs. Lydia is always glad to do. The pink frock
and yellow locks flash upon us at corners over the
daffodils, or glimmer far off among the orchard
trunks. And as the blithe creature stoops over a
butterfly or mocks the starling's whistle or the nut-
hatch's pipe, simple and joyous as any of them, we
muse upon the estrangement between man and the
beasts, which not even such a go-between as Alice
may compose. It is a little saddening for us who
would like to be friends with the wild things ; some-
thing may be done by patience and quiet movement
and knowledge of when and where ; but on the
whole the lower creation will have none of us. Our
friends with the bombarding weapons, from the cata-
pult to the hammerless ejector, with the specimen
box and the butterfly-net, industriously maintain
the rift ; and our own necessary interferences are
too great. They cut us, in fact, all the league of
little lives, and I for one cannot entirely put it aside.
Alice herself, this vision of pure happiness and light
heart, with enchantments of softest finger-tips and
murmurs of caressing nonsense, cannot charm them.
The red-admirals in the early autumn will come and
sit on her finger, but for a slice of apple, not for love ;
the saturnine toads regard her impassively for a
minute and then straddle away to their own devices ;

44 IDLEIIURST :

the ants, she says, will never stop even and look at
her, but always keep on running, running. Just
now she comes up with a history of a black bee
discovered in the act of choosing his lodgings; "he
went into, oh; twenty or thirty holes in the green-
house wall ; he was so particular, and at last he found
one, just what he wanted, so he came out again and
turned round and went in tail foremost, and now
he's living there for good." It is to be feared that
he would prefer his hole in the old mortar to any
invitation of Alice's, even to the best bedroom in
the new dolls' house. There is another side to this.
" I do wish," says Alice, reflectively, " that I could get
into that hole and see what he's doing inside." A
piece of that other Alice's mushroom, on the diminish-
ing side, might alter the present relations con-
siderably.

For myself, the incommunicableness of birds and
beasts is only part of a sense of alienation from the
whole natural world, felt more keenly at certain hours
of the earth and sky, under certain aspects of the
wide champaign, hill-horizons, dark woods. No man
can put his pride as man from him and win admission
into the mysteries beneath his feet. The more
intensely we feel the power of the earth, its brooding
light, its shadowed terrors, its sweet silence, its still

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 45

unchanging procession of heart-breaking loveliness,
the more we know ourselves to be uninitiate ; the
nearer to tears its beauty brings us, we see the clearer
that there is a secret we cannot share.

April $rd. — I went down to the village to-day to
see the Spring Fair, which has been held in the street,
between the church and the old toll-gate, for five
hundred and odd years by record. Under a grey
cloudy daylight the street shows a crowd of men
and beasts, the customary wide spaces of desert mud
being thronged for the day with the agricultural
"interest" of all the country-side. In the roadway-
stand bullocks in small droves, kept in station by
shrill yells and the merciless ash-plants of a peculiar
race of ragged nondescripts, half-gipsy and half-
tramp, who follow the fairs and markets. Here are
deep red, long-backed Sussex steers, black Scots,
miserable little cross-bred heifers, which huddle or
bolt in puzzled misery. Horses of dejected appear-
. ance are tied in strings by the footpath, or ridden at
a gallop through the thick of the traffic by long-
coated gipsies with wonderful seats, accompanied
with halloos and the " hi — hi — hi ! " which seems the
traditional encouragement to unwilling nags on these
occasions. Near the church entry there are some

46 IDLEHURST :

wattle pens of sheep ; and it is well to notice the
difference between the faces here and those of the
cattle-dealers. Here are many of a passing type,
middle-aged men, ruddy and open faced, in clean
frock and gaiters, carrying an ancient, green carriage
umbrella. The new type, which bargains among the
bullocks and horses, is more various, but to my
fancy, generally unpleasant to see. There are heads
bending over the sheep pens that might have been
the originals of the fourteenth-century corbels in the
church. Among the cattle-dealers there is hardly
a face which does not bear the stamp of the hour
which must sweat her sixty minutes to the death.
Altogether there is a prevalence of expressions hard,
coarse, and animal. From the gentleman-farmer in
check tail-coat and cord breeches, to the butcher in
a greasy mackintosh, all look as though they ate too
much, and drank something more. Whether farming
be on its last legs or no, market takings find some-
thing still for the hotel bars. Towards dusk, after
the weekly market at Tisfield, you can meet the
farmers' traps going home, some at a gallop, many
with loose reins, and foul-mouthed or sleepy tipsiness
in command. The " Griffin " at Tisfield on market
day is a warm corner. You will find the farmer who
was late home on the market Wednesday, strolling

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 47

through his mangolds with his gun the day after,
while the roots are spoiling and frost is near. We
all know that British farming is ruined ; and watch-
ing its practitioners at Arnington Fair, big, red-faced,
gross men, full of beef and beer and tobacco, driving
very fair nags in tolerable traps, dressing well enough
in country cut and solid materials, one begins at
last to divine that great mystery of Agricultural
Depression which so concerns Editors and Reviewers
and writers upon statistics in the morning papers.

Halfway down the street I found a little group
before a mixed lot of steers ; a tall gentleman-farmer,
lean, Jewish-featured, black-moustached, in neat
riding breeches and a tail-coat ; next him a dealer,
a large man, with a heavy puffed face and orange
whiskers, in a top-coat and muddy trousers ; in the
rear an old fellow in a ragged frock, the Damoetas to
the hawk-nosed ^Egon, a heap of patches and clouts
surmounted by a wonderful head, broken-nosed,
blear-eyed, toothless, hair and beard a tangle of
grizzled curls, the mahogany skin puckered with a
thousand wrinkles. These three, as the farmer and
the dealer wrangled, and the drover leaned on his
stick, impassively chewing, very well represented
some several orders in the agricultural interest.
They contrive to live, not ill, I judge, according to

48 IDLEHURST :

their respective standards of living ; how far those
standards, and those clearly separated orders of men
encounter the simple foundation-law of the land, is a
question worth, perhaps, more thought than some
present matters of debate obtain.

I meet the Rector, going about the throng with
his mind keenly attent to the human part, here
speaking to a late parishioner who is back again for
to-day, here watching for a moment some entente of
bad characters by the "Wheatsheaf" door. I see
Mrs. Lydia, towed hither and thither among horses'
hocks and bullocks' horns by little Alice, who does
not see, I hope, all the reckless cruelty, the slashing
hits at noses and knees ; cruelty which in the gross
means a large money loss to stock farmers every
day in the year. The adage " never take your beast
back from market " is sound enough so long as the
drovers are allowed to depreciate all that comes
under their hands with brutality at once random and
calculated. There is no difficulty in understanding
that farmers should care nothing for other men's
cattle, as just now, when two hogs in one of the
pens were fighting furiously and momentarily tearing
the market value out of each other, the ring of dis-
interested pigmen stood about the battle, shouting
with laughter, and hardly making way for the owners

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 49

to part the fray. But it is hard to see why a man
should suffer his own property to be knocked and
bullied out of its value, unless one refers it, with
many another riddle besides, to that complex affair
of causes and effects, the mystery of Agricultural
Depression.

I went back to Idlehurst about noon, to find the
order and peace of the pleasance deeper and saner
for even the little tumult of the Fair. Bish not being
in his most active state to-day, owing to the remnant
of a cherished cough, left from the winter's inevitable
" brown-kiters," I ran the hoe over certain borders
myself. The sun struggled out and the wind
freshened, and I was able to indulge that small
destructive instinct which I allow in cutting groundsel
and shepherd's-purse through the collar and turning
the roots of little grasses up to the atmosphere.
The daffodils, undashed this year by the accustomed
sleet, swayed in full glory ; the crown-imperials stood
rigid at the full height of their ebony stems clear
of the whorls of pale green leaves. The Van Thol
tulips shone between me and the sun with the
translucent glow which is their true colour, far above
the raw and dead hue they show by reflected light.
Well out of the range of these, shone together the
cushions of purple aubrietia and clear yellow alyssum ;

E

50 IDLEHURST :

the contrast of Alice's paintbox, to be sure, but of
Turner's too. As I looked over all these down on
the village, where the lowing beasts and shouts of
men, the noise of sheep and dogs made an inter-
mittent murmuring hubbub, I found myself pro-
pounding a sort of sum in Rule of Three, unanswered,
as my sums are wont to be ; the terms being Arning-
ton Fair, and the Bank Crossing, and the quiet of
this plot of garden within its inviolable walls.

Towards evening I walked out by the field path
to Blackhatch, facing the setting sun, a level blaze
of light between the tree stems in the shaws. I
turned back soon after the light began to go and
the scents of the earth to rise in the cool-settling
dusk. There are hours which bring out all natural
odours in their strength, as there are seasons which
strike out the fullest colour of every surface ; and
this evening was charged with odour to the full.
I often think that we greatly neglect the sense of
smell ; treat it as nugatory, if not as something a
little vicious by association, without making Aristotle's
distinction between amateurs of roses and of pomades.
There is a great amount of pleasure, none the less,
for those who use their noses as they should use
their eyes, with strenuous discrimination — the dilet-
tanti of smells. There is a pleasure to be gained

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 51

from the thousand natural perfumes of the country,
quite comparable to that given by a fine colour or
a perfect musical interval. Sometimes (my own
case) the sensorium retains and associates scents to
a strange degree, and fixes unfailing and dispropor-
tionate pleasure upon many that are in themselves
indifferent. One of my earliest remembrances, the
smell of pears stored in a cupboard — as they were
stored somewhere in pinafore days — touches a strong,
irrational pleasure ; other recollections running back
to childhood, as the scent of tulips open in the sun,
of gummy buds of poplar trees, of the damp mortar-
and-matting atmosphere in an old church, have each
their singular effect of delight. One or two others
I trace to later dates ; damp garden quarters under
the early Spring sun closely imitate the mouldy reek
of Oxford meadows which the floods have left for a
couple of days, and recall, as nothing else can, the
time when one rowed in the Torpids. Hay half
made and a garden weed-smother have associations
of amazing force, accidental but indelible. These
go back to the twenties; after that it is too late
to gather associations, if indeed there are any yet
unattached.

To-night every bank and hedge breathed, as I
passed, its proper atmosphere ; every lightest breeze

52 IDLEHURST:

brought something new. The soil threw up incense
at every step, the scarcely budded branches set it
afloat, all of the fine and recondite kind. Almost
any nose can appreciate hay, or lilac-blossom, or even
a bean-field, exquisite differences though these be ;
but a budding quick-hedge after a shower, or moist
young bracken, or a larch plantation on a spring
evening, require nares emunctce. As I passed along
the wood road, above all the separate notes — notes
of primrose clump, bluebell spike, trodden tussock,
and wet moss — came the general woodland air, the
breath of the very trunks and twigs, of trickling
water, of fir bark, of the dead leaves of fifty years.
As I came out into the open, I caught the smell of
a dusty road in the twilight cool, not unlike the
steam which goes up when raindrops begin to run
together and darken the dry soil of garden beds —
a smell that brings recollections of drought and
timely showers. Then as I passed the hedge-corner
by Bish's cottage, came a blue drifting haze from
the garden patch, the half pungent, half sweet aroma
of a rubbish fire, which, acting through my idiosyn-
crasy of nostril, brought me home in a pleasantly
sentimental state of retrospect. I turned into the
dark warmth of the cowshed as I went across the
yard to find one more luxury of recollection in

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 53

the breath of the placidly munching Jerseys ; and
after that I fell into a speculation about possible
future evolution of a. neglected sense, classifications
and systems, education, and so forth. I mused
of national collections of scents, as our present
picture-galleries ; of scent- concerts, a fantasia on
lime-blossom, a sea symphony, tarry and phosphoric,
a nocturne of garden plots in summer moonlight: —
" Delights " (as More in Utopia) " let in at ... their
nostrils as the pleasant relishes and seasonings of
life, which nature seems to have marked out peculiarly
for man. . . ." Delights better appreciated, perhaps,
if some change of taste should abolish such modern
anaesthetics as patchouli and penny smokes, to say
nothing of the world of municipal stenches which
at present deprave and obtund an undeveloped sense.
Meanwhile I enjoy a further dimension of human
pleasures than a multitude of my fellows possess
who season their atmosphere with sempiternal Navy
Cut, or that perfect blend of shag and fusee in a
juicy clay.

i^th. — Bish's cough has during the last few days
been complicated with a digestive disturbance ; every-
thing he took, as he told me, why, it retaliated ; and
he reckoned as how there must have been thunder
about which had effervesced in his inside. In these

54 IDLEHURST :

circumstances, he sent up his son Henery as his sub-
stitute in the garden. Henery is about nineteen ; has
a lanky frame, like a skeleton in corduroys ; his boots
are enormous, and shuffle through the world sound-
ingly ; his face is freckled, his hair ginger-red, and his
eyes small, light, and shifty. I think he would be a
sorrow to his father, if the rubs of the world had left
in Bish any property so active as grief. Henery works
under protest ; every turn of the spade marks off the
time towards six o'clock, the rank pipe, the tea with
onions, the hour of the stroll " up-street " with Frenk
and Erree, of the badinage with Maery's or Loow-
easer's responsive charm. I hardly like to leave him
alone with my tulips, the flaming Keizerskroons and
soft Rose Luisantes that border the quarter where he
works. Those vast feet have a way of flattening,
with half-malicious clumsiness, any choice growth
they come near ; but I want to go and see Bish plre>
so after warnings, received in sullen silence, without a
moment's lifting of the dull eyes, I leave the youth
in the middle of a solid piece of digging and take the
field path to the cottage they call Dogkennel, in the
bottom by the brook. Small and damp and green, it
stands on the fringe of a large copse, round it a clayey
garden patch, containing little beyond the stubs of
the winter greens and last year's scarlet-runners

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 55

decaying on the sticks. Under instructions, Bish
works admirably ; but he has no power of initiative.
The cottage is a poor timber and plaster affair, the
old thatch coming down to the middle of the case-
ments, and shrunk away from the one black chimney-
stack. In the living room, with its close heat and
ancient smell, I find my man. Without his hat, Bish
is picturesque ; he has a high crown, bristled over
with thin hair, a narrow peaked face whose deep-
scored wrinkles converge to the chin and pointed
beard, melancholy eyes that speak a philosopher on
the defensive against the conspiring world. I think
his must be a surviving or recurrent type of physio-
gnomy ; he belongs to the Commonwealth, to a
certainty ; the Rector calls him The Regicide. He
would become jackboots and a buff coat perfectly,
and would not be amiss in a frock ; but no ancestral
instincts rule his clothes. Bag-kneed, frayed check
trousers, some treasured cast-off, without so much as
leggings to ease the anomaly, a black coat with pen-
dulous tails, and a battered straw hat, disguise the
Roundhead all too well. As I find him bare-headed
he looks the Ironside again, though a dyspeptic one.
As I come in, he puts down a thumbed copy of
Culpeper's Herbal, which was his father's, and which
he still reads with vague notions of profit, although

56 IDLEHURST :

he does not know a tithe of the herbs by sight, and
never gathered simples under sun or moon. He
sometimes tells me there's a deal more in those old
books than what you'd think for. " Doctors " (here
bubbles up the latent distrust and hostility to the
regular practitioner, which goes together with absolute
dependence upon that hardworking gentleman in
hours of need : a sentiment running back perhaps to
times of witchcraft and home medicine of the pro
mirifao kind, a rebellion against hard and fast rules and
the stern categories of — osis and — itis) — " doctors,
they don't seem to reckon much on 'em ; but it might
be better for some on us if we used them herbs more.
Father, he was wonderful fond of them ; he'd go out
of a night to gather 'em under the Planets. Once "
(and here comes the inevitable triumphant instance)
" he was bad with the 'sipelas in the face ; and the
book said as how mash-mailer was the thing to cure it ;
and he hadn't got no mash-mailer, so he took and put
on the tea-leaves out of the pot, two or three times ;
and that took it clean away. And them gipsy-women,
he declares, they be won'erful clever, sometimes.
There was one came to the door sellin' skewers a
year' two ago, and she told his wife to take dandelion
tea ; and that took the slug off her liver as quick as
quick." Such is Bish's general position toward physic

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 57

when in his ordinary health. When he is on his club,
as now, the elder Culpeper makes way for the younger,
and father's book becomes somewhat academic.

In answer to my present inquiries, he says that
doctor seed him yesterday, and reckoned as how he
wouldn't be right till the stomach was mended. Yes,
he'd been middlin' bad ; corned on swimey-like in
the head, and the wind it terrified him all night. So
he runs on, cataloguing with real enjoyment the
sensations and motions of various parts of his inside,
and exercising the envied privileges of the family
invalid. I hear, not for the first time, that his heart
was right up in his mouth ; this he connects somehow
with cramps in the legs, " something crule." " I
'spect I got 'em when I was carter-boy. The roads
they was bad, then, I can tell you. I've knowed a
waggin go a-slidin' with the bottom on the road, and
the ruts was that deep as the wheels didn't tetch the
bottom. We'd have to stop, when we was goin' to
work in the mornin', and tip the water out of our
boots, and wear 'em like that all day ; no dryin' of
'em ; I 'spec's that's what's give me the cramps."
Likely enough, and much besides in those hard years,
poor Bish of the shaky frame and annual brownkiters
But you never gave yourself a fair chance, by reason
of the prodigious physicking you have suffered. All

58 IDLEHURST :

our cottage folk drink deep of medicine the year
round ; they rarely find themselves in a state of
health to which some sort of physic is not applicable.
It is a normal state to be " taking " something ; puffed
patents, seas of "mixture," pills, "iles," liniments,
powders, ever pour from the little shop which combines
pharmacy and "fancy goods." And the cast-iron
constitutions, the dura messorum ilia are not let off
with the guarded persuasions of the pharmacopoeia.
Mrs. Bish was telling me the other day what a fine
thing turpentine is, taken internally — " painter-chaps,
they takes a lot of it." And then there is the popular
remedy of small-shot. When we are troubled, as
we frequently are in Sussex after heavy courses of
pork and greens, with a feral indigestion ; or when
women suffer from what doctors call globtts hystericus ;
we at once diagnose " the raising of the lights," and
treat it seciindum artem. As the lights are supposed
to leave their proper station and ascend the windpipe,
the most natural thing is to weight them down ; there-
fore we prescribe sparrow shot — five or six to a dose,
say twice a day. Bish has an aunt who got through
a seven-pound bag, and lives. Bish himself, a natural
sceptic, is doubtful of the rationale ; but reflects that
jockeys they gives 'em to horses, allowing the cus-
tomary a fortiori argument from the lower creation.

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 59

The Rector thinks that the popular notion of the
human inside is constructed from the demonstrations
given at pig-killing time ; but I fancy that any
reference to fact would fetter the confident theories
of anatomy one hears. Disease is almost personified :
it " flies to the legs," " settles on the lungs," or " ketches
the liver." The more outrageous the history of
internal commotion, the more calmly assured is the
statement. Old Tomsett told me, after the last gale
we had, that the wind got inside of him and terrified
him pretty nearly all night. Of course, the trans-
formations of technical words one hears in these
narratives are too common for note ; but when Mrs.
Bish informed me that her sister at Lewes had got
the Eating Diabolus, I thought for a moment that I
discovered a case of demoniac possession.

I was not sorry to leave the hot little room and
shake off the fusty air in the wood-paths. I expect
to see Bish at work again the day after to-morrow ;
his constitution at fifty, though battered and shaken,
seems proof against almost every sort of ignorant
neglect. He can perspire all day and sit at night
among the family linen hanging on strings about his
head, just conscious of discomfort in his wet shirt.
He can live, spite of Sunday cleaning-up, in compacted
dirt, inveterate, ingrained. He can eat, of mere custom,

60 IDLEHURST :

coarse food to repletion every day. He can drink year
to year a river of drugs. He can smoke a compound
of fiery nastiness which might choke a whole street.
I sometimes wonder what might have been made of
such fibre, with decent care and some regard for that
branch of science which our little school-people learn
to worship, as per syllabus, under the name Ijeen.

It may be that country doctors have found it
difficult to touch the mass of ignorant conceit, and
the traditional sanitation ; but I cannot altogether
hold them clear of neglecting the teaching side of
their office. Admirably assiduous and widely accom-
plished as they are in the main, they ought, by
this time, to have made more impression upon the
destructive heresies of cottage nurses, and to have
set up some standard of clean and sound living in
that qualified state of health which the cottager
desires. Our medical men, covering their large,
scattered practices, riding far in wild nights, working
hard for fees too often dubious, are in private sickness
beyond praise : is it too much to ask for a larger
recollection of public health ?

As I came home, the evening thickened, dull and
still ; the time was one of those halting-places that
come in the advance of every Spring. The wood was
thick set with violets ; the red stemmed spurges were

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 6l

uncurling ; here and there a solitary stellaria shone.
As the light fades, a prevailing sadness grows upon
the land, a melancholy which the cry of the plover
beating up and down the field beyond the wood,
seems to express. In the distance some one is calling
the cows with that lugubrious " Cup, c'up, c'up,"
which is one of the twilight sounds. Then from over
the hill a bell begins to toll for Arnington evensong,
a thin wavering note on the moist wind, a voice which
with all the sounds from wood and field, fold and
yard darkening under the unfriendly night, "paia il
giorno pianger che si muore." It is the hour of
introspection, doubts, fallings-from, all along a slow
mile under the glooming wood. Then comes into
sight my great elm, with one cheery starling bubbling
and whistling his utmost at the top ; and next, the
kitchen chimney already at work ; and for once the
domestic reality routs the vague trouble of the mind.
There are seasons when one's thoughts choke within
four walls, and must fling out for life into the open
air ; but there are times also of a lower unrest,
exorcised, as now, by vows to Lar, by thought of the
panelled corner where the Liber-proof hangs, of the
shelf of the immortals, of the meal even — severe in
matter, in manner perfect — now growing under
faithful Lucy's hands. In my solitary evening walks

62 IDLEHURST :

I often have recourse to this sort of spell. After
reaching my farthest point and setting my face home-
wards, I let my mind run on before to the centre of
all comings and goings, the covert and burrow of
one's personality ; sometimes peopling the quiet
rooms with faces and voices which never came there
and never shall ; filling the prosaic corners with happy
ghosts, who always vanish even while my hand is on
the door.

\6tk. — Blackthorn winter, in half a gale from the
north-west, and with now and again a spit of snow
out of the hard-edged deep blue clouds. On such
rude days conscience demands a sorting-up of tasks
neglected ; and my forenoon went in works of
necessity with barrow and spade, comfortless among
the wind-thrashed wallflowers and strewn pear-
blossom. At noon the sun struggled out, sending
great spokes of misty light through the folds of the
steely sky, and suddenly lighting up the orchard
boughs, silver and gold against the gloomy north.

Conscience was eased after a morning face-to-
ground and back rigidly bent, and I walked down to
the village and aimlessly out towards the blank out-
line of Ockington Beacon. Two miles out, at Jolland's
Corner, a vast triangle of waste common fringed at
one edge with cottages, a sawmill, a coffee-tavern,

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 63

and an iron temple of the Particular Baptists, I met
the Rector on his rounds and turned homewards with
him. Years of acquaintance have never quite re-
moved a touch of constraint I feel in his presence-
something of an awkwardness one might show in
converse with a courtly angel. He is so merely good,
so wise by constant proof, so serenely above the
common confusions of the world, that it is easy to
believe he sees much which we surmise ; " the secret
of the Lord " is with him, if anywhere, assuredly.
Everything of him, the fine-cut face and clear eyes,
the cultured voice and grand manner express the
clean strong nature wrought by long inheritances and
experience to the height of human accomplishment.
He is unfailing in his office and his visiting ; his
church is ordered in a rare mean of furniture and
ritual ; his sermons overflow with thought, streams of
pleasant diction, deep as clear, yet never academic,
always vital to the lowest mind : in handling parish
matters, in the work of clubs and charities he is
always kind, yet clear-headed and strong-handed.
Beside him, the clergy of our country seem in general
ineffective, to say the least. The several types are
well represented in the deanery ; we have the
youngish ascetic, unfortunate in his physiognomy,
whose experience of the world was gained at one of

64 IDLEHURST :

the less exacting Theological Colleges, who empties
his church on principle, by means of scaring innova-
tions ; there is the aged B.A., withered and exhaust,
mock-venerable with unkempt beard and bleating
voice ; we have the good easy man, his own patron,
who drives an admirable pair and confines his paro-
chial labours chiefly to subscription-lists ; we have the
essential townsman, broken down after an East-End
cure, retiring to the repose of the rectory, about as
well fitted to comprehend his flock as to judge stock
and roots. On the other hand, the Rural Dean is a
fine gentlemanly old cleric, an Oxford prizeman, a
good horseman, tall and straight, silver-haired, work-
ing fairly well at his seventieth year ; others we know,
obscure, middle-aged curates, young incumbents,
zealous and not wholly unwise, who are for the most
part very creditable to their order. But whether a
parish be in a state of " high organization " or dead
neglect ; whether the church be full or empty ; the
character of the parishioners hardly seems to be
affected. To outward appearance, at least, the flock
seems to respond in a curiously small degree to the
character and the works of the parson. In Arnington
there are perhaps reasons in the Rector himself for the
absence of any very noticeable elevation of standards.
I can imagine that the constraint I have felt at times

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 65

in his presence must have its counterpart in many
other of his flock. He is not to be ignored : that
common relation of the country priest and the
labourers is impossible here. The farthest outliers
on the upland farms, the veriest lurcher-keeping ne'er-
do-well, fall under his influence, and must feel too
clearly that he belongs to a world not theirs ; must
know how he scorns the life they love. Such and
such a course he holds to a hair's-breadth, such a
threat he defies, such a slight he overlooks ; not the
most fervent charity will meet meanness or malice
half way ; and herein lies a strange natural check to
the weight of a perfect example. He himself dis-
regards what we call results, in the way of Band of
Hope converts or offertory pence. His ideal of duty
is shut up in his own thoughts. Only by long
acquaintance I came to guess the immense solicitude
for his people that fills him ; to trace a not infrequent
fit of gloom and abstraction almost terrible in its
degree, or a humour of inward gaiety and intellectual
abandon to some apparently small happening in
school or cottage, evidence, to him, of rise or fall in
the world of souls, his care.

A short time ago we had among us a clergyman
whose vocation it was to conduct that sort of religious
Blue-Pill called Missions, a thing imported, as I

F

66 IDLEHURST :

imagine, from the Methodist societies, and by them
called Revivals. This gentleman was shocked by
the lethargy of Arnington ; professionally, he observed
an open door. "My dear sir, you have made no
impression upon the people at all ! The place wants
rousing, sir, — rousing! These stagnant country
parishes have really no chance;" and so forth, and
so forth. The Rector said nothing, but presently took
the man with him on a long round of visits to the
outlying farms and cottages, and brought him home
silent and reflective, with a world of new light upon
the matter of personal religion and pastoral methods ;
with some perception, it may be, of the truth that
roots work underground, and that there are means
of influence to be found in a lifetime which are
wanting to the programme of an emotional fortnight.
To-day, as we trudged along the somewhat dreary
road, the wind harsh on our faces and the sky black
before us, our talk ran upon the youth of the parish,
taking as starting-point Henery Bish, whose two
days' work in the garden were still raw in my mind.
I found my conclusions from externals to be mainly
right. Henery is a drone, of the stingless sort as
yet, the Rector says. He has made some study of
him, and thinks he would be consistently immoral but
for general restraining funk. This holds good of too

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 67

many of the young men ; their law, surlily acknow-
ledged, is the constable living in Wickens' Cottages,
the gamekeepers who patrol the coverts, the military
J.P. whose dogcart spins through the village on
Bench days ; indolence and cowardice are the chief
inward preservatives from actively vicious courses.
The Rector admits all this and more, concerning the
village proper ; but there is a large difference between
the inhabiters of " the street," the five or six hundred
souls between the Tanyard corner and the Mill
brook, and the other odd thousand scattered among
the farms and cottages in the outlying parts of the
parish. In every way the outliers excel the street-
dwellers ; the children are healthier and pleasanter
to see, the lads and girls are steadier, the elders are
incomparably more civil and sober-minded ; alto-
gether it is a gentler race. To a twice-dipped Tory
like myself, this of course is the remnant of the old
order, still unsubmerged in cloacal overflow of these
latter days ; the Rector, who must be called a Radical
for want of a sweeter name, thinks it lies in the
breeding. Out on the farms, in the little hovels of
cottages that lie a mile up a wet lane all alone, there
is often courtesy to be found very unlike the bald
converse of the street There the boys' " touch " and
the girls' curtsey (this most effective when performed

68 IDLEHURST :

by four or five in line) are not quite perfunctory ;
the accompanying grin comes from the heart. The
gamekeeper will stop to talk, with friendly salute ;
and you find him equally free from any touch of
servility or insolence, unassuming, with natural good
manners. The labourers, hoeing solitary in the
remote fields or lopping underwood by the roadside,
answer the wanderer's good-day cheerily, neither
forward nor sullen. But down in the village we are
in evil case. At thirteen years or so the boys with
great punctuality begin to " go to the bad." Good
little boys they may have been till that climacteric —
even good with the superiority of Sunday-school-
book heroes ; but soon or late they become what
the village calls " Radicals," and it is not a pleasant
metamorphosis. They loaf most of the day at shop-
windows and lane-corners ; the badge of their
emancipation is the cigarette, which is fast displacing
the bullseye in the small grocer's window. They
avoid all appearance of work ; if caught and cate-
chised on the subject, they profess a desire for a
"place as house-boy," the small knife-cleaning job
that entails kitchen fires and odd meals and large
spaces of leisure, and leads to no permanent employ.
A very few, possessing rigid fathers with conservative
notions, are put to gardening or serving in shops.

A JOURNAL KEFT IN THE COUNTRY. 69

Very rarely is a boy apprenticed to any trade now.
After they are clear of the Standards, they hang
about the street corners in all weathers, amusing
themselves with language above their years, often
horrible, with the sports of the season, whip-tops,
or marbles, or catapults. The old people are never
tired of expressing their astonishment at these
manners. The middle generation, the fathers and
mothers of the little revolutionaries, sometimes
grumble and draw comparisons with their own
harder youth ; but rarely attempt any sort of cor-
rection beyond an occasional "clip on the head,"
dealt in ill-temper, and understood in that light.
The Rector thinks that the Day-school and the
Sunday-school between them have destroyed the
notion of parents' responsibility for their children's
ethics. Those energetic institutions take so much
out of the hands of the fathers and mothers that it
is small wonder if the formation of manners goes
with the rest. The result, in the case of the boys, at
least, is disastrous. There seems to be no sanction
under which to appeal to them, no respect save for
the superior force temporarily on the side of Order.
It is not pleasant to contemplate living among such
beings in the grown-up state ; and I have some-
times seriously questioned whether that branch of

70 IDLEIIURST :

learning which makes a man a clean shot with a
revolver may not prove profitable during the next
few generations. The Rector never shuts his eyes
to facts : even when arguing on the other side, he
frequently presents me with evidence a good deal
stronger than my own. He says that the boys are
wholly without a sense of honour ; chivalry we should
not expect, but there is not even fair play. When
the Sunday-school-ma'ams explain that strength
ought to respect weakness, the little tyrants are
puzzled by the proposal to throw away a natural
advantage ; and they continue to bully the girls, to
mob daft people, to harry the brute creation with-
out truce. Further, he says that even the virtues we
judged traditional are dying out ; mere brute courage
seems to be going. Many of the boys will not play
football, for fear of knocks. Last Summer he took
a boys' eleven over to a cricket match at Tisfield ;
and as he had damaged a finger, asked for a volunteer
to take his place as wicket-keeper. Not one of the
louts would put on the gloves, from tenderness
towards their knuckle-joints. And when they fight,
there is no honest punching or wrestling, but pre-
liminary hurling of flints or any missile that comes
to hand, followed by a wild-beast worry on the
ground, with tooth and nail, and inarticulate noises

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 7 1

of frantic rage. Such an encounter the Rector
chanced on this afternoon, walking to Jolland's
Corner, and dissolved with sudden stick. ''They
are going back to the monkeys," he says ; " there
will never be another Tom Sayers in Sussex."

To this debcicle of boy-nature there is a set-off in
the more conservative nation of girls. These seem
largely to escape the sort of distemper which takes
the boys. Though in many ways they help to make
the future troublesome, they are the most hopeful
part of the coming race. Among the various de-
formities of face, the too common rickety and
scrofulous subjects, there is a proportion of honest
shiny complexions, of red cheeks and eyes speaking
simplicity, modesty, pleasure in a friendly world,
sufficient to save the stock for a generation or two
yet. The decay in juvenile manners is by many
people put to the account of the School. In a neigh-
bouring parish to Arnington there is a village Board
School, whose fruit, under the hands of farmers,
small traders, and a local "agitator," might almost
put us here in conceit with ourselves. The Tyefold
Board is a dull, soulless machine, ill-compounded
with party-economies and primary prejudices ; the
Master, a Lancashire man, almost unintelligible to
his pupils, a specimen of the coarse, downright,

72 IDLEHURST:

self-assertive North-country nature on its worst side ;
absorbed in his own prospects, bounded by reports
and grants ; ready with his brutal slash at every fine
Gordian hitch of humours or chances. The effect of
his handling upon the peculiar half-shy, half-sullen
natures of the Sussex children is grievous. He might
have made a pavior or a rivetter, under an able fore-
man ; as a teacher of the elegancies of the Code, as
preceptor to some hundred opening intelligences
whose qualities would tax the powers of a philosophic
saint, Mr. Clegg is absolutely dreadful.

But here in Arnington, with our docile Managers,
and the Rector to steer, we are not greatly superior in
our results, after all. Our Master and Mistress are
excellent people, who maintain their percentage with-
out a touch of Mr. Clegg's tyranny. The reason lies
in the whole plan of instruction ; in the rude whole-
sale classing, the mechanical methods, the ignoring of
the element of personal character. Not to mention
Mr. Clegg, our Mr. Attree is a melancholy instrument
for the building up of a democracy. His mild lower-
middle-class fundamentals, his modest capacities,
which being superior to the grocer-boy destiny of his
fellows, lifted him to a training-college and a painful
science, deep in decimals and nibbling at French and
the Gallic War ; what can they do towards the

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 73

foundations of life in the Arnington which is to be ?
What else than the moral wilderness we see could be
produced by this small, smooth mind wholly taken
up with the labour, week-end to week-end, of satis-
fying Governmental necessities in the way of Freehand
and Mental Arithmetic ? If we could have for our
Masters and Mistresses persons uniting the acquire-
ments of the average University Head with an
eternal patience, an irresistible sympathy, and the
insight into character of a popular Counsel at the
Old Bailey, the mass of dead detail might be made
to move, and some result of actual life might appear.
Under the present conditions, young Arnington is
being sketchily instructed in many branches of
learning secular; a little Sunday catechism and
hymn-book exercises vainly present the spiritualities
in face of the overpowering workaday week ; in the
practice of life the children are their own masters,
with a list to the worse, if list there need be, from
the all too patent elder faults at home.

There are those (we have representatives of the
breed in Arnington) who think that there is a necessary
connection between compulsory schooling and a
virtuous populace ; that figures and reading primers
naturally make for godliness. These people, perhaps,
view the cottage interiors in Mill Lane as so many

74 IDLEHURST :

sources of saving Democratic health ; this, and a good
deal more, is implied at open-air meetings at Election-
time. Even in saner hours one hears the labourers
credited with monopoly in several branches of virtue.
When the Rector says that there are only two or three
heads of families in all Mill Lane and Wickens'
Cottages who are consistently sober, I rashly take his
word against the Progressive estimate; and I recollect
how Mr. Eliab Blaber, our village carpenter, builder,
and undertaker, recently excused a delayed job by
explaining, more in sorrow than in anger, that on a
particular Monday morning there was not a man in
his yard sufficiently the better of his week-end drink
to go to work. What may be called moderate drunken-
ness is the general rule ; there are exceptions, in the
way of fitful abstinence and paroxysms of boozing.
What chance have the children in any training of
morals, when the school-hours go over studies which
are to enable us to best the crafty Germans, and the
home-life is enlivened by father's varying states of
beer ?

And it were well if only beer were to blame. The
common cottage life is both dirty and unhealthy,
dull and ugly. The old houses in the village have
for the most part large rooms, if low ; they are nearly
all " detached," with tolerable patches of garden ;

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 75

they were built, with their steep roofs of " Horsham
slate " and central chimneys, to keep out damp and
cold. The new cottages, built by speculators from
Tisfield, and owned by two or three small tradesmen
in Arnington, are detestable styes, with thin slate
roofs, rubbishy doors and windows, and scamped
brickwork ; externally, an educational power in ugli-
ness which not twenty thousand Schools of Art could
overcome ; internally, a dull horror with their unused
front parlours, sacred to antimacassars and wool-
works and the family Bible reposing cornerwise on
the table. The small kitchen-living-room at the
back, with an impracticable little range (charged
extra in the rent), perhaps a copper as well, is often
inhabited at one time by a family of seven or eight
souls, the dinner a-preparing, and the week's wash
half dried. Up the breakneck stairs there are two
or three little bedrooms, stifling in summer, bitter
in frost. The whole building, whether Jacobean or
Victorian, reeks with a thick warm smell, compounded
nastiness, preserved within well-closed windows, save
in the full dog-days. There is small wonder that in
these shanties of the Jerry-builder personal cleanli-
ness is not much followed ; a comprehensive tubbing
is perhaps impossible in a kitchen which is the
common-room of the house. In this matter the old

?6 IDLEHURST : <

cottages make no difference ; soap and water are
hard to come by ; but I believe the experiment is
very rarely made. Babies are tubbed somewhat
severely till they reach the knickerbocker age, when
they gain their freedom, and thereafter exhibit the
" low water-mark " conspicuously between collar and
neck, below which soap seldom descends in after-
years.

The catalogue of vulgar errors would in its entirety
fill two or three walks from Jolland's Corner. We
had reached the hill which descends into the village
while the Rector was giving instances of the miserable
unthrift which habitually squanders the ample wages
in the fat summer time, and comes with pitiable
messages through the sad-eyed wife when the first
fortnight's frost has stopped work in December.
And as we gained the foot of the street, we discussed
the strange care with which " decline," or consumption,
is preserved and propagated in the parish. In some
fatal way the many consumptive stocks among us
marry and procreate with zealous certainty. The
blowsy, red-cheeked lasses may never so much as
" walk-out " with a swain ; but if there is one whey-
faced narrow-chested slattern more obviously a wreck
than another, with half her relations in the church-
yard from ancestral phthisis, she will be married

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 77

before she is out of her teens, and live to hand
on the cherished plague. Dr. Culpeper can speak
sternly enough when a patient with half a constitu-
tion is being asked in Church ; but nothing serves
to turn the weedy girl or the rotten young fellow
from the course which seems almost to be a tradition
or a religion in our country, for the honour and
increase of tubercle. Our people seem to think
sound health a thing improper, if not almost impious ;
and no one the least interesting or socially valuable
who has not his proper disease, his symptoms, and
his remedies to recommend him.

With such reflection on the ways of life in Arnington,
tuned to the inert gloom of the afternoon, we reached
the " twitten " or byway that leads to the church
and the parsonage. Here I left the Rector, with the
parish evils heavy upon him, and mounted the hill
for home in the gathering dark. The wind had
fallen, and in the dead calm there was some hint of
amended weather to-morrow. I turned at the
Tanyard corner to look back on the village, think-
ing of all the witless unnecessary wretchedness
being contrived there ; but my mind was ready to
throw off that solicitude, to guess at to-morrow's sun,
to remember the white days —

" Fulsere vere candidi tibi soles."

?8 IDLEHURST :

I recalled the rich world, friends, books, the garden ;
rebellious against vicarious unhappiness till I thought
of the Rector, whose perpetual burden I had been
fingering for an hour, and wondered if his consolations
were so lightly found ; thence slipping into wider
perspectives, which closed as I reached my door with
inconclusive speculation upon the receiving of one's
good things in one's lifetime, and some fixities con-
nected therewith.

24^. — Two or three sunny days and as many
warm nights have brought on the Spring past all
account. Within a week, as it seems, the pears on
walls or in the open quarters, widths and mounds of
white hawthorn-scented knops, have succeeded the
cloudy wreaths of plum and damson bloom as it
faded into the light green of the spreading leaves.
Oaks and elms are flushed over with a yellow haze ;
here and there in southerly corners is a tree half in
leaf. Spite of the exhilaration of this whole-hearted
advance, one feels half aggrieved, as though the
Spring had slipped in almost unawares and defrauded
us of part of the accustomed pageant of entry.
Swallows have been with us all this last week, trilling
and twittering in the great apple tree near the lawn,
making preliminary sweeps about last year's nests
at the eaves ; as though no winter among Barbary

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 79

palms or Nile banks had come between. The cuckoo
came on the seventeenth, a little late for the hurrying
season. As a rule he is tolerably punctual to Cuckoo-
Day, when the fabled old lady lets him out of the
basket at Heathfield. The cuckoo's-mate calls his
" ree — tee, tee, tee, tee, tee ! " all day from the
orchard trunks. Nightingales are reported ; but
nightingales are too good to be taken on hearsay
just yet.

There is a manner of holiday in the garden. The
heavy work of getting in summer crops is nearly
done, and we have broken the back of the potting
and re-potting in the frames. There is less of
planning and more time to admire. To-day is
Alice's birthday ; and in the afternoon we held a
small commemoration, with tea in the garden.
Alice came early, and employed herself in gathering
by special leave, given to mark the day, an eclectic
posy from the borders. Nearer the hour fixed in
the invitations came Kitty Culpeper, a contemporary
of Alice's in the village. She promptly discharged
her attendant nurse and joined Alice among the
flower-plots ; where I presently saw the yellow head
and the brown in close conference over an armful of
pink and white tulips. The other guests arrived at
the grown-up equivalent, on the other side of the

SO IDLEHURST :

hour, to Alice's time on this side ; Mrs. Lydia from
the Rectory ; Mrs. Kitty French, a neighbour of mine
beyond the Common ; and her son Gervase, at Christ
Church, who should have been back in St. Aldates,
compounding between Lit. Hum. and Summer Term,
but that a sprain kept him with us for a week
beyond the vacation. Mrs. Kitty is a year or two
younger than Mrs. Lydia, and pleasantly contrast-
able in many ways. She shows traces of having
been very pretty, where there are signs in the other
of more recondite beauty ; she is as delightfully
unwise as her friend is memorably sage ; her prattling
shallows are none the less silvery for the thought
of Mrs. Lydia's quiet deeps. On that smooth brow,
where the black-grey hair breaks irrevocably in
little waves and rings, into those wide-set eyes —
laughing, ever so little short-sighted — trouble comes
rarely and not for long.

The tea-table was set on a small level semi-cirque
of turf under the high bank that skirts the fir-clump ;
a corner that treasures every sunbeam that falls, and
is only uninhabitable on very sad days indeed.

Alice, as became birthday honours, poured out
tea, with Kitty second in command. There seemed
to be some sort of coolness between the two ladies ;
but Gervase, who is of that nature which all dogs

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 8 1

jump up at, and all right children lay hold of by
finger or coat-tail as may serve, divided himself so
impartially between the pair that before the first
buns were finished the breach was made up, and the
wrinkles smoothed out of Alice's forehead. It was a
joyous feast. What matter whether the tea-pot would
pour when the spout had been decorated with blue-
bells, or what the tea was like when cowslips were
added liberally to the brew ? What vast delight it
was when a great old cuckoo flew just over our
heads, vocal and visible ; and what shrill chorus
greeted a squirrel which looked at us from the top
of the bank, and after rating us for trespassers on
his bounds, raced away over trunks and branches !
Too soon there fell a great silent discontent because
nursemaids were seen afar ; and earnest assurances
that it was quite early, really, and that they hadn't
seen all the pigs and only one of the calves, gained
twenty minutes' respite ; and with Gervase betwixt
they went off to see the menagerie once more.

I sat in the sunny corner with the ladies, and we
talked of gardens and gardening. Mrs. Kitty is " a
great gardener ; " one of the sect who are masters of
everything in that science except a garden. These
soi-disant hortulans are not uncommon ; feminine for
the most part ; learned in all the books upon the

G

82 IDLEHURST :

subject, in every name of all that grows, from
England to Van Diemen ; they work, too, vigorously
at times, with paraphernalia of aprons and gloves
and knowing forks and scissors. But there is little
or nothing to be shown for it all. In their conserva-
tory you find a Marechal Niel just green enough to
support the armies of the aphis, a dozen sticky
geraniums, some dead ferns, and a collection of
relics, cytisus, indiarubber plants and cyclamens,
bought in bloom at the door and lingering out a
depressing life on the stage.

Your friend is very well contented, busily " damp-
ing down " with a beautiful new syringe, or trying
the latest patented fumigator upon the fly. In the
open garden, the borders are almost flowerless at
any season ; you are shown with great pride some
miserable little novelty or oddity in solitary state
upon the barren soil. To the owner's eye all is
beautiful. " I am going to make great alterations
here next year; I shall have all these beds turfed
over, and roses all along here." And so the desert
blossoms in the flitter-winged fancy of Mrs. Kitty
and her kind. Or in less optimist hours it is :
" Really, Wickens is perfectly hopeless. I must get
a man who understands flowers ! " or else the seeds-
man has been dieadfully unprincipled ; or the soil

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 83

develops stiff clay properties, and refuses to grow
roses. But through every chance, these people are
very happy; and that is more than some better
gardeners contrive.

To-night Mrs. Kitty seems to notice some difference
between my crowded plots and the tile-and-trellis
features of the Gate House pleasaunce, and to want
a little advice — a hint or two as to how the flowers
here grow so tall and thick. Well, first of all, it
means a good deal of hardish work ; you ought to
see me going my rounds in the morning, Mrs. Kitty.
Short of opening the petals with one's fingers, one
has to do everything for one's flowers. Then there
is the grand rule : Never do to-day what you can put
off till to-morroiv. She smiles at me. " Of course you
mean — ' " I mean, Madam, precisely what I say !
Procrastination is the soul of gardening. There is
more than enough to be done in each day. Once,
only once, in all my horticultural career, did I accom-
plish in a day all I had planned to do. Learn the
art of Putting-off. Next, feed your family. Turn in
and top-dress every year tons, tons, Madam, of good
black hotbed stuff, three-quarters rotten, like bride-
cake ; of rich yellow turfs ; leaf mould ; beautiful red
ashes from the rubbish fire. Then, keep away rakes
and tittivations, and rough up your borders with that

84 iiDLEHURST :

admirable tool we call a shove-hoe. Learn to put on
the ground all the plant life it will carry — nearly all
flower gardens are short of flowers — all lawn, edgings,
stakes, gravel, and soil. Dodge in your hardy
annuals between your bulbs, and leave places for the
tender annuals, phlox and asters, zinnias, nicotianas,
which will overgrow the dead stems of tulips and
daffodils. When you have done all this ; and dis-
covered that there is one day of all the year proper
for each several operation (not a day to be got from
Almanacks, as our people like to have it), but one day
between certain limits, eminently fit by weather and
chance for the seed or the bud or the planting out ;
and that to catch this perfect day you must keep
yourself clear from entanglements of social engage-
ments a fortnight ahead, and so forth ; and when
you have learned all the intricate exceptions to the
rules (and in gardening, rules are the exception) ; and
when you are proof against disappointments very
near heartbreaking — why, then you will be in the
way to grow flowers."

Mrs. Kitty laughs, smelling at the bunch of nar-
cissus she carries. " If it really means all that, I
think I would rather go on as I am. I suspect that
for all you say, there's a sort of luck in it. And
you've got such a lovely soil ; haven't you ? Now

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 85

don't you think if I sowed my front garden all over
with quite common nasturtiums, it would look very
nice, and save ever so much trouble ? "

It would, undoubtedly ; so we discussed that and
other plans for adorning Mrs. Kitty's demesne ; till
the children came back from the farmyard and were
shepherded homewards by the ladies, calling shrill
good-nights from the turning in the lane which we
call Good-bye Corner. After they had gone, I strolled
round the walks in the glow of the quiet evening
with young French. We listened to the blackbirds,
to the starlings congregated at vespers in the great
apple-tree, a score of them facing the sunset, getting
out their music, their bubblings, hissings, clicks, and
whistles, with mighty energy of wing-flappings and
head-bobbings. Gervase thinks they are conscious
humourists ; that just now they are burlesquing the
spring fervour of nightingales and thrushes and such
poetic hearts. If not, he holds their intense ungainly
earnestness as almost pathetic. Down in the copse
below the meadows a blackbird and a thrush are
singing amcebean strains, the rich legato warble of
the golden mouth against the clear vivace call of the
speckled breast. Then, as will happen, we tire for
the sound of our own tongues, and leave the sundown
wood-chorus for a rambling talk. Gervase, an old

86 IDLEHURST :

admirer of Alice's, had been so taken with her lady-
ship's dignity that he almost grudged to make up
the quarrel with Kitty Culpeper. She had told him,
while Kitty lingered among the calves, how it all
happened. They had been comparing notes about
their dolls, and slid from dolls' names to their own.
" She said she thought Mildred wasn't at all a nice
name for a doll ; so I said, it was a great deal nicer
than Kitty. And she said that Katherine was a real
lady's name, and nobody who was nice was ever
called Alice. So I said, 'Why, "Alice" herself was
called Alice, and there couldn't be any one nicer than
her, even if she wasn't real. And there was Alice in
Dick Whittington, and in the May Queen in the poetry-
book ; and I said nobody was called Katherine except
Katherine Howard and Katherine Parr, and I'm sure
they weren't really what you'd call jolly people.'
Then she called me a pig ; and I said I should never
speak to her again."

" I soon smoothed it over," says Gervase ; " but
Alice was quite right about her name. It is the great
English name ; the classics are full of it. ' Little
Alice' in Tennyson's 'May Queen,' and Alice 'the
Miller's Daughter,' and Alice in ' Queen Mary,'
Coleridge's Alice du Clos, Fayre Alice in ' Willyam
of Cloudeslee,' Alice in < Henry the Fifth.' "

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 8/

" Elia's ' Alice W n,' " I put in, " and Alice Lee,

Alice Bridgenorth, ' Old Alice ' in Lammermoor."

" Alice Lorraine, and 'Sweet Alice with hair so
brown/ " concludes Gervase ; " and they all have a
distinct sort of English sweetness, a sort of honesty
and goodness and healthy affection in them all. Of
course there are plenty of very nice Kates and Kitties ;
but then one can't forget Catherine of the Medici and
the Russian person, and they weren't what Alice
would call really jolly people."

We had come in our perambulations to a corner
where a company of "snakeshead" fritillaries hung
their checkered bells. I think not many Oxford
men worth their battels could see them without
recalling Iffley and Kennington meadows in the
best of the year, the best of the years, perhaps.
In my time, quite unlikely sorts of men used to
pick bunches of the flowers, when the levels of
grass burned like green fire, and the river flashed
dazzlingly at the bend beyond. We would come up
the tow-path with our spoils ; they may do it still
and find it pleasant, when the boat goes well, and
the Schools are still afar, and people are coming up
for the Eights. Gervase goes back into the thick of
it all to-morrow; to see the golden fields and the
twinkling stream ; to rip his blade through along the

88 IDLEHURST :

Willows; to shout cheerily across the quad; to saunter
after Hall with soul at rest. He nods pleasantly at
my fritillaries, and we pace on, talking of Oxford — an
odd confusion of my antique memories and his keen
present. Gervase has a compound nature ; all the
strength of youth which can back up a spurt or draw
a tutor, together with the spirit which even in stress
of Schools, loves books, philosophises a little, and
keenly perceives and enjoys beauty of outward
things. He will take his Second in Greats, and
probably end in the Civil Service, with a little re-
viewing, perhaps even an occasional slim volume
of verse.

He accepts the forecast ; but demurs to the volume
of verse. " I don't take it as seriously as that," he
says ; " I only experiment a little in rhymes and
metres, and so on. I think, now inspiration seems
to be fairly dead, we might give rather more time
to perfecting the form. If Laureates write rot, they
might at least contrive with a little practice not to
get the stress on the unaccented syllables all over
the place. We ought to let the sense go for a bit
(it would be a great relief all round) and try for
sound, where we might do something. I'm sure
there's a great deal to be done with alliteration — I
don't mean the —

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 89

' Tangled in toils of your tresses
And fast in your fringe '

style ; something a little more recondite. There's
any amount of it in all good verse, but you have
to look for it. And then there's what you may
call ' half-rhymes,' like that in the ' Lady of
Shalott '—

' Only reapers, reaping early
In among the bearded barley,
Hear a song that echoes cheerly.'

And then there's repetition, and antithesis of sound,
and recurrent vowels, in Coleridge's way; and all
sorts of small elegancies like that."

I suggested that he should give me a sample of
his ideal verse ; whereupon he recited the following
doggerel, or something like it —

" On the land of the semi-detached
The Spring has made sweet seizure ;
The gate of the blowing South's unlatched
And noon's a golden pleasure,
Good for marking the almond-blossom
Light in light on the liquid azure,
Bees a-sprawl in the crocus' bosom,
Sparrows sparring or matched."

" Something like that," he says ; " no fine thoughts
to disguise the workmanship. And on this plan,
you can make as much out of the Green Park or

90 IDLEHURST :

Hampstead Heath as out of the Isles of Greece, or
Camelot, or any mortal place."

"People don't seem to realize," I answer, "how
much all true poetry leans on mere natural pheno-
mena. Modern poets crowd into London, and so
miss their small chance of doing decent work.
Think how meaningless a deal of Tennyson or
Shelley must be to an ordinary London intellect."

" Yes," says Gervase ; " but even down here in
Sussex a man could not honestly set up to write
pastorals or meditate the Country Muse. Honestly,
what heart could one have to versify about the
landscape while you can hear the Brighton expresses
at five-minute intervals, and know that only a few
miles away there is the embankment, and your
scarecrow station and the advertisements in the
meadows — Buggin's Bile Bolus and Sigger's Scari-
fying Soap — and the rest of it ? "

I resent this attack on our rurality. "There's no
railway on that side," I point out.

" No ; only a view of a lovely corrugated iron roof,
and the Major's other improvements to his buildings
for the new tenant. Then there's the brook there-
it ought to have pound trout in it ; but the Tisfield
gasworks run their filth into it, and there isn't a fish
in it these five miles. And there's a jolly little

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 9 1

sawmill at Blackhatch, you can hear it all day ; only
it doesn't matter so much, because it sounds just
like the baa of a Spring lamb. And your blessed
metropolis of a village, with its progressive tastes !
I was out in the woods last night, to hear the
nightingales — no, not sonnetteering — and there was
an infernal steam-circus with an organ in full blast
down on the Green, and a rifle gallery. The wind
was that way, and a damnable waltz with a wrong
note every third bar got into my head ; and I had
to give up the nightingales and go home to bed.
A man who wants to put nature — English nature —
into verse, must shut one eye and ear at least. At
the present rate of things, we shall have to stick to
classical models before long, and take to Pope
again."

After this we slip away into Oxford matters ; the
Dean, a certain Proctor, Vincent's, Mr. Spooner's
latest, Abel Beesley, some new skiff-riggers, Mesopo-
tamia ; and come back to a light-hearted comparison
of Horace with Catullus as a metrist ; when Gervase
finds it is perilously near dinner-time, and rushes
away in the midst of

" Saltuumque reconditorum
Amniumque sonantum."

I am left to go over my far-off terms, touched into

92 IDLEHURST :

life by Gervase's warm-blooded actualities ; and once
more to marvel at the hopes and propositions held in
those threshold days ; hopes which, I suppose, to such
of us as have not become bishops or members of
Parliament, or popular novelists, are among the most
sadly-humorous things in the world.

I paced round the long island of flowers under the
fast-thickening dusk, and came to a stop again by the
group of snakesheads. My scout used to tell me
that it was impossible to get them to grow away
from Oxford ; I learned to rank that with Thomas'
other many inventions, so soon as I became a gardener.
But to-night, after the late ruminations, and with
clearer recollections of the Iffley fritillaries, I can
believe that he was right after all. These are not
the Oxford sort ; the kind I knew has been extinct
for a definite number of years. Thomas builded his
fiction better than he knew.

I was drawing towards the house, signalled by the
candle-light in the parlour window, when a low churr
came from the apple-tree as I passed ; and as I softly
came to a stand in the grass, close overhead broke
out the voice of the nightingale. Year by year it
comes as a fresh miracle, never staled by use, never
fallen from the height of younger memories. There
is no voice like it ; the volume, the force, the liquid

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 93

falls, the purity, the ringing brilliance of it ; its
variety and depth ; more than all, those marvellous
stealing, swelling, dwelling, long-drawn notes, the
only crescendo there is in bird music. All go to make
the first nightingale's song a mark, perhaps the
clearest, in the calendar of the natural year. There
are some human voices which recall the quality of
the sound — not those of the concert-room race.

She sings on — Philomela for ever, in spite of all
miserable naturalists — a song and then a silence, to
make the next strain the sweeter ; until another voice
from beyond the firs shrills in her pauses ; and soon
a third comes fainter from the copse below the
meadows. All night they will sing ; and to-morrow
forenoon or afternoon, the woods will hear them
through the daylight din of thrush and blackbird,
finch and wood-dove, till darkness brings silence for
the tireless song. I listen long, then shift a cramped
foot, and she hears me. She scolds for a moment
with a harsh, croaking note, and after a minute's
silence I hear her beyond the garden begin again
that irresistible stealing sweetness ; and not to listen
all night I turn to the lights of the house, questioning
whether Gervase French might not draw some science
of prosody from that chant, or whether the passionate
air did not rather belong to the old days, when

94 IDLEHURST :

versing was more than a parquetry of words, more
than an echo out of all the Classics ; to the days
which will come again, when plenary inspiration shall
be required and found in all who sing.

May ist. — Mayday, by the almanack ; but it is
vain to try to conjure the life of the old festival into
the common air. It was not so hard to do, even in
days which I can remember ; when Mayday implied
holiday and rambles flower-gathering, and the arrival
at the house-door of little rustics with their May-
boughs, devices in the pale harmonious colouring of
the season — lilac, cowslip, orchis, bluebell — displayed
with smiling pride and the traditional chant in honour
of Garland Day. To-day is as lovely as any in the
early Mays ; glistening clouds draw through the blue
which is deep ultramarine at the zenith, turquoise
near the verge ; clouds which lay belts and isles of
shadow across the leafing woods, barring the distance
with palest green and russet purple. The hillside over
against my own, with its larch plantations and oak
shaws, looks as though a dusty yellow or pale
emerald had been "scumbled," as a painter would
say, over the soft brown and silver-grey groundwork
of the woodland. Light is vivid and air is buoyant ;
the day is perfect ; but the keeping of it seems to

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 95

have gone by. In the whole morning but two little
companies of garland-bearers knocked at my door for
the customary pennies. They had no song ; the
wreaths drooped dismally, having been made over-
night, not in this morning's dew. The flowers were
hidden under a clout, only withdrawn on receipt of
coppers. One wreath made of crossed hoops covered
with blue-bells and cowslips had a small doll sitting
at the intersection of the circles — a relic, perhaps, of
older imagery. One of the children told me his
granfer used to be Jack-in-the-Green forty years ago,
and he likes them to go round. Altogether it was a
depressing visit ; and perhaps the custom would be
better extinct, with that other of carol-singing at
Christmas, an even unhappier pretence.

Considering these pretty superstitions giving way
before the present manner of Progress (which the
County Council's great steam-roller seemed to typify
for me, as it puffed and growled over the Arnington
road, a peremptory macadamiser), I fell into one of
those idle fits which are best suffered to tire them-
selves out. About noon I betook myself to the little
oak copse which stands below the red stems of the
fir-clump, where the thick underwood opens at one
or two places upon noble prospects both to north
and south. I always feel, on entering a wood, some

96 IDLEHURST :

touch of the stillness and gloom of an old church ;
but to-day the ever growing and fading gleams of
sun, and the din of an army of finches in the tree-
tops, made the little thicket less reverend than gay.
I sat down on a drift of leaves under a bank, looking
out to the hills in the north, and let the senses work,
the mind slackly following. Chaffinch and greenfinch
and woodlark answered one another incessantly ;
now and again from further holts came the cuckoo's
notes, or the clap and crow of a cock-pheasant.
Once a swallow shot through the little clearing,
trilling the song which, excepting the shriek of the
swifts in chorus, seems the fullest expression of joy
in liberty and motion. Then the breeze gathered
and soughed through the firs behind me, a crescendo
murmur, travelling through the clump ; the breeze
which in the Purgatorio —

" Di ramo in ramo s'accoglie
Per la pineta, in sul lito di Chiassi ; "

" from bough to bough," with Dante's exquisite nota-
tion of nature. The farthest ridge of the distance
with its keen-edged clump on Camp Hill, showed
aerially blue ; between that and the foreground in-
cessant change worked. Here a cape of woodland
flushed out into clear yellow under the travelling ray ;

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 97

here a slope of meadow faded into dusty blue-green ;
here a rounded swell of plough-land showed pale
pink or dull purple. Sudden touches of more vivid
colour gleamed out, a rape-field, a willow-plot, a white
cottage. In middle distance the oaks displayed
tawny brown, green bronze, or brass-yellow, as the
light shifted. The old white horse, feeding in the
first meadow beyond the brook, was a dominant point
of colour in the whole picture ; and the cowslips in
the grass just beyond the wood had their part in
the concert.

After a time the endless changes of beauty seemed
to weary the perception, which, as it were, flags and
fails from the necessary keen vision of mind. I moved
across a bed of bluebells to the southern side of the
wood, where a gap opened over the Weald and the
Downs. The long grey wall of chalk-hills closed
the view ; below it rolled the landscape in wooded
promontories and islands ; right beneath me lay the
little cluster of roofs, the spire beside its black yews,
the brook-poplars, the smoke drifting in a light
haze from the chimneys of the street. Sounds came
to me here on the height ; faint cock-crows from a
score of farms ; the thin clangour of the church clock
— a peaceful lenitive chime ; the clink of the smithy.
I could hear the alternate rumble and silence as the

H

98 IDLEHURST :

carrier Veness made his calls in the street, changing
presently into a steady trot as a little cloud of dust
travelled up the rise beyond the village, and the
piebald gelding was off upon his weekly journey to
Lewes. Next there was an outburst of treble shouts
and cries, faint and far away, and I knew that the
school was up and the boys were pitching their stumps
on the Green for the midday cricket. A fitful Babel
continues till a shrill bell — a strident modern call,
not the mild harmonics of the church tenor — quelled
the din, and rang the strays back to their forms and
slates again.

As I looked at the roofs below me, wavering in a
steady shimmer of heat, I forgot the reeking bars
where the men drank the heavy morning beer ;
forgot the mingling smells of Hobden the butcher's
new-painted shop ; the grocer's boys tugging their
baskets to the side-doors in Prospect Place. It
looked from my standpoint too pretty and simple
for anything but rose-covered porches, virtuous
labourers in knee-breeches and buckles, and the rural
fair with side-ringlets and tiny pointed slippers.
A stranger looking down from the hill-top on such
a day as this might well think he had reached
the Happy Valley. And even I who know can
for a space exorcise from the lovely precinct the

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 99

painful, unseemly, base life which fills it in waking
hours.

The sun flushed upon the long woods above the
village and drew the eye away to the level edge of
the Downs. It was all endlessly beautiful ; but I
found once more the recompense I have learned to
look for in any deliberate regard of natural beauty.
The sudden flushing of sunset, a chance view during
a journey, leave only memories of delight ; but when
I go in search of beauty of earth, wilfully sit down to
receive its impressions, always there grows in the end
a melancholy as of loss and departure, helpless, most
irrational, but, I believe (as with the wild irrational
happiness of dreams), going down to the deeps of our
nature.

One o'clock of this idle day goes by the church. I
think of little Alice, down at the Rectory, who has
by this time escaped from the Kings of England and
is no doubt bouncing her ball against the back of
the stables. I think of Gervase French, who, no
doubt, is leaning out of his window to call to some
one in the street, plans for going down to Sandford
in a canvas pair ; while lunch is replacing gown and
note-books on the table behind him, and across the
gay street he sees some corner of Bagley, shimmering
in the sun. I think of old Tomsett, straightening his

100 IDLEHURST :

legs on a warm hedge bank, and fumbling for his
bread and cheese and flat bottle. All reprove my
otiose mood. I move so as to get a better view of
the patches of colour in the garden, seen between the
fir-trunks ; and while I look at the smiling oasis I
count seven of the tufted parachutes of the dandelion
sail by me from the meadows, which of late were
golden all over with the flowers, into the parterre and
the herbarium. To-day the feathery globes are
scattering far and wide, pledges to the gardener that
wholesome work in grubbing of leathery taproots
shall not fail him hereafter. To-morrow I will cer-
tainly have a turn with the spud ; to-day is sacred
to the contemplative life.

In the afternoon I made a visit to the master of
Lycetts Farm, one John Avery, an agriculturist of
seventy-five, roundly prosperous in the midst of the
decaying industry ; with whom I have occasional
commerce of poultry-sittings or cider, and also, I think,
of feeling, in our common, well-developed natural Con-
servatism. Lycetts Farm stands low and close, as
do nearly all the old foundations in our country ; you
hardly see, till the last turn of the green cart-road
opens out the farmstead clearing, its four fine
chimney stacks, warm red-brick walls, and long roof
of " Horsham slate," the flat cleft sandstone, graduated

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. IOI

from small squares at the ridge to broad flagstones at
the eaves, best of roofs in cold or heat. The yard
rises from sallow-planted bottoms, by grassy mounds
and pits which in ampler times were the fish-stews of
the mansion ; there is a little lawn before the door
bordered with pansies and pink daisies. A vine
straggles over the broad base of one of the chimneys ;
a yew half buries another and reaches out over old
garden-walls, where fig-trees and pears show vast boles
and a thicket of shoots.

The heavy oak door was wide ; and I found Avery
sorting out garden-seeds in the kitchen. When Lycetts
was Twy hurst, a house of the great family of the
Beres or Beers, who made themselves places in three
counties, this kitchen was the hall. It has yet the
great chimney-breast and open hearth, where an arm-
ful of sticks smoulders between the dogs, and a black
pot hangs from the bright steel crane or rack on the
chimney-back. Something remains of the old panel-
ling, faded and patched. Overhead the iron hooks
along the black timbers tell of ancient provision.
Out of the kitchen winds a broad staircase of solid
balks of oak, guarded at the foot by a massy trap of
the same timber, which when down and sparred across
would defend the upper stories, if the outer doors were
forced in a siege. In the middle of the great room

102 IDLEHURST :

sits Avery, an odd figure, dark-faced and keen-eyed,
clad in torn and dirty frock, quaintly reigning among
all these remnants of consequence and country state,
and these solid comforts of the modern farm. As I
came in, old Tomsett, who does odd jobs in the farm,
hobbled in from the back passage with a message
from the fields about mangold seed. The master
gave his orders, not unkindly, but with the touch of
superiority inevitable perhaps from a man who has
both with honesty and credit made himself a place
in the world, to his fellow who, after sixty years of
work, is something less than when he began. Avery
began at the bottom of the hill, and found rough
places enough ; but to-day he is his own man, a
person in the parish, well-to-do, safely planted beyond
any thought of the Union or the Court. I know him
for a clear-headed, well-balanced old man, whose bank-
book is no idol to him ; who can turn at times, with
no touch of unreality, simply and gravely, to matters
which should grow into a man's last decade. From
his original eighteenpence a week as carter-boy he
rose by steady work, steady as poor Tomsett's, but
ordered by strong will and foresight, to "good
money ; " he kept his savings ; married prosperously ;
ventured when the chance came on a little farm. He
taught his boys to be worth a couple of labourers

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. IO3

apiece ; his wife worked tirelessly for the house.
When things were ripe he moved to Rispham, and
did very well with Southdowns. At last he came to
Lycetts, and settled down to end his days on the
hundred and thirty acres of middling land, content
with fortune, and recognising easily the limit of his
affairs, No less in secure middle age on his own
farm than in the up-hill years when he gathered other
men's harvests, he worked as few work now. Since
rheumatism cut him down at seventy, he makes shift
to hoe among turnips, propped between the hoe and
a stick, or to look after the horses. But it is not much
more than a formal defiance to idleness ; four sons,
tall men whose worth is not to be calculated in terms
of the ordinary labourer, live in the house and keep
the land " like a garden." " Good boys, they are,"
says the old man ; "I alias know they'll do just what
I tell 'em. I does without any odd man so long as I
can ; you can't put no trust in 'em. That's half why
farmin's as bad as it is ; there's not what I call
honesty ! There was a fella I turned off last year,
he was tellin' them in the publics down in the
village how he'd been makin' a fool of me, and
what he got out of the place. They han't got
their hearts in the work, not in no sense, like.
They must be right here" he says, laying a

104 IDLEHURST :

gnarled fist on the breast of his ragged gabardine.
" When I was a boy, they'd tell us we wasn't to knock
off till we could see to count three stars a-shinin' ;
but, bless you, the chaps nowadays, they'd rather go
by their watches. They're a shacklin' lot, that's what
they are ! Now, my boys, I reckon they sees a good
many stars afore they've done some jobs, and it don't
look as if it had done 'em much 'arm."

Here Mrs. Avery interrupted us with preparations
for tea. She is a short, black-haired woman, some
ten years younger than the master, a little hard-faced,
and keeps on guard with the world. She rules the
house nobly, with painful cleanliness and plenteous-
ness of all manner of store, seconded by the eldest
son's wife, a plain girl with a face of immovable
goodness and the spirit of work in her strong
shoulders and red wrists — a girl after the mother's
own heart, grappled to her soul by the silent
communion of righteous, unrelenting labour week
to week about the dairy and the henhouse and the
drying-ground. While Mrs. Avery stirred up the
stick fire and measured out the tea, she spoke about
the third son Albert, very much as though he were
a boy at school. " Jus' like a pookin' cow 'e's bin all
day. D'y' 'ear, father? All along o' somethin'
Steve Wickens was a-tellin' him las' Sat'dy down

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. IO5

in the village. Oh, it's the gells, is it? Who said
it was Liza Packham ? That's jus' like you ; 'spectin'
the fire to draw afore the chimley-back's half warm

like. I says to Albert, like that I says " Here

the entry of the daughter-in-law, who bears the
amazing name Deidameia (a not uncommon name
here, pronounced Dedemiah, and probably taken to
be Scriptural), stayed the further enlargement of the
secrets of the house, and left me able to talk with
the old man again. He affords a good instance of
the fair-minded way nearly all the old men have in
looking back ; he seems to see with equal clearness
merits which ended with his boyhood and those
which came in with the last Ministry. In all this
there is, of course, room for healthy grumbling ; and
just now he was complaining of the vanishing of
the old "round frocks." He hardly knew where
to get one now. "Won'erful good they was.
They'd keep out rain better nor any top-coat ; and
that warm acrost the chest again the wind. Chatfield
in Lewes, one time he'd women all over the country
makin' on 'em for him ; I don't expec' there's many
could put one together now. And look at long
leggin's ! Everybody used to wear 'em— right up
to here. There was old Jack Comber had a little
tanyard clost against where the schools is now

106 IDLEHURST :

down at Rispham ; an' when I was a boy, I'd take
the leather into Lewes every Saturday, for his sister
to make up ; and at Christmas-time, he'd give me
a pair o' leggin's, made just as I liked, brass buttons
and all. Jack was a man, he was. He used to live
over by Steyning, afore he come to Rispham ; and
he'd often tell me about the smugglers. He was
ploughman in those days, and after he's done his
day, he'd walk over the hills to help get up a lot
o' sperrits. Well, the smugglers they'd give him a
keg o' gin now and again ; and he'd alias fill his
bottle out o' that, and take it with him in the field,
ploughin' ; an' he'd get through his bottle in the day.
I asked him once if he didn't put no water to it?
'Water?' he says'; 'not unless it was uncommon
hot.' And he'd do his day's ploughin', and over
the hill again at night to the smugglin'. There's
not many men 'ud do the like of that now, would
they? They was stronger then, an' rougher too.
The men on the farms was terrible hard sometimes
on the lads. When I first went as carter-boy, I
never had a misword from the carter but once, an'
then I deserved it. The carter-boys used to be
beaten cruel, sometimes — mos' generally. The second
place I was at, the carter was a rough 'un. Once we
was ploughin', and he told me he'd kill me. He

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 107

says, 'You come here!' but I kep' on a standin' and
wouldn't go ; but at last I saw he was a-comin' to
me, so I went ; an' he says, ' Take my hand,' he says ;
so I took it ; and he says, ' If you don't drive better
I'll kill you.* Next time we stopped, he says, ' You'd
better say your prayers ; ' so I said * Our Father ' out
there in the field. I was frightened, I can tell you.
Next time I took hold of the horse's head all the
way, because I really thought he'd kill me. He
lost his place after that, not over me, but about
beatin' another boy. Ay, they was rougher then
than they are now. That was when the Horsham
Gang went on. There was a lot of 'em ; they broke
into houses, but never hurt nobody. Police ? There
wasn't any then, but only beadles and constables.
At last the gentry got a man to go in with 'em ; and
they didn't take to him, not at first. After a bit
they did, and he let on them, and they was taken,
one here and another there. One was hung and
the others transported. But the man who did it,
he had to fly the country."

The clatter and clink of the horses being brought
round to the yard made old Avery hobble to the
door to inspect them ; and when he came back to his
chair, he had something to say about the disappear-
ance of oxen for the plough. Here and there they

108 IDLEHURST :

may still be seen, chiefly in the more sequestered
parts of the Downs ; but practically the plough-bullock
is extinct. " Tis a pity," Avery thinks ; " there's
never such beef as they bullocks made when they'd
been worked and then fatted. They was goin' out ;
but I think as how it was the cattle-plague as made
people give 'em up, mostly. I rec'lect when that
first come ; we'd only horses then, an' it took them.
When I brought 'em in one night, Master 'e says,
* You've got to be a bit more careful with the whip,
my lad ; you've been hittin' this one in the eye,' he
says. Well, I'd laid the whip on a lump o' dirt
when we first went out, and never touched it all day.
When we got the horses into the stable, my mate says,
' Hold on,' he says ; * here's the other eye wrong ! '
And so it was. And the same night I was goin'
acrost the meada and I fell over a cow and kicked
her ; but she never got up ; so I says, ' Bring a
lantern, Jimmy/ I says ; ' there's something wrong
with one of the cows.' He got a light, and sure
enough she was dead. They all had it after that.
We went over to Tisfield for the farrier, but we only
lost that cow, and none of the horses. Seemed as
though the hard stuff in the roof of their mouths
came off, and then they got better."

Nowadays we have the Agricultural Depression with

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 1OQ

us ; but we do not find our cows in the dusk dead of
the quick mysterious plague, nor are the carter-boys
half-murdered in the lonely fields. Avery seems to
perceive compensations in everything ; I do so myself
under certain conditions, but partially. I fail to see
the make-weight in the modern farmers, the fre-
quenters of the Griffin at Tisfield on market-day,
for the loss of the touch of refinement and courtesy,
the observation and the centred mind of Avery. As
I rose to go, the old fellow was full of delighted praise
of the quality of the air and the water at Lycetts.
The old folk notice such things, with much accuracy
and appreciation. " A beautiful water," " a rare fine
air," are niceties which our friends in the covert-coats
and riding-breeches, the brewer and the broker who
farm, fail to take into account ; possessions which,
with a hundred others, are not the less real because
they are rare. The Rector connects them with one of
the Beatitudes, confessing himself to be without the
qualification that inherits so largely.

There are days of March when few things are
better for a man than to get under the lee of a big
hayrick, stamp his heels in the litter, and set his nape
well into the overhanging wall ; while the mixed sleet
and dust whirls past the corner of the rick, let him
in the warm lull of the sheltered air pull a handful

IIO IDLEHURST:

of the hay and smell it ; half the spell of June is
in the grey fibres ; he can almost hear the blackbirds
on the wind ; if by chance the cowman should begin
to sharpen the hay-knife behind the rick, he hears the
clink of the scythe in the shimmering fields ; the
essence of summer is laid up in the heart of the hay.
Something after this fashion I find in talking with
old Avery. There is a kind of laid-up sunshine in
his nature, a quality impenetrable by winds of fortune,
which makes him a shelter for others on bleak days.
I wish it were given to more of us so to stack our
Midsummer grass, that it will make pleasant corners
for windy weather, and cut out sweet and wholesome
to the last truss when the scythes swish again through
the sorrel and the dog-daisies.

22nd. — Last night we had rain, after a grievous
drought which entirely spoiled the transition from
latter Spring to Summer. For a month past the
glass has dropped and risen, the wind has gone about
from raw north to sweet south, every shape of cloud
has loomed and melted ; the cockchafers have held
their yearly one night's festival ; sooty airs have
pervaded the house, and candles have sputtered o'
nights ; — without bringing the desired showers. It is
heart-breaking work to watch the windward from
hour to hour ; to see the promise of the airy wisps

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. Ill

rise only to vanish ; to try to find comfort in sunrise
or sunset. The restless wind swept the sky clear of
the last thread of vapour, and left a grey-blue vault
from which the sun shone with July face. The light
was broad and colourless, the heat dry and untem-
pered ; and the latter Spring became a desolation.
All vegetation suffered ; the breeze which all day
sucked the moisture from the roots, blew keen under
the stars, and the frost bit just before dawn in the
lower plots and unsheltered corners. Leaves lacked
the moist, crude green of Spring ; grass yellowed ;
the apple-blossom fell almost as soon as it opened.
Pseony blooms were but half-grown, and strewed
their petals all too soon ; delphiniums were climbing
inches every day, hurrying out their flower-spikes,
pushing on with the rest to bloom and seed, forced
by a dry root-run. Insect pests made the most of
the dry chill weather ; rose-grub and caterpillar
meshed up and gnawed the leaves of the Perpetuals ;
greenfly mossed over the lustiest shoots with their
serried host. As a balance to this, the slugs and
" shell-snegs " were laid close in tufts and clumps of
the borders, and the daintiest seedling was safe in the
midst of the dusty soil. Weeds, too, suffered ; an
hour's skimming of the surface with the hoe made
havoc with the persicaria, goosefoot and fumitory,

112 IDLEHURST :

the eternal dandelion and groundsel which infest my
quarters — "a legacy," as Ministers say of a deficit,
"from my predecessors" — former tenants, who let
the weeds run knee-high, and left a sufficiency of
wholesome work to any reformer there might chance
to be among their successors.

After mornings among the hydra-heads of un-
necessary vegetation — sow-thistle, mallow, chickweed,
plantain — it became easy to slip out of tune with all
the life which worked and rejoiced in the flaming
afternoon ; with the starlings sliding on their incessant
journeys to feed the shrieking nestful in the roof;
the swifts balancing and cutting superb curves high
up in the blue ; the myriad flies that made the air
glitter with their jerking dance ; the innumerable bees
whose steady bourdon, a little sharpened or flattened
from one note from moment to moment, hummed
about the white blossoms of the holly-trees : all these
were too light-hearted for the soul whose labours,
spite of the forlorn pretence of the water-pot, were
slowly coming to nought in the disastrous weather.

Last night closed in with hazy drifts about a
blood-red sun, without a hint of change. Then, in
the small hours, when we were all asleep, a quiet rain
began ; the great watering-pot was swung impartially
and completely over all, and we woke to find the

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 113

world already fresher and greener, the course of the
year set going the old way, and a rich atmosphere
steaming up from soil and leaf. The morning was
still and grey, under vast formless folds of vapour ;
the unseen sun, striking through these, turned the
world to a great glass-house. In the refreshed peace
of the day the long-delayed businesses of the garden
prosperously unrolled themselves, to the monotonous
purr of a dove in the fir-trees, that most domestic-
soothing of woodland voices. Bish, working " strip-
shirt " amongst the peas, I heard whistling now and
then in a furtive manner, showing thus unwonted
contentment in the favouring season. At times the
day gloomed somewhat, and a cloud of dusty rain
trailed up our hillside and drifted through the firs —
a wet mist that pleasantly dewed the face, and re-
freshed the stocks and the asters planted out to
replace flowered-out wallflowers and forget-me-nots.

Callers arrived in the afternoon — Mrs. Lydia bring-
ing her niece Margaret Fletcher, and Mrs. Kitty with
a Miss Cottingham. Margaret spends some summer
months each year at the Rectory, and is of old an
associate of the inner circle with Alice, Zero, and
the rest. Helen Cottingham is a new-comer — an
artist staying in the village to paint landscape and
country models, as a change from the life-school and

I

1 14 IDLEHURST :

the St. John's Wood associations. As we sauntered
round the garden, the two girls presented a very
pleasant difference of good looks. They are both a
bare twenty. Margaret is something tall, round-
armed, fiaOvKo\7ros, with a fine poise of the head,
grey eyes looking very straight out of a sunburnt face,
dark brown hair wound voluminous in shining braids.
Helen is a head shorter, slight, with childish hands ;
her face defying all superlatives in dark blue eyes,
pathetic, gay, unfathomable by fits ; cloudy hair no
nameable colour but beautiful ; dog-rose bloom of
the cheek ; all the inexplicable differences of curve
and angle which make the features of regnant Beauty.
The clouds were breaking out in gaps of moist
blue, and the sun flushing over the dripping woods,
as we made the tour of the garden to inspect the
iris-beds — blue German and pearly Florentine, and
all the bronze and mauve and yellow glories —
Hortense and Alfred Fidler, Queen of May, Victorine,
Nancy, and the rest — and the paeonies, laying their
great heads about the borders, fading from crimson
to pink and white. Miss Cottingham, with her head
a little on one side, and one eye shut, regards what she
calls a " perfect bit " — a group of iris backed by the
dark of the clipped yew and the grey and golden
lichens of Pomona, the broken-nosed garden goddess

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 115

half hidden in the hedge. Besides these came a
middle distance of variously gleaming border, closed
by the tangle of apple boughs and spaces of turquoise
sky. When we left this enchantment, another subject
opened itself — the fir-clump with one shining cloud
entangled, so it seemed, among the dark-tufted
branches ; the lower sky clear between the shadowed
stems ; and ail the slope of the garden falling from
the foot of the wood in vivid sunlight. Before the
light shifted, the artist was framing between small
fingers a width of aquilegias, a hundred soft and
tender passages of rose, yellow, pale purple, and
white, and uttering little explosions of appreciative
delight. Margaret Fletcher, who does a little honest
amateur water-colour work, followed her, rather
puzzled by the superlatives, but clearly impressed
by the fine technicality of the language.

Tea was set under the yew hedge, and Mrs. Lydia
poured out. The talk was mainly artistic — Miss
Cottingham in a pretty way teaching us the last
conclusions of the London schools, and what they
do at Julian's, and how her friends had been hung at
Manchester or crowded out at Birmingham. All of
us — except Mrs. Lydia — were attentive, as befits the
shy amateur in the presence of the real artist. We all
do a little in our own ways ; Mrs. Kitty makes little

ii6 IDLEHURST:

pen-and-ink caricatures which she calls " etchings ;"
Margaret dabbles in water-colour ; I possess grounds
and points, and a few proofs of ghastly first states.
Only Mrs. Lydia has no gift in this kind. She would
hang her rooms with grocers' almanacs just as soon
as with Gainsboroughs, and could hardly distinguish
horizontals from perpendiculars. I sometimes ques-
tion whether there be some essence of lying in all
plastic art, that we see so many wholly good and
pure souls untouched by its appeal — something of
the sort which banished jutTirjove from the Polity.
Howsoever it be, Mrs. Lydia listens behind the tea-
things to our debate, amusedly above us ; sometimes
throwing into the discussion the clear dictum of the
unprejudiced mind. Margaret, who was taught at
school to mix " shadow colour," cannot see the blues
and purples which Helen Cottingham tries to show
her in the sunlit garden. I arbitrate (supporting
myself against the weight of Slade Schools and
Newlyn studios by memories of William Hunt and
David Cox) to the effect that the colours are there,
but that when once the eye has learned to see them,
it is, save in the case of the great, sure to see too
much, and to read into nature those dread anilines
which invade the proprieties of the Academy itself.
Miss Cottingham thinks we don't see half yet.

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 1 1/

Margaret summarises, " You'll never make me believe
in blue trees and a pink sky ! "

After tea we adjourn to my little gallery ; a few
feet of dark panelling whereon hang the little Turner
— a body-colour Venice something of the latest — two
Prouts ; a David Cox sketch of a storm ; an immortal
plain girl in a blue sash by Hunt ; and a few moderns
who have not yet " arrived." In their perfections both
sides find the evidence they require. I suggest
recourse to literary colourists. We discuss that touch
in the Purgatorio where the shadow falls red on the
white flame, and the parallel in the Ancient Mariner
where —

" The charmed water burnt alway
A still and awful red "—

two instances of colour-sight something like Turner's,
certainly unlike many other people's. Then we come
back to the Commedia for that deep paradox, which
contains the whole matter, of the

" Troppo color vivo."

The elder ladies leave us to our argument, and
retiring to the window at the end of the long room,
discuss the vital necessities of the parish. I find my-
self engaged in a little war with Miss Cottingham on

Il8 IDLEHURST:

behalf of my middle-aged ideals, and by way of carry-
ing the fight into the enemy's country, lecturing
her on the iniquities of modern methods in Art —
how they all live together in limited quarters of
London, painting professional models, and copying
Manet's way or studying M. Besnard ; going into
the country in the summer (here she makes me a fine
curtsey), and sketching anything which reminds
them of the Academy ; coming back to Campden
Hill or Chelsea in the shortening evenings, running
about to each other's studios to show their work ;
making out of this more Academy pictures for next
year ; and so on ; never getting any fresh fact or
matter into the process — following each his own
narrow line of subject — puppy-dogs, herring-boats,
swamps, cottage interiors ; carrying on a regulation
system, a routine as dead as Egypt. Miss Helen is
beginning to crush me with inferences that my
objections do not touch the younger schools — her
school — and I am remembering the difference which
one's standpoint makes, whether the road lies from
or towards the sun, when Mrs. Lydia breaks in on
our debate. Smiling at us with a look that in any
one else would be quizzing, she stands by the piano
and touches one or two chords pianissimo, her pro-
test, and our signal at once to leave the strife. I

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. l\9

open the piano, and she sits down and begins one
of Schubert's Vier Impromptus. There is nothing
to debate upon in Mrs. Lydia's art, so long as she
is playing ; there is not time, till she has done, to
think how perfect it is. When the last note is still,
I fall into speculations concerning the distinction
between music and art of form or colour ; how the
one sense, maimed and shrunken, exists with the
other glorified. I remember the curious complexity
of Mrs. Lydia's gift ; how she seems to be free of
the spell she lays on others, talking and laughing
through the tenderest air, as though the fingers did
it all ; how she seems to have no choice, playing,
often in incongruous connection, Chopin, Balfe,
Schumann, Gade, Handel ; how, the Rector has
told me, she sometimes does not play for a
month together, or only fingers over some trite
hymn-tune in odd twilight half-hours, something
reminiscent of child's Sundays, of Confirmation
Day, perhaps.

After the Impromptus she played us a Chaconne
and then a Minuetto ; and as the pathetic recurrent
phrase filled the quiet room, it was easy to understand
the power of music, wider, simpler, incomparably
more moving than the art of the eyes ; easy to under-
stand the cast of mind to which the matching of

120 IDLEHURST:

colours and turning of lines must be a mean business
at best. And before the last chord, Mrs. Lydia
turned round with a laugh to Mrs. Kitty ; they really
must go, and she would send the blankets (or some
such parish paraphernalia) by the boy the first thing
in the morning.

In the dusk I walked out northwards towards
Sheringham, meeting the customary Saturday night
procession of outliers coming down for their weekly
shopping in Arnington, and the earlier buyers already
going homewards. I overtook Mrs. Bish in her
ancient black, a vast basket on arm, full of the
Sunday's flap-of-beef, the half pound of tea, the
currants, and the inevitable bottle of physic.

Then came several faces I knew, men from the
nearer farms ; others that were strange, from the far
corners of the parish — a little man, toothless and
knock-kneed, with thin black beard and yellow whites
to his eyes — two stout young men in tail coats and
gaiters, one of these a very common type in Arnington,
with white eyelashes and light bushy whiskers on his
florid cheeks ; the other was playing an accordion,
which, perhaps, on the whole, may be called the
national instrument. After these came a farmer's
girl, who might be of any age between twenty and
forty, slight, anaemic, formless, dressed in a forlorn

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 121

long-waisted black jacket and draggled skirt. She
wheeled before her an infant and an assortment of
miscellaneous groceries in that comprehensive vehicle
called a pram, and represented only too well the
general young-womanhood of the parish.

I turned out of the road at Cudbridge and sauntered
down a woodside where no marketers came or went ;
and before long the gasps of the accordion died in
the distance and left me to the hush of the evening,
growing momently upon the wood. Then the night-
jar began his drowsy burr, answered by another and
yet another, until; relieving one another, they filled the
twilight with an unbroken, monotonous drone. Close
at hand, as I sat on the field-gate, small lives cricked
and rustled in the hedge-bank ; three fields off I could
hear the folded sheep munching, and the wavering
bleat of a lamb. Then one or two premonitory churrs,
and the nightingale broke out in magnificent song,
pealing from a sapling almost within arm's length of
my resting-place ; the song that never tires, as perfect
a delight here on the edge of Summer as when it was
new in the first days of April. She pours out air
after air, separated by a breathing-space pause ; and,
so far as I can judge, never repeats the same figure in
the quarter of an hour I listen to her. I slip away at
last without disturbing the diva, and lose the song

122 IDLEHURST :

at a bend in the road ; indulging a fancy which some-
times comes in turning away from such a feast, from
Mrs. Lydia's music, or from a rich sunrise, a fancy that
the lost beauty will all be found again presently, to
the note and the hue, in the centre wherefrom it is a
vibration.

It was a very light and still evening, and the village
street when I reached it was murmurous with a
sauntering crowd, buying, gossiping at corners,
dropping in and out of the public-houses, the
Stand-up and the Crocodile ; a crowd happy
enough in its own way, with the week's wages in
hand and the Sabbath already begun. Some of the
men are by this time washed and in their better
clothes, recreating, like my friend of the accordion,
who acts Pan to this Arcady for want of a better, and
fills the street with jerky strophes. There are too
many of the girls from the cottages, the order which
does not "go out to service," the home-drudges and
the "up-street" gadabouts, enjoying their principal
promenade, strolling arm-in-arm deep in circum-
stantial secrets, or formed in line at the edge of the
pavement to badiner with the contemporary youth,
who balance on their heels in the roadway, spit, and
exercise repartee, with minute-gun explosions of horse-
laughter.

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 123

The shops are all aflare, doing their chief trade of
the week. Outside the Crocodile an old fellow in a
frock and a keeper-looking man in velveteens are
holding each other by the shoulders, prosing low and
affectionately in the earlier stages of beer. One or
two labourers in shirt sleeves come from the allot-
ments, wholesomely tired at the knees, no doubt,
with a broccoli in a handkerchief for to-morrow's
dinner.

The night scarcely deepens. A glow hangs over
the fallen sun in the north-west, and the larger stars
of the constellations are pale and clear. As I turn
into my gate under the firs, I see Antares, winking
hazy-red on the edge of an eastern cloud-drift, under
the steady yellow lamp of Saturn. A landrail is call-
ing his restless crake-crake from his wonted meadow,
and I can hear the night-jars purring across the
valley — two sounds which show beyond doubt that
Summer is established.

June 6th. — The rain which fell ten days ago was
all too little to help the garden ; and up to last night
it was bitter drought with cloudless noons and keen
nights. The roses were foul with vermin, aphis, cater-
pillar, " brocks " in their little tents of spume ; the Teas
as usual escaping much that the Perpetuals suffer. Out

124 IDLEHURST:

in the woods the oaks were being stripped by the
green caterpillar ; some copses were as bare as though
it were January. Nature was out of joint. The
harsh, dry air seemed to suck the generous humours
out of man, leaving him pithless and his works vain.
The elder has been in bloom for a week past, and
the rattle of the mowing-machines sounded all about
the valley, but none of the good associations of hay-
time were to be conjured up. By noon yesterday
the barometer had crept down to " change," and the
sky wore a hopeful look, even to the oft-deceived and
sceptic eye. In the dull heat, vast fans of thin white
cloud spread slowly out of the south ; along the
western horizon lay a company of fantastic little
tossed-up vapours, unquiet and thundery. During
the afternoon a grey-barred canopy of cirrus rose
very slowly ; and by sunset heavy black wreaths of
cloud were drifting under a dome of thin ashen-grey.
At nightfall I went up to the top meadow to watch
the anxious course of things. The air was dead and
heavy as I stood by the gate and looked over the
cleared meadow, a grey-green, shadowless plane,
sharply cut by the black line of the hedges and the
solid darkness of the unstirred elms. Everything was
oppressively quiet ; there was no motion save the
slow shifting of the pendulous breasts of the clouds

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 12$

overhead in deepening blots of gloom. Low in the
south all was undistinguished grey, but for some faint
horizontal bars of darker vapour. As I watched these
a glint of fire, very pale and weak, more felt than
seen, winked from under the grey streaks, and de-
clared storm in the doubtful elements. After some
minutes, while the clouds overhead massed themselves
with imperceptible motion, the horizontal yellow
flicker came again, repeated instantly by another
gleam round in the west. Then in the hedge beside
me fell a few large drops — slap, slap ; and far off in
the valley the wind began to sound in the trees. As
I reached the house, after a hasty round of barn
doors and frame sashes of late left wide, a rustling
breeze drew all at once through the garden, bringing
the rain with it in gusty sheets. For half an hour
the lightning blazed through the steady fall, with
that long pulsating flicker that turns all the streaming
air to blue fire and reveals terrific cloud-scapes,
mountains and cataracts of vapour tossed and
writhing with the energy of the storm. One may
generally foretell the seventy of a storm coming
on at nightfall by the frequency of the distant
flashes, before the thunder is heard — what people
call "summer-lightning." In this case the thunder
died away rapidly, the storm passing to the

126 IDLEHURST :

westward ; soon the rattle of drops in the trees
fell, and overhead a misty star looked through the
thinning clouds. Southwards a broad belt of greenish
sky opened out ; the disturbance was past, and all
the rain which had fallen was barely enough to darken
the dusty earth. Once more the gardener's patience
must take up the weary weight of hope deferred.

The morning broke cool and clear ; the air was
washed of all the late sultry fever. A thousand small
white clouds sailed out of the south, sometimes fall-
ing into semblance of line and squadron, sometimes
curling and rounding up their dazzling tops with a
thundery threat, only to break down again into dusty
wisps and fringes.

I determined to make a push with the hay. This
week we have cleared the four acres next the
garden — Cannon Mead, we call it — and the small
piece behind the wood. To-day I propose to work
late and finish the lower meadow along the brook.
My haymaking is carried on in the old-fashioned
way, spite of local doubts about my sanity. Here-
abouts, haymaking is a lost art ; the ideal operation
in Arnington is somewhat of this fashion : given
cloudless weather, the grass is first left to stand and
seed about a fortnight after it is ready to cut, from
notions of getting a bigger crop ; then the machine is

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 127

run round the fields, and the sealer or tossing-machine
follows. The third day, or even the second, if the
crop is light, the hay is raked roughly into lines with
the horse-rake and carried from the lines. Being
thus about half-cured, it is stacked (wide and low, to
save pitching up), and left to sweat and smoke and
possibly fire. In perfect hay-weather this plan is just
feasible, though a vile piece of scamp-work ; in most
seasons it is calamitous. The scarcity of mowing-
machines delays the cutting ; a day's rain saturates
the uncocked grass ; and the hasty, careless operation
breaks down, ending in a rick of grey, washed-out
provender, not without its due effects in the ultimate
eating. The tearing cut of the knives in the machine
is a very different thing from the clean rip of the
scythe ; and the older men are positive that where
machines are regularly used, the bottom surely
deteriorates.

When my meadows are ready, with due, but no
excessive observance of the weather, I put in some
half-dozen scythes, retained beforehand : Bish, who
is a slow but very steady mower ; Lemuel Welfare,
a terrible Radical, who does nothing all the year
till hay-time, then works superbly and drinks in
proportion; Henry Awcock (which we call Awk),
the Rectory coachman, lent for the business, a

128 IDLEHURST :

man who loves the hay and considers the hay-
making his yearly holiday ; a couple of odd men
from the village, at other times a fettler and a
hay-trusser; and old Tomsett to swap round the
hedges and clear corners. After the cutting, the
swathes are properly turned with the fork ; and,
as the weather serves, got into line, into small cocks,
and in an ordinary year of doubtful skies, into large
cocks ; thence carried, a mature, wholesome feed,
and ricked on a proportionable base. This year the
sun and wind have made the hay almost too quickly,
and there will not be much difficulty in finishing all
to-night. It is busy in the field all day, and towards
four o'clock fervet opus along the brook alders. Lucy
Sayers leaves her kitchen to rake after the waggon,
a quaint figure in a vast bonnet and girt-up skirts.
Mae'ry Bish labours elegantly and not too hard in
a spotted blouse and what she would call a "siler'at ; "
Liza, old Packham's niece, hatless and touzled, looks
pretty and works famously, her pink print rolled
up to her strong elbows. Tomsett, to whom all
give the honourable title of "Mas'" for this turn,
commands the army with traditional authority and
ancient wisdom. A score of children roll in the
grass and do their best to derange the haycocks;
there is a gay babble of talk and laughter, through

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 1 29

which comes the shout from the waggon, the warning
to the man on the top to " Staand faast ! " and the
adjurations to Sally and Rodney in the shafts.

Mrs. Lydia has brought Alice, who tugs at a rake,
after a disappointed attempt on a fine new fork.
Margaret Fletcher looks on with Mrs. Lydia, a
little wistful or rebellious at admission of hay-days
over ; very soon I see her raking with Mae'ry and
Liza in high spirits, careless of a tenue which was
not meant for the hayfield.

Afternoon declining, we have tea in the field, piling
divans of hay round about the kettle. Zero wakes
from his doze and balances sleepily on to his hind
legs, more from habit than a desire of bread and
butter. He is presently trying to convey to Alice
the fact that the tradition of the house against very
sweet tea as a beverage for terriers is one he never
accepted.

"May he have one more lump?" I hear; and
discover that the mixture is already more than
half-and-half.

The jolting waggon comes and goes, and the field
clears slowly before our eyes. Up in the yard the
grey-green pile grows under the feet of the men.
The elders along the upper hedge hang thick with
their creamy panicles of flower; and their smell,

K

IDLEHURST :

honeyed yet pungent, a heavy strong essence, conies
in the light airs across the universal atmosphere of
hay. This blending of elder and hay is to my
associative mind one of the most forcible notes in
the scale of the year. June by June it renews all
the old hayfields, the cloudless summers of childhood,
the poignant passages of youth, before the present
course of uneventful seasons turned all to peace
perchance too lightly accepted.

The sun goes early, in a bank of grey mist ; the
waggon lingers for the last rakings ; Alice and the
ladies have left us. The men sit in luxurious ease
about the yard, and pass the beer while Bish and
Roser top the rick with trusses of straw against
chance of storm. Out of the south gathers and
rises a vast intricate system of rain, ashy grey
parallels tangled with diagonal weft of threaded
vapour ever climbing nearer the zenith ; lower down
looms a blank leaden vault across which hurry little
black drifts ; close to the horizon a clear hard
edge of cumulo-stratus cloud shows silvery-white
upon the dun shroud. The rain is coming, past
any doubt, this time. I give it till nine o'clock, at
farthest, as I contemplate the shapely cube of my
dozen tons of well-got hay. In this mind of
serene content there is a touch of commiseration

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 131

— wholly pure, shall I say? — for my neighbours
whose mowing-machines sounded in my ears all
the day.

As I saunter up the broad path of the garden,
with Zero at heel — alas! Zero, you come to heel
all too readily, at whiles, and your gait is a trifle
old-gentlemanly— I would like to tell the sunburnt
greenery to hold out ever so little longer, for a
soft veil has been swiftly let down over the village
and the further woods, and there is a sound of
abundance of rain. I hear it and the wind it brings
coming up the hill from copse to copse, till at last
it fills the garden and strikes the firs into the
pleasantest music they have made this year. I stand
face up to the pelt until the rich reek of the thirsty
soil fills my nostrils, and I am driven in by the
increasing flood. Half the night, waking to listen,
I hear in a sleepy content the multitudinous voices
of the rain, the murmur of the garden, the gush of
drops against the window, the bubble of all the
eave-shoots running full and over. The thought
of to-morrow morning is a recurring pleasure; the
end of labours with the water-can, when every fibre
and cell that grows will visibly rejoice in its refreshing,
not merely the pegged verbenas and the carnation
seedlings, but every hedge leaf and roadside weed

132 IDLEHURST:

from Firle to Crowborough, indifferently watered
through the darkness, whilst

"fo S'apa
avrap air) Ze<£vpos //-eyas, atev e</>vSpo?."

I2t/i. — To-day the morning broke, if the word may
be used of the pale light which so slowly grew behind
the tossing fir-boughs, in ceaseless rain. The world
was roofed in by grey cloud whose flying wreaths
now and again curled through the trees ; beyond the
garden-walls the elms faded into a background of
streaming vapour. The vegetable world rejoiced
visibly ; and after the late dull heat, one's own fibres
were the better for the downpour. And on the side
of utility, such a " fall " goes to replenish the springs :
another day or two such as this, and the " flit " or
surface wells, now perilously low, will fill up. Round
about Arnington a dry summer always brings us
to the edge of a water-famine ; and two or three
inches of rain more or less at the critical time
mean very much to us in the matter of health and
comfort.

There was no stay to the sweeping flood all the
forenoon ; and I recognised the day as one of my
especial holidays. The garden is looking after itself
as no army of gardeners could tend it; there is small

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 133

chance of callers breaking in on one's solitude ; and
so a solid morning may be spent on despatching the
accumulated arrears of small things, in improving the
mind, or in that medicinal idling which is for some
of us at times such an admirable thing. Mrs. Kitty
always keeps one novel uncut for such a day. Mrs.
Lydia devotes the time to the mystery called, I think,
" picking and turning," or to sorting the Rector's old
sermons. As I have no such employment kept for
the occasion, I went into my study about nine o'clock
with an indefinite plan which comprised letter-writing,
a little reading, re-arrangement of certain book-
shelves ; and left a liberal margin for contemplative
moments, if they should arrive.

At the outset I was disturbed by Lucy Sayers,
who required me to fill up some lacunae in the day's
bill of fare. I told her we would have something out
of the old book ; and took down " The London Art
of Cookery," a ragged leather volume of the last
century, containing in its text and the MS. comment
many delightful kitchen fantasies, conceived on a
scale of baronial liberality. I passed over the recipe
for " Bombarded Veal," which requires a penny loaf,
half a pound of fat bacon, an anchovy, marjoram,
lemon-peel, chyan pepper, chopped oysters, ketchup,
artichoke bottoms, and truffles : and suggested that

134 IDLEHURST:

the " Shoulder of Mutton Surprised "- might be prac-
ticable. Lucy thinks she could manage it ; all except
the barberries for garnish. She is a little sceptical
about the " London Cookery," since the last attempt
to produce "Florendine Rabbits" by its directions
led to a bread-and-cheese lunch. For a sweet, I leave
her to choose between the Solomon's Temple in
Flummery and the Desert Island, and to find modern
substitutes for the sack, orange-flower water, and
eringo-root prescribed. Lucy departs to her province,
fired with the high task before her, and I turn again
to my morning of odds and ends.

I possess one of those uncomfortably analytical
minds which count the footsteps in a walk and half-
consciously measure proportions in the pattern of a
carpet. When I had written my letters, I vacantly
watched for some little space the rain plashing on the
window-panes, and then found myself cataloguing, so
to say, the contents of my study. From a mere
mechanical counting of items I slipped into a sort of
catalogue raisonnt ; and letting the book I had opened
lie on my knee, I amused myself thus for half an
hour, perhaps, with my belongings. I began at the
corner of the ceiling next the door, where a couple of
spiders live frugally and to all appearance brotherly,
protected by a pencil line on the plaster, a magic

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 135

circle within which Lucy Sayers' brush may not come.
Any nonsense is possible to "scientific" people ; and
so my sanity escapes graver reflection. Outside the
circle Lucy dusts with double zeal, and our under-
standing about the matter provides that if ever the
criminals break their sanctuary, they shall go. Lucy
is wholly without that respect for the spider and its
works which she attributes to the inferior race
summarily characterised as " gells." " Spiders lucky ? "
says Lucy : " I reckon they're middlin' unlucky when
they comes near me!"

Next to the spiders I note my main bookcase, a
roomy lodging for other things than books. Papers
of garden seeds share a shelf with broken-down
fishing-tackle ; an ancient hortus-siccus lies in com-
pany with candle-snuffers and a mole-trap. The
books are, I reflect, as I look at the somewhat ragged
array of backs, mostly of the old world ; cracked calf
and warped vellum outnumber the cloth-gilt moderns ;
" Esmond " in an early edition is, I think, my nearest
point to modern romance ; my science stops at the
earlier Darwin. Being once scolded by Mrs. Kitty
because I had not read a serious novel of last week,
I explained that I had thought I ought to begin at
the beginning of literature, and work downwards in
order to the moderns. "Well, and where did you.

136 IDLEHURST :

begin ? and where have you got to now ? " says the
Censor ; and I tell her that I began at Eutropius as
quite a small boy and am now got somewhere about
the Elizabethans.

" Fancy that now ! " is Mrs. Kitty's comment.

Even amongst my ancients there are odd gaps ; I
entertain only personal friends, whether amid the
Heliconian top shelf of Venetian and Dutch editions,
or the dictionaries that repose on the floor. I like
even a lexicon to have a character of its own ; my
commentaries are chosen more for the humours of
the commentator than their bearing on the text. I
mostly dispense, spite of the several deductions
possible from the fact, with those works without
which no gentleman's library is complete. Order
and rank on the shelves go mainly by inward
character ; some volumes seem to have an almost
spontaneous way of sorting themselves. Bernardino
Danielle's Dante constantly finds its way from its
fellows, the Convito and Petrarch, to stand beside
Conington's ^neid ; and more than once I have
found a stout Rasselas with plates pinning a shabby
paper Candide against the partition. The Iliad and
the Republic are generally separated by a Chase's
Ethics ; and I always humour and encourage this
rational collocation of authors.

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 137

Above the bookcase, whose top carries desueta
anna, an old gun-case and a lashless whip, hangs a
row of engravings ; a very fair second state of Ben
Arthur, half a dozen Constable mezzotints, a Samuel
Palmer, a pencil scribble of Leech's, and two or three
unknown hands that bide their time to be the vogue.
Beside the chimneypiece are five silhouettes in oval
frames — my family portraits. The first of these, with
capacious gills done in white on the black, and gilt
lines to indicate the hair, presents my mother's father,
whom I can remember by his shirt-frill and a story
he told — how he once left the Dragoons, who were
ready to charge the Luddites in the market-place,
and walked out alone with his hat in his hand to
speak to the mob, and how he got them out of the
Square, and down the Vicar's Croft, and on to the
Moor, without so much as throwing a stone. There
was another story, which I liked when I grew older,
about a bank failing and my grandfather going to a
friend in trade and asking for a loan to save his
credit. The friend gave him a draft for the amount
without saying a word, and put my grandfather's
receipt in the middle of the parlour fire — confidence
that was not mistaken. They were rough days in the
North-country town where he was brought up : one of
his first recollections was of his father's house being

130 IDLEHURST :

burned by machinery-rioters, and of himself and his
sisters being taken in a waggon to an uncle's house
in the country, arriving in the early summer morning ;
and of his father calling out, " They've smoked us
out at last, George ! " He said that the fire and the
journey in the waggon were all a kind of dream, not
very terrible ; but that when they reached the house,
so still and quiet, with white pigeons on the grass and
the shadows of the hollyhocks across the flagged path
in the morning sun, it all came back to him with an
agony of crying.

This burnt-out great-grandfather, whose silhouette
shows a tailed wig and a very strong chin, was an
attorney ; save that he married a penniless beauty, I
have no further tradition of him. Next to him hangs
a paternal great-uncle, a sea-captain who died in a
French prison : it is told of him that he once swore
at his sister because she cut his toast in two instead
of in three. The sister, a spinster Mehala, a light of
some Independent congregation, is beneath him, in a
mob cap ; her snuff-box and stick are extant, together
with her fame for housekeeping, extreme plainness
of person, and stateliness of carriage. Last, under a
full wig, is the strong original of all our derivatory
noses, the hook of the Derbyshire dalesman beyond
whose cloth-mill begin the myths. I feel a sort of

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 139

guardianship over me from these shadows of ancestors:
I owe to them that their descendant never

" Frangenda miseram funestat imagine gentem."

I sometimes think that they who possess ancestral
Knellers, Jansens, Zuccheros (not so much perhaps of
a Prelate, a Privy Seal, or High Admiral as of a
succession of obscure country gentility addicted
valiantly to serve their country at home and at the
wars), that such fortunates should be beyond the
danger of a wilful degeneracy. My blind silhouettes
have their power : what influence might there not be
in the eyes of a Van Dyck ? It was a saying of my
father's, which touches this use of descent on its other
side—

" The first Radical must have been a man whose
father was hanged."

Some way from the silhouettes hangs a little pencil
sketch of a girl's head, a relic of the grand passion of
my early teens. It escaped the fire by some chance;
and after all these lustrums I am not sorry to have it
by me — as a dry primrose may mark a page in one's
solid folios. Through the quaint horror of the
unequal eyes and laboured hair, I can see pretty
Barbara as she looked in the last summer of our
fellowship — I recall even the mauve pinafore, the

140 IDLEHURST :

hair-ribbon, the Jacob's-laddered stocking of the long
play-days ; the shell necklace and morocco shoes of
party-nights. We used to swing together, her hair
blowing across my face on the breathless downward
stoop ; blackberried together ; in the hush of warm
summer sermon-times dissected our Sunday posies ;
she would be very contemptuous towards my struggles
with ruTrrw, on the strength of her French irregular
verbs, when the schoolroom grew dark in the winter
afternoons, and the far-off muffin-bell brought the
thought of tea and the end of labours. I must have
been a shy and awkward lover ; she, I think, would
have grown into a coquette : neither for her teasing
nor her friendliness (and which was sweeter I could
never say) did I ever tell my devotion. There was
always an intangible bound, beyond which our wildest
play never led us ; only once, when she dared me to
shake hands with her through the quickset hedge
which divided our gardens, and I drove my bare arm
through the worst of the pricks, and felt both her
hands grasp mine, might the world have been turned
upside down. But I let the moment go ; something
on the instant grew between us more impenetrable
than all the hedges of the world, and that love-passage
was over. When Bab and her people went away to
live in Devonshire, I was left miserable, no doubt, but

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 141

full of valorous hopes and splendid dreams. I never
saw her again ; but for two whole years (which in
our money means at least forty) I lived her knight :
until the gallopings among the kitchen garden plots
with a beanstick for lance, in glorious quests and
tourneys, were exchanged for copy-book Epics of
Carnelot, and Barbara was forsaken for an imaginary
damosel of imitative construction called (I think)
Lystrenore. I drew portraits of Lystrenore in a Pre-
Raphaelite vein, more than enough ; they have not
escaped the fire. But the devotion expressed by that
well-moistened pencil-point lives in the picture of
Bab—

" Vorbei sind die Kinderspiele
Und alles rollt vorbei "—

but not altogether, protests the little profile —
" Glauben und Lieb' tmd Treu'."

The study timepiece, the tall clock in the hall, and
the cuckoo on the stairs, give one o'clock with the
unanimity of (let us say) a School Managers' Meeting ;
and the morning has gone with half my idlenesses
undone. The rain still drips from the honeysuckle
at the window ; but after these indoor hours the open
air begins to call, and after lunch I propose one of
my favourite diversions, a thoroughly wet walk. The

142 IDLEHURST :

clouds are still down on the hillsides, and a grey
misty light lies on the landscape ; but the driving pelt
of the morning has fallen to a soft blowing cloud
of moisture, which pleasantly bedews the face and
gathers in the eyebrows. The yellow brook by
Dogkennel has almost drowned the single plank that
makes the bridge, and my path lies through plashy
lanes and woods, where a moment's breeze brings
down a thunder-shower of drops. I make my way
to a barway in a tall hedge, giving a prospect to the
north over the moorland ridges of the Forest. As I
lean over the gateway in the silence of the vacant
hour, I can hear the drip from the elms in the further
field ; birds and beasts lie close and still. The hill-
side over against me shows dark at the bottom
under the trailing fringe of the rain-cloud, which
blots out the hedgerows halfway up the hill. Over
everything the fine rain sifts and drizzles : the drops
on the bramble beside me run together and slip into
the hedge bottom ; little rivers meander through the
grass at my feet ; the field furrows are pouring down
the slope to the brook, the river, back to the sea
again. Man and his works are put aside ; and earth
and heaven are at their business in that compre-
hensive way which our partial faculties may so pro-
fitably contemplate.

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 143

As I was on my way home, keeping under the
hedge-side " in the loo," as we say, I came on a very
old labourer standing up to shelter, a ragged sack on
his shoulders, the rain trickling from hat-brim and
nose. He told me he had been there since eleven
o'clock — the bailiff had thought as how it looked
like clearing off, and had sent him to do a job of
gapping ; and if he had gone home it might have
cleared off after all. So he had eaten his dinner and
stood out in the rain, shifting from one wet foot to
the other hour by hour, and thinking, Heaven knows
what.

The field he was in was poached into a red quag-
mire by sheep, who stood tail to the wind, motion-
less except for an occasional shake of their sodden
fleeces — the whole a picture of dull wretchedness.
I find the old man is David Walder, eighty-four
next birthday, doing a full labourer's work on
Sacketts farm. He is crippled by rheumatism,
and has to walk two miles to his work every day ;
is looking forward with dread to the haying which
begins next week, and the harvest that follows, with
their long overtime. " I be that tired," he says. All
this blundering cruelty slips in, of course, between the
several necessary links of authority on a large estate :
the bailiff has no commission to ease the work of any

144 IDLEHURST :

particular hand — possibly it is by his kindness that
Walder has not been already turned off; to the
steward or agent David Walder is nothing more than
an item on the pay-sheet ; the owner, Mr. Newcome,
if he ever looks over the farms on a Saturday after-
noon, knows less of his labourers than he does of his
crops.

Sacketts is in Tyefold parish, and out of the range
of our watchful Rector. The Vicar of Tyefold is of
a blameless conversation and, I believe, is the first
authority in the Diocese upon Low-Side Windows.
Walder has never seen him to speak to : he reckons
he's most likely been to his place and found him
out ; as he would any time between six and nine
of the day at this time of year. I suggest that the
Vicar might speak to Mr. Newcome, and get him
put to lighter work. He turns to me with something
like terror in his watery eyes ; anything but that !
His one object in life is to show that he can still
do a full day's work ; for this he strains to equal the
younger men, and is ready at a hint for the hardest
jobs. If once he be thought to be past work, they
will turn him off; and that is the final catastrophe:
these old people decline to take the workhouse into
consideration. I contrived to reassure him that
nothing should be done to jeopardise his wages ; and

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 145

telling him that it is less than an hour to knocking-
off time, continued my way along the hedge. I
looked back from the gate into the next field, and
saw him, the sack drawn a little closer, the head
dropped lower, motionless under his thorn tree, a
figure of patient misery ; a form of dread surely to
us his masters, if we could look beyond those walls
of reasonableness and decency and well-meaning
which we build about our ways. I could not com-
fortably think of my morning's employment, with
old Walder's leisure hours on my mind ; but at
length appeased myself with the determination to
see the Vicar or Mr. Newcome himself in a few days,
and with the recollection that in a like case in
Arnington, the Rector's application to the employer
resulted in kindest consideration of the matter and
a long-service pension to the old servant for the rest
of his days, with the further thoughtful provision of
light work to break the strangeness of the first
holiday in seventy years. Our large landowners are
anything but hard men ; they are kind enough on
due occasion, if only the occasion is brought to
them, and they have not to seek it. I feel sure that
in this case Mr. Newcome will be just and generous
when his attention is gained ; and that old Walder
will not have long to wait for easier times, for rest

L

146 IDLEHURST :

at last, and the lifelong shadow of the Union gone
for ever.

Before I reached the garden gate the rain was
over, and the grey evening lifted to show a pale
golden line in the west. Hope stirred livelier in
various directions ; for old Walder and all his mates ;
for pension schemes, public or private ; for a fair
to-morrow ; for Lucy Sayers' experiments in Mutton
Surprised and the Flummery Solomon's Temple,
which the punctual dinner-bell announced at that
moment to be ready for proof. As I came up the
still dripping garden, I thought, by a whimsical con-
trast, of Piccadilly at that hour ; the dim light, the
lamps beginning to glimmer on the drenched pave-
ments, the dull thunder of the omnibuses going by
in the steam of their own horses, the moist crowd
wading to the refuge through the spirting mud j and
came back with relief to the placid close of my wet
day in the country.

i%th. — Heavy showers of late, ending in one whole
day of quiet rain, put the garden in tune, and allowed
me to leave flowers and herbs to their own devices
and the restricted ministrations of Bish for a term.
It is in a man's power to make the quality of a
holiday independent of its outward conditions : by
steady antecedent minding of home-affairs, a week's

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 147

peregrination may be made fuller than a six months'
voyage of the ordinary travelled man. Thus I found
my late journey into Oxfordshire to contain more
matter than a cruise among the Cyclades in far-off
Wanderjahre. At Oxford I found the perennial
new buildings which vex the conservative soul ; a
vast civic pile in St. Aldate's, and some puzzling
demi-colleges off Holywell ; St. Mary's new apex
gleaming like a nightcap amid the new pinnacles,
frigid mechanisms —

" Icily regular, splendidly null."

I mused whether it would be possible, before any
more of the old features vanish, to move the whole
modern business of the University to Brompton —
Schools, Professors, Delegacies, Extension Meetings —
and there make them happy in beautiful new buildings.
With them might go the trams, the stone-saw, the
paper-boy, and a hundred other energies of the time,
leaving behind them the Genius loci they insult, the
relics of Oxford's immemorial grace, to rest through
quiet terms and slumberous vacations, educational in
a way which perhaps not even Endowed Research
has yet discovered.

When I am in Oxford, I generally find that my
ramblings about the town follow more or less a

148 IDLEHURST :

customary order. I lean over Magdalen Bridge and
watch the punts emerge from the archway with hollow
plash and ring ; I wait by St. Mary's entry while the
bell is going, and the gowns flock by to Congregation ;
from a narrow lane I look up to a house-front, white
in the sunlight, with green window-boxes, to the
open windows of the rooms which were mine. I am
a revenant ; I find myself inclined to walk softly, to
give room to the corporeal passing crowd, to stop in
convenient corners to watch the currents that have
gone by me. On this last visit, Summer Term was
on the lees, and that vague spirit of unrest was
abroad which drives the undergraduate from Jiis
haunts ; something of the old feeling awoke even in
me when I met the clattering hansoms, hat-box and
portmanteau atop, and the serene, brown, wholesome
faces, set towards New Road and the Long Vac.
The man who has not kept up his connection
with his College, and has no friend even amongst
Dons and Fellows — those VSKVWV a^vi]va Kaprjva still
haunting the ways of life — should choose the far end
of the Long Vacation for revisiting Oxford. When
there is a touch of yellow in the Broad Walk elms,
and milder sunshine sleeps upon the mouldering
facades ; when the coil of the Extensionists has died
away, and the new electric installation is finished in

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 149

the College Hall ; then is it easiest to raise the dead,
and renew one's ancient terms.

My walks about the town generally lead me by a
certain Tractarian-Gothic doorway in a cobble-paved
side-street, a door that I seldom pass without an
almost physical pang. Moralists have, I think, un-
accountably neglected to take into consideration
that flightiness of the human conscience which so
often produces an odd want of sense of proportion.
I doubt if any crime against my kind or my country
could leave a worse sting of remorse in me than did
the fact that I once went through that door to dine
with the Head, a forlorn, uncouth Freshman in a
black morning-coat and blue-spotted tie. As with
the superstitions learnt in childhood, the horror of
the thing will not quite rub out of the grain : I
still see the puzzled shirt-fronts, the unwincing polite-
ness of the hostess whom the College called Polly.
I remember a man on my staircase who once asked
me up to his rooms to see the empty bottles in his
scout's-hole — the vast relics of a wine to which I
had not been invited. It was a deed of a curious
badness ; but had it been mine, the memory would
have passed long before that accusing tail-coat began
to lose its power. The Puginesque door with its
broken-nosed corbels will never be to me as the

ISO IDLEHURST:

other doors in the lane. To-day I met in the Turl
Lethbridge of St. Boniface's, the volunteer Don, the
Juvenalian

" Bonus miles, tutor bonus "

of our day : it flashed upon me that he was at that
fatal dinner ; and though I knew I was safe from
those mildly-peering glasses, I confess I looked
another way. Not until I had wandered down the
meadows and along the towpath, observing the devious
arks and shallops silken-sailed with parasols, scattered
by one rough eight in training for Henley, did that
obsession wholly pass away.

I had found rooms near the High ; and as darkness
fell I looked from an attic window upon the green
sky behind St. Mary's and the sky-line of pinnacles,
battlements, and chimney-pots ; here a dusky syca-
more feathering out between the houses ; here a
glimpse of a lane-end under a yellow lamp, with the
momentary traffic over its cobblestones, now men in
flannels, late from the river, now two girls in lilac
blouses, now a flowing M.A. — the very Proctor !
For some merciful reason the electric light, whose
blue lightnings make darkness in the High a kind
of Walpurgisnacht, was for the nonce extinct ; and
I was able to recall how in my last term I once

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. !$!

looked out on the town on such an evening as this,
and with the heroic presentiment of youth, said
good-bye for ever to Oxford. Often since that
returning, can I say that the Ego which, leaning from
the Blue Boar Lane window and watching Bagley
under the moon, on that June night began (and left
half-way) a ballade of farewells, did not in truth take
an eternal leave ? Yes ; it was not I who so rarely
mixed dreams and life under these darkening walls,
but a soul which some spell of hour and place seems
to infuse into my being. I feel motions of barbaric
sentiment, of amazing hope ; deadest postulates
begin to stir with life ; and an absolution of blissful
ignorance floats downwards over all. Couplets of a
ghostly Newdigate echo from morning meadows
where they were born ; thin voices halloo across
shadowy quads. I hear as in a dream Tom begin to
clang over the roofs ; but a harsher note, the roll and
clatter of the tram below me in the High, serves to
break the spell, and bring back my wonted self and the
sufficing common world beyond the moonlit spires.

From Oxford I journeyed into the flats of the
Windrush and the Coin — a land of rushy streams, in-
numerable willow-rows and landmark poplar-clumps
— whose differences of character, in colour and atmo-
sphere, from that of my accustomed Sussex horizons,

iS2 IDLEHURST:

were a recreation in themselves. The very air had
a new quality, the villages a climate of their own,
mixed breaths of stonebrash soil, limestone walls
and roofs, and many brooks ; wholly unlike the thatch,
faggot, dead-leaf, wood-fire smells of the Weald. This
pleasure in distinctions suggests that perhaps we do
not generally (to use a logical figure) look on life
intensively enough ; do so concern ourselves with the
denotations of things that the plurality of worlds
cannot hold us, when an acre of terrestrial meadow
might suffice all aspirations. Of course there is a
back side to this theory ; hideous subdivisions are
imaginable ; but I think that practically, in things
of the natural world, it deserves consideration.

I found myself at home again on a still evening,
when the whole garden seemed to exhale, so to say,
the light imbibed during the burning day. The eight-
foot spikes of the delphinium looked like pale blue
fires ; the mounds of the Canterbury Bells showed
no dead purple or pink, but vibrant colour ; a white
rose against the green gloom of the yew hedge shone
with inward light like a star. The whole aspect is
one which is seen but twice or thrice in a summer,
under uncommon conditions of evening clearness
following a very bright day.

Scents of mignonette and night-stocks, not the

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 153

strong immediate odour, but the evanescent secondary
sweetness that begins at a few yards from the flowers,
drifted and hung about the paths, crossed at one
point by a rich suggestion from the strawberry quarter.
I took all the phenomena as a sort of welcome home ;
though in truth the motionless spires and shadowy
leafage of the borders, the solemnity which affects
all foliage under late evening light, never seemed
further from human communion. Nature will not
break her pact against man —

" Les jardins parlent peu, si ce n'est dans mon livre."

Zero greeted me with an alarum of barks, his old eyes
failing him in the dusk ; and stood, when I called
him, head down and tail feebly wagging, crushed and
apologetic for the monstrous mistake. Bish pre-
sented himself, with impassive touch of hat-brim
and eyes on his boots, to hand over the vicegerency,
and ease his shoulders of the heavy burden of the
week's responsibility. I commend his care ; and half
unwillingly admitting that things are looking what
you might call pretty middlin'-like, the laboriously
honest soul departs, relieved of a weight.

Lucy Sayers' welcome carries with it the impression
that I have been away on the Grand Tour.

" I be glad to see you back, Sir ! I never can get

154 IDLEHURST:

on without no proper cookin'." To-night the table
groans with a whole week's arrears of Lucy's pent-up
energy, and the kitchen is no more defrauded of its
master.
So to bed—

" Desideratoque incumbere lecto " —

the home-bed, sweeter in the lavendered whiteness
of Lucy's press for experience of dubious cribs in
strange hostels ; to sleep, well content, though I
cannot bid the house rejoice in its lord, nor say, for
grave lack of the wherewithal —

" Ridere quicquid est domi cachinnorum."

July 2nd. — There fell to-day that hour wherein the
year is clearly at the height, when it has reached the
fulness of change, and has no greater beauty to un-
fold. After to-day it will be all downhill ; here
beyond question Summer turns her face from us.
The morning was fresh and sweet ; the garden was
never so gay. Queen lilies swayed in ranks and com-
panies, smutched with gold dust on their lower petals ;
under them the roses glowed, in pointed bud or open
to the yellow heart. Lower still bloomed masses
of campanula, Sweet William, pentstemon, with the
earlier of the annuals, lavatera, linaria, clarkia, great

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 155

double poppies, and that most excellent new-comer
Shirley, in a spacious width by itself. Every colour
harmonised with all — purple Canterbury Bell and buff
testaceum lily, blue delphinium and red rose — all
save the scarlet lychnis, which jars in every contrast,
and exists only for his own splendid hue.

Though endless change is still before us, carnations
just plumping their buds, hollyhocks showing colour
here and there amid their green buttons, sunflowers
climbing to full stature, phlox and aster biding their
time ; yet here is a period fulfilled. The Summer is
of age ; and of long custom the moment has for me
a touch of sadness beyond the forlornest days of early
autumn.

I had been working in the vegetable quarters,
making up arrears of my late recess ; and such reflec-
tions as these came to me in a back-straightening walk
up and down the long path. I had superintended
Bish's gathering of peas for Lucy, checking that
selection of the elderly grey pod filled with hard cubic
seeds which are his ideal of a " nice-eatin' pea ; " an
ideal which he enforces, as many greater folk in
larger matters, very cheerfully on the rest of the world.
With the Ashleaves he can scarcely go wrong, though
he shakes his head over the extravagance of them —
early are they and small, and of rare succulence — give

156 IDLEHURST :

him Roses and Hebrons, large and filling, and not too
alluringly nice. In general, I find it safer to secure
my garden-stuff for myself; and so pea, bean, and
potato are culled at their grand climacteric, and are
in the pot before they have time to resent the change
by flagging and softening. This matter of selection
of the fittest, and recollection of some recent ex-
periences of travel, led to reflections on the vegetables
of the nation at large. I find — in the matter of peas —
that at public dining-places in the summer, one is
generally served with small bluish and greyish cubes,
somewhat hard and floury in texture, indeterminate
in flavour, save for the mint. I trace the natural
history of these vegetables thus : —

Seedsmen- breed a quick and strong-growing,
heavy-cropping stock, coarse and insipid, all touch
of quality lost in the gain of abundance and rapid
return. This seed is sown in market-gardens and
given rough field-culture ; the pods are gathered,
very well developed (for the tally's sake), by
women of the tramp class, and are carted in
large masses to markets, thence to the greengrocer's
trays, where they lie in sun and dust for a day,
maybe. When they finally reach the saucepan and
the table, they pass without comment as "green
peas," no more critically considered than the slice of

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 157

bread or the mustard. All this holds good, mutatis
mutandis, of every sort of market vegetable and
fruit — early potatoes, strawberries, lettuces, cucum-
bers, "greens." Fed on American pith and cotton-
wool, the public hardly knows the taste of a right
English pippin or pearmain : anything light, dry,
insipid, will serve for the market, so it be fairly large
and has a showy skin. And in course of time the
thing of generous juices and sound fibres becomes not
only neglected, but positively distasteful : just as Miss
Cottingham finds our sweet cream-coloured butter
naught, while she remembers the salt material of
middle-chrome hue found at prudent studio-teas ; and
as inland folk visiting a fishing-village miss some
added customary tang in their fresh-caught sole or
whiting ; as Bish turned the other day from the fill
of very choice Turkish I gave him, back to the dark-
hued abomination of fiery stench which he gets of
Mis' Bennett, and smokes in a short, saturated clay.

In the matter of garden stuff the British people,
save some of the wealthier who can be upsides with
their own gardeners, some cottagers of finer strain
than the common, and some wise amateurs like myself,
are quite ignorant of what is good to eat. "No
garden like Covent Garden," says the Cockney ; not
knowing that if nothing else came between, in the way

158 IDLEHURST:

of dirty fingers and worse contingency, the mere time
lost between gathering and cooking destroys all the
finer essence of the herb, the inward aroma, the clean
wholesomeness. A cucumber twelve hours out of the
frame is simple poison ; belated lettuces — even peas
— may be eatable (as many things unseasonable may
be done with at a pinch ; November roses, or a bride
at forty) ; but the man who can, in the words of the
classic, " go into the garden and cut a cabbage " — to
say nothing of Paxtons, Blackhearts, or Jargonelles
— has a treasure out of reach of the common variety
of millionnaire.

About teatime came the Rector, on his way back
from visiting a far corner of the parish, white-footed,
and glad of the yew-tree shade and the tea poured
out by Mrs. Kitty, who arrived with Gervase about
the same time, on a pretext of getting rose-buddings.
Gervase had spent a week in London on his way
back from Oxford. He took his Second in Mods. ;
the Newdigate was not for him this year : he proposes
to have a " thorough slack " in the country, profess-
ing satiety of Oxford things. This will pass, I doubt
not, some time before the cheery October term calls
again to the grey city of youth.

The Rector had been to see old Widow Blackman,
the representative, with a sadly pinched jurisdiction,

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 1 59

of the wise woman of tradition. We all know her
infinitely pathetic face, scored with wrinkles, with a
recollection of pretty lines about the mouth and
chin, and the pale blue eyes that look with mournful
patience on an incomprehensible world. We know,
too, something of the reality behind the mask ; the
inveterate begging-nature, the cunning, the all too
frequent drops of spirits. The Rector always comes
from Widda Blackmail's depressed and silent ; he
knows the impenetrable recesses of that half-Pagan
nature, and is not to be deceived by pious guile
now grown mechanic. Through all kinds of religious
cultivation, from the Church Catechism of her child-
hood, through the Calvinistic rule of her first
husband, the fervid Baptist zeal of her second and
third men, to the return in her eighth decade to the
Church, to the foreseeing care and keen siege of
intellect and devotion on the Rector's part, she has
remained mean, crafty, animal, base utterly. Now,
but a poor ghost of a witch, she is only credited with
power to wish away warts. Warts are, as far as my
observation goes, almost the only subject of super-
stition left among our people. Children cut notches
on a stick, and the dirt-bred nuisance departs ; you
can wish your warts on to another boy, or sell them ;
but if you want a radical cure in a bad case, you must

l6o IDLEHURST :

go to Widda Blackman at Catstails. I can find no
other trace of belief in the occult in the village.
Gervase thinks it is want of imagination ; I fancy it
is something worse than that — want of heart, exhibited
in the last degree. Even so I can rejoice at the dis-
appearance of the miserable tyranny of grimmer
superstitions. My Lincolnshire nurse taught me, as
a nervous small boy, all her lore of signs and portents ;
and I remember the sickness of terror (to this day
not quite worn out, but sometimes rising, a thin, un-
comfortable spectre) at spying a winding-sheet in the
candle, or hearing a dog howling in the awful dark
hours when I ought to have been safe in the snug
citadel of dreams. Amongst the rest, Letty Colbatch
taught me that an owl portended a death ; and when
once in a country museum I came upon a strix flam-
mea in a glass case, my small intellectuals sweated
in anguished question whether a stuffed owl was a
real portent ; the dim hope that the spell was broken
failing before the stare of his yellow glassy eye.
Looking back, after Elia's manner, on that small boy
as another self, I could almost cry for him now.
Best-hearted Letty, what torment you taught me !
The Rector is with me as to the cause of the general
decay of superstition ; but it is a subject he hates to
talk about offhand. There is among the gentry a

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. l6l

spurious sort of successor to the vanishing faith of
the cottagers ; people nail horseshoes over their
smart stable doors, and respect numbers and times
with a good deal of uncomfortable solicitude. Mrs.
Kitty agrees that it is most absurd ; she never cares
the least about thirteen at table ; but then you can
never know what other people think about it. And
May marriages ? suggests the Rector. Oh, of course,
thafs a very different thing, Mrs. Kitty thinks. Every-
body knows it is really unlucky; she has known
quite a number of people who did it, and were all
most unfortunate. In fact, she considers it really
tempting Providence.

"That feeling," the Rector says, "has of course
been attributed to the pre-Reformation regard for
the month of Mary ; but that can hardly have any-
thing to do with the short-coating of babies, which
the cottage people won't think of in May. My wife
finds that scruple very common : she had an argument
this spring with Mrs. Wickens, who utterly refused
to change her child's frocks till the end of the month.
She wouldn't mind for herself; but she knew it
would bring trouble to the child : no, she didn't mean
bronchitis, but real trouble ; she'd known plenty of
people do it, and not one but what was sorry after-
wards. So she waited for a lucky east wind on the first

M

162 IDLEHURST:

of June, to make the great alteration. It was Mrs.
Wickens, too, that told my wife the appalling piece
of natural history that a year in which lionesses have
cubs (no restriction of any latitude — either the Zoo
or Timbuctoo) was a very unfortunate one for human
babies to be born in. The origin of a myth like that
is beyond my guessing : it sounds like an aira^
A£yo//£vov, a spontaneous generation ; but no one who
knows Mrs. Wickens could fancy that possible."

" It doesn't sound like intentional humour," I said :
"not in the usual line of Sussex wit, such as the jokes
about going to Bau'combe, and the three true lies,
and the Piddinghoe magpies."

" No," the Rector thinks, " it is a real serious case
for the folklore folk. But as to May weddings, I am
afraid poor old Blackman must have defied that law
more than once. But of course in her young days
people were shockingly free and easy."

"Oh, of course, shockingly," replies Mrs. Kitty,
with her mind absorbed in her watch as she rises to
go home.

Gervase stayed on after the others had gone, and
we took a few turns round the garden together. In
Time's unconscionable accelerando it seems but a
day since we were idling so among the fritillaries :
now the clear luminous blossoms of the evening

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY, 163

primrose are open in the dusking air. We drift upon
verse again ; touch on the new poetry books, their
leanness; and discuss the modern equivalents in
Arnington to the ballad and its kind. I give
Gervase a few selections from our Volkslieder : they
are fearful when merely repeated ; but their effect
when rendered at Choir Suppers and Harvest Homes,
through the blue smoke and beery air, is not to be
imagined. We have some examples of (I think)
native strains, melancholy rubbish such as What is the
Life of a Man, more than the Leaves on the Trees > a
village classic which one Joe Vinall used to copy out
for singing-men at a shilling a-piece ; but these are
outnumbered by the strange Irish-American species,
of which The Fire in the Grate and Pm a Man has
done wrong to his Parents are representative. Even
these are giving way to the mere music-hall froth,
which filters down to Arnington some three months
after the London vogue.

Gervase thinks that we can't expect much from
secular lyres while we sing such rot in the way of
hymns on Sunday — rhymes that would not be
stood in a pantomime, and drivelling familiarities of
expression. It occurred to me here that my morn-
ing meditation upon the decay of taste in greenstuff,
the tolerance of the caulis suburbanus and his kind,

1 64 IDLER URST:

touched in some sort this matter of popular song.
With a general democratising process at work, we
get naturally width, not point or edge ; taste being
unconcentrated, is vulgar ; there is a common igno-
rance of good verse exactly as there is of good
marrowfats. We are all pea-eaters (with our knives,
too, some of us) — all critics ; and the standard, of
legume or laureate, drops to the multitudinous
average. Gervase fancies it is something like that.
None of the finer perceptions can be taught. People
think they know at least all about external nature
offhand. Some one lately referred quite reve-
rently to a passage in " Oliver Twist," where the sun-
light is reflected from a pool of blood on the floor
to the ceiling of Nancy Sikes's garret. " I told her,"
says Gervase, "that I preferred Shelley's handling of
the angle of incidence and reflection —

' The lake-reflected sun illume,
The yellow bees in the ivy bloom.'

' Oh, but that's only poetry ! ' says the precious critic.
One touch, of course, is sheer beastly impossibility ;
the other is an instantaneous photograph, besides the
' immortality ' part of it."

From this we strayed to considerations of natural
descriptions and landscape feeling in the poets. I

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 165

think we do not on the whole give due place to the
purely descriptive parts of great verse ; do not suffi-
ciently note the height touched in Homeric and
Virgilian similes ; or such instances of spiritual power
conveyed in little more than exquisite description as
Christabel and the Ancient Mariner ; most strangely
neglect the tremendous painting power of Dante,
more particularly shown in touches of landscape
feeling that we are mostly pleased to confine to later
periods — touches as accurate and as magnificent as
Turner's. (The storm on Pratomagno is perhaps the
finest sustained description ; sometimes a phrase is
almost as pregnant — il tremolar delta marina, — si
muova bruno bruno.) And matters of this kind are,
it is to be feared, beyond the reach of the Education
Code ; as yet beyond the reach, it seems, of University
Extensions, of shilling manuals, of the whole art of
Learning at Second-Hand.

Thus we propound harmonious theories, pacing up
and down the darkening alleys. Gervase, I notice,
as the argument becomes a little involved, tears to
pieces a rose carnation he plucked in an abstracted
moment ; and I myself only at the last moment
come to sense of the lovely evening sky behind us —
no fierce glories of colour or energy of motion, but
a clear pale green, barred with one narrow streak of

I 66 IDLEHURST :

scarlet, and almost drowning the first white edge of
the new moon — so both of us acting our own text,
and missing that finer sense of things of which we
talked.

i$tk. — To-day I was about the garden early, in
the pure cool of the morning. We had. a week
of flagrant heat, when the sun shone his fifteen
cloudless hours in a grey-blue sky, till the air
quivered, the soil was dust and ashes, and green leaves
drooped in the glow. Then one night the wind
shifted to the north, and brought a drift of smoky
cloud shot every half minute with a red underglow ;
and for an hour the rain drummed on the roof, the
lightning blazing through the flood in pale pink and
purple sheets, and the rending crackle of the over-
head thunder mingling with the bass boom which
shakes the rafters and jars the window-sashes.

In the morning the wind was south, soft and
sweet ; all the dull heat was washed out of the air,
and the garden was moist and happy, with here and
there a breach made by the rush of the rain. I was
busy at repairs of these by six o'clock, because I was
engaged to spend the better part of the working day
down in the village. To-day the Arnington Court
of the Loyal Order of Ancient Saxons hold their
annual festival — which they honestly call their Feet,

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 1 67

unsophisticated by Board School French. As the
necessary expenses of the saturnalia cannot be legally
borne by the Society's funds, certain of the gentry
in the parish are invited to dine with the brethren
and, by inferential presentation of a subscription-list,
to contribute to the banquet. I received the customary
invitation by the hands of the grocer's boy on his
round a few days ago, and accepted as a matter of
course, with the mixed feeling usual in these cases,
the hope that the self-sacrifice involved may in some
vague way compensate for the probable failure of
any good effect from one's presence.

The Loyal Saxons, following an ancient undeviating
procedure, make a full day of their holiday. At nine
o'clock there rises above the ordinary village sounds
the thump and blare of the brass band, whose music
may be traced as it travels here and there about the
environs to serenade the seats of the chief subscribers.
Distance delivers me from this honour, and takes the
worst out of the cacophony, reduced as I hear it to
a not altogether unpleasant jingle of cymbals and
pulse of the big drum. Towards eleven the National
Anthem denotes that the Society prepares to attend
Church, where at their request, following tradition,
they hear the Rector read service and give them a
short address — I have heard several of these — plain,

168 IDLEHURST :

direct advice as to mutual help, the risks of thrift,
and the like, with perhaps one fine thought or touch
of pathetic earnestness towards the close. The grave
responsibility of properly carrying out this part of
the Feet prevents, I believe, most of the Brothers
from listening to a word. And year by year the
Rector commends to them the virtue Sobriety ; now
perhaps, after knowledge of many Feasts of Reason,
rather hopelessly.

A little before one o'clock I presented myself at
the Greyhound, and found some half-dozen fellow-
subscribers waiting about the steps till the dinner,
half an hour late in right Arnington style, should be
put on. There was the Rector, of course, talking to
Dr. Culpeper, who is medical officer to the Court ;
Chatfield, a young farmer ; Mr. Laban Peskett, the
proprietor of " the Shop ; " and Gervase French.
The Major rode up presently, and dismounted to the
admiration of the street. His hack, his buttonhole
rose, his strident hail of greeting and bluff air, we all
know and respect. As he entered the portico, he
dislodged from the shadow of the doorway a figure
I had not noticed before — a small, slight man in a
shabby check suit and white wideawake, brown-faced,
grey-moustached, melancholy, and by no means so
distinguished as the Major. General Aske seems to

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 169

have left his distinction behind with his cavalry
regiment in Afghanistan ; it was once great. Now
a colourless, bald little gentleman, he starves in a
cottage near the Crossways, is very regular at Church
on Sunday mornings, and attempts small parochial
employments. As he stands by the red-mottled
pillar of painted granite, one can see beneath the
woful ragged shirt-cuff the end of a long purple scar
on the wrist, which he habitually tries to hide. The
Major is sufficiently distinguished without such a
decoration.

At length we hear the band coming down Mill
Lane, and see the banners debouch into the High
Street, above a column of black-coated, billycock-
hatted men, solemnly marching in bright blue scarves
and tinsel regalia. On all sides streams the whole
feminine village, mothers and maids, with a score of
perambulators, and the school-children careering in
front. Halt is called before the Greyhound, and in a
few minutes the long assembly-room behind the inn
is full of perspiring brethren, scrambling into their
places at the tables, with thunder of bootsoles and a
Babel of that sad Cockney-Wealden mixture which is
now our main dialect. The subscriber guests take
their seats at a high table across the top of the room,
supporting the Rector in the Chair. The room is

1 70 IDLEHURST I

well-proportioned and airy, built a century ago for
very polite assemblies of the County, now sunk to
these uses of the Loyal Saxons, concerts of the Arn-
ington Choral Society, and party oratory at election
times. The tall windows are open and we look out
•over the inn garden, pleasant greenery and turf under
a quick-dropping rain ; here a clump of orange lilies,
here an uncared-for hollyhock.

Meanwhile, the tables are set with steaming joints,
accompanied with long rolls of Sussex pudding ; the
Rector smites the board with his carver, says Grace,
and we fall on, in absolute silence. The Court eats
hugely, and does fearsome things with its knife. The
host's two exuberant daughters, in colossal blond
fringes, dirty collars, and white waistcoats, journey
round the tables with beer jugs; they have a mis-
chievous knack of filling up any half-empty glass on
the table, so that a man loses reckoning of his capacity,
and anticipates the due season. Gradually the
tongues loosen, until the room rings with loud talk
and rude laughter. At the high table we discuss
the promising wheat, the coming price of hay ; or
touch on politics of that bland kind which obtains
where, as it is in the Weald, all householders are
so universally Conservative that there is scarcely a
check upon expressing opinions in company.

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. I/ 1

After four helps or so of fat, underdone meat, we
come to currant tarts and jellies, the beer jugs still
irrigating the Court. With the cheese and a fresh
relay of beer comes a pause, and we can conveniently
observe the Court as it sits before us, now fairly loose
from any severer reserve. Some sixty or seventy in
number, the men are mostly well-to-do, the majority
aged something between thirty and forty. There are
several lads, and a few grey old fellows. Among them
all there is hardly a single farm-labourer ; they are
chiefly from the village street and its suburbs,
gardeners, grooms, the brewery hands, the shoe-
maker's men, a one-eyed gamekeeper, a miller's
loader, Jenner the higgler, and the contingent from
Mr. Blaber's yard, builders' labourers, plasterers, and
carpenters. In the main the faces, in long perspective
of profiles, are hopelessly heavy and animal in ex-
pression ; the aggregate of thick noses, elephantine
ears, and shapeless mouths is depressing. The
Rector's serene brows and seeing eyes, Gervase
French's square bronzed face and straight nose, seem
to belong to another race. There are exceptions to
the general deformity ; one or two ruddy and curly-
haired, a black-eyed gipsyish fellow ; but these only
serve to mark the common character.

The rain is over, and the garden looks very cool and

172 IDLEHURST:

fresh under the grey light, as the long room begins to
warm and thicken. The Rector begins the toast-list :
we drink " The Queen " somewhat perfunctorily. We
are not communist in Arnington, but we really do not
trouble our heads very much with affairs beyond a
six or seven mile radius from the Greyhound. Then
follows the "Bishop, the clergy, and ministers of all
denominations," given floridly by the Major, and drunk
without enthusiasm. We are somewhat apathetic
about the Church, and very decidedly so about the
Chapel. The Rector replies, short and dry, with half
a dozen ironic hints for those who can see them. The
Band is called upon for musical honours, and their
repertory being limited, treats us to an encore of
"God Save the Queen." We drink "The Army, the
Navy, and the Reserve Forces ; " the Major responds,
after a hurried and alarmed refusal from the General —
" Never did such a thing in my life ! " We drink to
the Order, the Court, and the Doctor; the first of
these being proposed by Brother Gander, a carpenter,
short and grey with prominent eyes, a fairly fluent
speaker, and therefore held among his brethren a
leader of men. On this occasion, I regret to say,
Brother Gander is a little incoherent, and drifts away
hazily into larger reviews, only to be brought up by
several calls of " no politics " from the back of the

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 173

room. He stares about him in an injured manner ;
but magnanimously passes over the interruption,
thanks the Chairman for proposing his health, and
sits down a little suddenly.

When Dr. Culpeper gets up to thank the Court for
drinking to him, there is no mistaking the meaning
of the applause. The power possible to a country
doctor is very great indeed. He has advantages
above the ablest and most laborious parson ; he
never needs to seek for his flock ; the sad confessional
behind the wire blind of the surgery, the grim con-
creteness of the bandage and the knife have a grasp
on the poor which no spiritual implements possess.
When a practitioner is sympathetic, firm, endlessly
painstaking, and plain-spoken, as Dr. Culpeper is
with his poor patients, he has the hearts of the
villagers as no one else has. To-day he speaks very
bluntly to the Court; tells them to be honest and
keep off their sick pay as far as possible, to be clean
and sober at all times — " that'll ruin me in a week,
and a good many other doctors as well ; but I won't
complain if you do ; " most of all, to keep sober to-day ;
and sits down amid loud " Ear-rears " and " For he's
a jolly good Fellow."

We are not more than halfway through the toasts
yet, and at the high table we raise our half-glasses of

IDLEHURST :

Medoc a trifle mechanically at each new call. The
health of the Secretary is proposed by Brother
Newnham in terms resembling the following, which
may be taken as typical of Saxon oratory: "Mr.
Cheerman, gin'lmen, and brothers ! I've got to pro-
pose our worthy Secketary, Brother Backshall." (Ear-
rear ) " Well ! You all knows as I ain't much of a
spokesman ; but I've been a member of this Court
now for five an' twenty years, an' I 'ope as how I
alias shall be." (Ear-rear, thumping of glasses on
the table, and a voice " Good old Joe ! " followed by
roars of laughter.) " What I say is, as how Brother
Backshall is the right man for the place." (Cheers and
rising conversation, a decidedly drunk Brother hold-
ing forth in a sleepy drone to nobody in particular.)
" Look 'ere ! If Brother Boorne wants to open 'is
mouth, there's plenty o' room outside ! " (Roars of
laughter.) " What I say is, give me a Man ! " (A
sudden silence, produced by this remarkable senti-
ment. Several members at the bottom of the room
file out noisily, after a disagreement with the land-
lord about beer.) " Well, Brothers all, and worthy
Cheerman, I think that's about all I've got to say;
and here's to our worthy Secketary ! "

In replying, the Secretary produces his balance-
sheet, and reads a longish statement of the Society's

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 1/5

moneys. It appears that they have about £1500
invested with a neighbouring Sanitary Authority ;
that the Court is quite solvent ; that the sick pay
has been rather high ; and that Brother Blaber's and
Brother Pink's funerals respectively cost £17 and
£14 — which strikes one as handsome, to say the
least. There is every sign that the funds are man-
aged in an honest and businesslike way ; and the real
value of the association, which has been a little
obscured during the feast, becomes apparent.

The long afternoon drags on. The sun has come
out, and shines on the swaying flowers in the garden,
where the bandsmen recline beside their nectar.
We still have to drink to the Trade, the Visitors,
Kindred Societies, the Press, and the Chair. A
sleepy atmosphere grows upon us, and presently
the Rector, feeling the pulse of things, clubs the
outstanding healths together, and dismisses us to
the outer air. We all clatter out, a little aggrieved
at the curtailment of the regular programme, and I
hear a stout brewer beside me say to his mate :
" Rector's alias one for cuttin' it short, ain't he ? "

In the street we separate, the Brethren to the
Mill Meadow, joined by their womankind.

" What are they goin' to do now ? " asks the Major.

" Run races, jump in sacks, and so on," the Rector

IDLEHURST:

answers ; " the men for bottles of whisky, the women
for pairs of stockings and packets of tea, given by
the Trade."

" Wonderful energy, Sir," says the General —
"wonderful!"

I turn with the Rector into his garden, a silent
paradise after the stuffy ineptitudes of the Greyhound
room. "All a puzzle, like most other things," says
the Rector — "such a mixture of good management
and horrid folly ; so much sense and so much that is
utterly beastly ! If one only knew what to take
hold of out of it all ! "

The band strikes up, far away in the Mill Meadow,
and we hear strident laughter and shouts. "Athletics,"
says the Rector ; " then dancing. It is just five o'clock,
and about eleven they will be waking the street with
whoops and yells and ends of songs. Ay me ! "

Just then Alice came in sight, with a white rabbit
tucked under one arm. She gave me rather a con-
strained welcome, as Barney was restive and had to
be securely embraced.

" Uncle Phil said he would rather stay and eat
the gooseberries than go to the Saxons. But he
had to go, so I chose the best tree, to be ready when
he came back. Come on, Uncle Phil. It's over
there, by the potting-shed, little red ones. But

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 177

there are yellow and green ones that I'm not sure
aren't perhaps better, in some ways, you know."

" We'll try," says Uncle Phil.

So we went and ate Warringtons and Broom Girls
and Roaring Lions under the apple trees, whilst the
band blared in the distance, and faint halloos came
to us from the festal scene, and Alice talked to us
and Barney, better music than many bands, and
sweeter sense than most speeches ; until Time, in a
cap and apron, summoned Miss Alice to please come
in directly at once, and left us to debate, in the course
of many turns round the garden, the sad labours and
still sadder pleasures of John Botting, and whether
any one but himself could mend them, if any one
would.

22nd. — The slacker farmers are still haymaking,
and a week ago harvest began upon the forwarder
lands. Among the sheep-pastures and the waste ill-
fenced uplands of thin " seeds," the pheasant-coverts
and the cabbage-widths, there is still to be found a
fair proportion of cornfields, waving crests and ridges
of wheat and barley, yellowing or in the full dusty
reddish bloom of ripeness, and stubble-slopes set
with long perspectives of white oat-shocks; though
we all say that it is a mere survival of other years, a
make-believe of agriculture. The Atlantic liner, the

N

1/8 IDLEHURST:

grain-elevator, the goods-siding paraphrase for us the
appointed weeks of harvest.

In harvest weather I turn my walks often through
the cornfields ; the waving ears, the wealthy air of
a field in shock, the crisp dry rustle of the straw
which even in these dark days seems akin to the
crackle of a new Bank-note, the work in the field
(not infrequently in small or lodged pieces with
the immemorial sickle ; not often hereabouts with
that unconscionable self-binder) — all these please
me as something passing away which I have lived
to see.

Over towards Tyefold more corn is grown than
about Arnington ; you can find five or six fields of it
together. Yesterday, as I sat behind the fir-clump
and looked over the northern hillside. I could tell but
two fields showing the ochreous yellow of the ripe
ears, amongst the grey-green pastures in all the
hundred chessboard squares of the ridge and its dark-
green copses — the ridge which within no long memory
was cornland from foot to crest. Unless the reaction
come soon, and we recoil into an Arcady of reduced
circumstances, there will be no corn, no harvest here.
The loss will be effectual in several ways ; we shall
have to adapt a deal of poetry and apologue, from the
Book of Ruth to the Harvest Festival hymns; we shall

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 179

have to give up Time the Reaper — unless we set him
to drive a self-binder on the plains of Dakotah. The
hitch, already very real, between the classics and the
modern understanding, will be widened. The whole
loss will be considerable ; for all the old associations
of seed-time and harvest are moralist and monitory in
a happy way of their own ; and these are qualities
not least necessary in times of " the devil's own team,"
grain futures, and the decay of the British farmer.
As I half-dozed in the shadow of the firs, watching
the barley-ears across the boundary lane shimmering
in the still heat, and hearing the click-click-click of
the machine as it turned a corner, and the whir of the
pinions as it came down the slope, I dreamed of
the years to be, when my plan of museum-counties
shall have been discovered and enforced, with Govern-
mental reproductions of the old agricultural labour,
historically correct in costume and accessories, for
the benefit of those happy souls whom Continua-
tion Schools shall lead to Art or Song ; to give the
Board Scholar some marrow to the dry bones of his
L' Allegro or his Bucolics.

As I mused thus, old Tomsett came down the lane
with beer for the men at the reaper, and stopped to
talk a spell. He agreed that the wheat was looking
middlin' good. But O dear ! it wasn't worth talking

180 IDLEHURST :

about now ! " They 'spec's the land to grow it all of
itself like— never clean it proper nor naun. When I
was a boy they'd be movin' a field a week at a time,
cleanin' and burnin' an' breakin' it up. An' you
never see them turnrice ploughs now— that was
ploughin' ; now they just tetches the top with two
'orses. And these .'ere machines — well, you look at
it ! When I was a boy, the farmers they was farmers
then — why, there'd be twenty times as much wheat
growed in the perrish as there is now. The farmers
they alias corned to Church o' Sunday in white frocks,
and tall hats, and leggin's ; and after Church they'd all
talk in the churchyard, and show their corn an' that ;
and afterwards they'd have a good booze at the Grey-
hound. Sims to me as how the farmin' begun to go
out just when the machines and all that lot come in ;
and look at it now ! Four acres o' wheat and seven
o' oats all they got on the Tanyard, that used to be
the best in all Arn'ton."

He sat himself down in the hedge bottom over
against me, in the wonted rheumatic attitude, hand
on hip ; and evidently proposed to let the reapers
wait for their bottle.

" How be your taters, Sir?" he asked.

"Middling," I answered; "not much size, but
plenty to a root, and no blight yet."

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. l8l

" They've got the blight down in the village," says
Tomsett ; " it's pretty bad on the 'lotments."

" It must have been good times before the blight
came into the country," I suggest.

" Ah, it was that ! Why, they'd grow anyhow !
I've knowed people get a crop from plantin' the
parin's with an eye or two in 'em. I rec'lect the
first time I ever seed the blight, too ; up at Racket
Gate on the Forest, it was ; there was a man had a
nice lot there, called Freeman Sayers — cousin he was
to ol* Mis' Sayers as used to keep the Crocodile — and
I was goin' by his place one day, jus' about as it
might be now, end o' July ; an' I says to him, I says,
' Your taters be won'erful early ripe, Mas' Sayers '
('cause the halm was all died down like). *I don't
know what's come to 'em,' he says — and that was
the first time I seed the blight. It was the year the
railway was opened, and people said as how it was
the smoke of the engines blighted the halm. I
can't say how that was ; but there's never been no
taters the same since then. Everythin' keeps on
gettin' worse, as you may say. Well, I must be
gettin' on ! "

So with much trouble he got on to his feet, saluted
reverentially with that childlike deference which
always produces an uneasy compunction in me, and

1 82 IDLEHURST :

balanced between his stick and the beer bottle,
crawled slowly down the lane.

I went back to the garden across a grass-plot
where the poultry coops are generally set. Here I
found Lucy Sayers in trouble at the loss of two more
chicks of a dwindling family — trodden flat by the
mother-hen, who had broken several of the eggs in
sitting, and seemed likely to make an end of the six
that were hatched.

" The hens don't seem to have no sense," says
Lucy, holding up a dismal little corpse by the leg ;
" people might expect they wouldn't kill their own
chicks. And what with over-eating themselves, and
getting wet through, and getting over the fence, and
never the sense to get back again — it's a wonder
there's any eggs at all, let alone pullets."

Lucy is right, though her strenuous mind puts the
ideal higher than most. She racks some two thousand
seven hundred eggs a year from a score of birds, at
a saving of about one hundred and fifty per cent, on
the village shop prices. But the brainless habits of
the poultry yard are no doubt a heavy loss to the
whole account.

In the garden I noticed that the yellow fungus had
spread widely on the hollyhocks, some of the clumps
being almost leafless at the base, and the orange

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 183

speckle defiling what remained. These Mallows had
been seedlings, raised in all the ways of healthiness,
but the puccinia had cut them down. I think that
plagues such as this, the potato blight that came with
the railway, the feebleness and helplessness of plants
—sunflower and hollyhock and delphinium, that must
be made fast with stake and tar-cord, daffodils that
cannot stand on their own legs, but lay their heads
in the April mire — these, and the imbecility of Lucy's
Minorcas, are a sort of retribution upon over-civilisa-
tion. We cross-breed and hybridise ; we strain after
size and weight, contemning the wholesome mean ;
and are punished accordingly in our works. The
mischief made by the professional florist among all
the blooms he has deigned to " improve ; " by the
professional fancier in every kind of domestic animal,
is a serious loss to the country. We have domesticated
half the natural quick sense out of the animal world
we use, and half the sound fibre out of the vegetable.
We might perhaps in time learn to refrain the grasp-
ing hand, leave some honey in the comb, some glean-
ings for wild nature put to tasks, and ultimately gain
the more ; but we should first have to unlearn full
half of our civilisation of man.

In the afternoon there was a symposium under the
yew hedge. Margaret Fletcher and Helen Cottingham

1 84 IDLEHURST:

came with Mrs. Lydia to paint in the garden ; and
when I came home from a visit to the village, I
found the girls hard at work among the roses, and
the duenna just assuming command of the tea-table.
Margaret, with a last frown at her work, slammed
her colour-box together, and came towards us ; Helen,
head aslant and brush in mouth, stayed to work
out the happy moment on a study perhaps as suc-
cessful as a young lady's is ever likely to be. The
garden was at the height of its summer pomp, hiding
its bounds with walls of peas and pyramids of con-
volvulus, rose trellises, towers of hollyhock and banks
of phlox ; and by such restriction of view giving scope
for all manner of magic vistas and imaginary dis-
tances, a condition that has a parallel, perhaps, in
some states of the soul. Helen had got into her
canvas something of the glow, glitter, and stir of a
world of flowers, beneath a square of blue sky as
dark as a July afternoon can show.

At tea she told us how she had been to see old
Mrs. Heasman, as she wanted to make a study of
her thousand wrinkles and tremendous nose. After
sufficient explanations, as Helen judged, she had
said to the old lady, " Then you are quite sure you
don't mind coming and giving me a sitting ? " and
had received the rather mysterious reply, " Well,

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 185

Miss, I won't promise as I'll come myself; but if I
can't, I'll be sure to send. You can have as many
as you like, and welcome to 'em, I'm sure."

This was a little bewildering, and suggested the
black art, in keeping with Mrs. Heasman's witch-
face, the black tom-cat on the hearthrug, and an
indubitable broomstick behind the door. Next
morning appeared the witch's familiar in the form
of little Jimmy Batchelor, carrying a basket of eggs :
"the settin' of the Plymouth Rocks as you asked
for, Miss ; an' Granma says as how she'll be willin'
to change any as don't hetch."

The moral of this is that we should use the
vernacular in dealing with the cottagers. I have
seen dire havoc wrought in the garden by my
failing to think out the relative values of " edges "
and "hedges," in an order for retrenchment given
to Bish ; and I shall never forget the sardonic
twisting of one corner of his mouth that does
duty for a smile when, confusing the inter-relation
of the aspirate and its negative, I once told him
to furnish some pea-rows with twigs at the bottom,
so that they could get hold quickly. With a
fine sarcasm, he remarked that most people found
their peas get hold quick enough of theirselves, he
reckoned.

1 86 IDLEHURST :

Proper names have, of course, their own values ;
one soon learns to resolve Strawk and Striggs into
their elements of Mr. Awcock and Mr. Higgs. There
are stories of one Pocock who denied his identity
when addressed by the literary form of his cognomen,
but answered to the name of Pawk. The older
pronunciation of place-names is going down before
the polish of the schools; Ahson and Heffle and
Linvul now get their full value of Alciston and
Heathfield and Lindfield from our half-Cockney
race : the sonorous long final -ly and -lye, of so many
names, West Hoathly, Arn'ly, Chid'n'ly, are clipped
to a mincing equality with Bickley or Brockley, or
any other undistinctive appellation. A few ancients
of the more obstinate temper retain the old forms,
and say " hon-lye " for " only ; " use the plural fre-
quently for the singular (always singing " Rocks of
Ages " in Church) ; and sometimes, but rarely, give
the old Sussex d for th. But all that remains is little
enough ; and in another generation the last of our
Dorisms will have fallen before the all-absorbing
Attic of the Old Kent Road.

Here Gervase French came upon us from the field-
gate, and took his teacup from Mrs. Lydia. He
had come, it appeared, for the purpose of criticising
the afternoon's work on the Whatman-block and

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. l8/

the canvas-board ; and Mrs. Lydia and myself were
very soon left alone at the tea-table.

We see the three heads in colloquy among the
rose-beds; and once or twice I find my companion
smiling a little in a reflective way, busy, I think,
with forecasts of Romance. Whatsoever the vision,
it was broken in upon by Mrs. Latimer from Black-
hatch, a short dark woman of five and forty, moving
scented and rustling under a mound of black lace
and beads, viewing the world at short range through
none too kindly lorgnette. She has been my neigh-
bour for six months, planted for inscrutable reasons
in a bald new place on a lonely hill ; her personality
being, I should say, one of the differentiae of Earl's
Court. I find that self-denial of her pattern is not
uncommon among wealthy Londoners ; a country
house is a mortification that seems to be attached
to incomes of a certain figure.

This afternoon Mrs. Latimer has been doing a
round of calls in her carriage. I take her through
the garden, with a mild apology to the owner of
three hundred feet of glass. She is delighted with
the humble scene. " Such a charming, old-fashioned
place ! Now, of course, at Blackhatch we had to
make all the garden out of fields. It is beginning
to grow up, though," she says ; " but will take some

188 IDLEHURST:

time." I know Blackhatch well, where a flamboyant
mansion, all red gables and chimneys, crowns the
hill, a sign to half the county ; round it climb the
sweeps of bare gravel-drive amid groves of eighteen-
inch laurustinus and arbor-vitse. " Such a delightful
old place ! " repeats my visitor, her glass aimed
momentarily at Helen and Gervase seen in a vista
of hollyhocks — as though it had grown on thus since
George the First, with never a modern backache nor
heartache in the process.

" Now we really beat you in the view" she goes on,
with a glance over the village and the Downs. " The
view from my own room looks over the stables ; but
from the drawing-room, my husband says it only
wants a few more really good houses on the best
sites, to be really perfect. And then, we see the rail-
way ! As I sit in the breakfast-room, I can look right
up the line, and it really looks as if the train was
coming in at the window. So sweet ! Now, aren't
you often very dull here, with nothing going on ? "

I murmur something about internal resources ; and
Mrs. Latimer flits to the Primrose League, a society
whose operations in these regions seem confined to
the giving of Penny Readings sandwiching a small
political address, and to that mild touting at election
times which the Acts allow. I counter with the

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 189

remark (which has served before this) that I am by
temperament too conservative for these innovations
of party strife. Then Mrs. Lydia delivers me from
the snare by coining upon us at a corner and carrying
off the huntress into the safe and happy common
ground of the nursery. I follow the pair, conscious of
Jack's croup and Mimi's singing-lessons, till we reach
the rose-quarter, and find the girls, driven from their
work by the lengthening shadows, scraping palette
and putting up traps, while Gervase charges himself
with the easel and umbrella and a posy of my finest
Teas, which were not to be denied to the desires of
Miss Helen, a lady, I think, not so constituted as to
be denied in many matters.

When all the company were gone, I took a turn
back to the garden ; Zero, relieved from social con-
vention, in his wonted place at heel. While the
evening mist began to rise, a milk-white lake on the
meadows beyond the garden-wall, I thought of Mrs.
Latimer's question about loneliness ; whether there
are not cases when the accident of company does not
touch in the least the isolation of the subject ; when
nothing less than the proper dimidium sui avails to
fill a treasured solitude.

2$t/i. — Yesterday the Rector surprised me early in
the afternoon as I was half asleep over a book, my

190 IDLEHURST :

only company the young robins and thrushes which
haunt the lawn at this season ; Zero away after his
own devices, faintly audible in a rabbit-hole two fields
off. The parochial reason for the visit was soon
despatched. I am a kind of deputy for the Rector
as regards my immediate neighbourhood ; partly for
handiness and partly because he recognises, as I
have found few other clerics to do, those obstacles
to intercourse with the flock which the clerical office
itself raises, and remembers those sides of the average
character which are rarely presented to the parson's
view. He has two or three other charges d'affaires in
different parts of the parish. Dr. Culpeper is his
coadjutor in directions I can only guess at ; of late he
has enlisted General Askc under his command ; and
it was from a conference with him at the Crossways
that he had come on to me at Idlehurst. The General
is one of those small, grizzled army men that seem to
abound in country places ; for the most part poor,
extremely quiet and reserved, high Tory and low
Church ; after a year's acquaintance you learn that
they led an absurd charge to glory under Nicholson,
or saved the guns at Maiwand. General Aske is a
good specimen of the breed ; pays his slender bills
weekly with great regularity, wears his old clothes
and observes old fashions without much concern for

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 191

public opinion, and looks somewhat grimly on the
amazing bad discipline and talking in the ranks
which goes on in social and political affairs. I once
dined with him at Major Buck's house : a rather well-
known political condottiere was of the company and,
perhaps to c/ioquer the assembled squirearchy, handled
the Crown and Constitution rather lightly. " Sir,"
says the General, " in Afghanistan I have had to have
men shot for no more disloyalty than that ! " and we
returned prudently to the birds and the District
Council.

He has been with us long enough now for the story

of the long scar on his sword-hand and the bare place

on his temple to have reached nearly every one in the

parish, and to gain him a peculiar respect. Bodily

prowess is still a power with our proletariat, spite of

so much compulsory development of their brains.

The Rector declares that the mile which he ran against

Oxford served him to better purpose in his first

curacy than his Tripos. When we meet our little

General in his worn grey t\\eed, sauntering in the

lanes and switching the nettles with imaginary true

edge of his rattan, we all feel, whether articulately or

not, what we owe him ; we can connect more or less

clearly the scythes of this and forty other peaceful

harvests with the sweep of his sabres under a fiercer

I Q2 IDLEHURST :

sun. At times he likes to talk of the old days ; lets
his wife fetch down his medals, and tells us how he
accounted for five native troopers in one charge at
Sialkot, And from those ringing days to the Cross-
ways cottage, the yesterday's newspaper, the potato-
patch, the campaign as aide to the Rector against old
Heasman's tippling and the incurable mendicancy of
Widda Blackman ! If ever he asked

" Otium divos —
Otium bello "—

in Mutiny times or in the Khyber, perhaps he finds at
some hours the answer all too fully given.

I made my usual report to the Rector on old
Tomsett ; little to tell of his last summer passing in
complete content with the occasional shilling for odd
jobs and the assured tea and tobacco. The latter, I
regret to say, generally takes the form of plug. A
few days ago I found him picking strawberries for
Lucy Sayers' preserving-pan ; and as it was a hot
day, I told him to help himself to a few now and
then. With a placid grin he indicated the bulge in
his mahogany cheek, and explained the solace which
made him superior to such gauds as Presidents or
Ruskins. And I could not quote ne quidnimis to him.

The Rector is a bachelor at present, Mrs. Lydia

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. IQ3

and Alice paying visits at Lewes ; so I persuaded
him to dine with me, and to stay a most unaccustomed
couple of hours afterwards. We sat on the lawn in
the gathering dusk, scents of honeysuckle on the
house and night-blowing stock in the borders coming
and going about us on the almost motionless air ;
beyond the shadowy space of the garden and the
meadow elms, twinkled two or three lights down in
the village. Zero discovered us in our deck-chairs,
and came to lay his nose on my knee. " One should
always have a dog," says the Rector ; " it illustrates
our status so well, from the other end. But why
don't the fanciers breed dogs that will live to sixty or
so, and last a lifetime ? I have given up dogs myself
since Agrippa and Bito died. I suppose, with dis-
temper and accidents, one might lose seven or eight
terriers from first to last. One has to fancy all the
little pack hunting rabbits together through the
asphodel. Don't we, Zero ? "

As the light fades, the fir-clump above us deepens
in a sort of bloomy green darkness against the colour-
less air which veils all but one or two large stars.
The Rector notices the solemnity of it, saying that
he constantly sees in our landscape an intention or
expression, a soul, the visible Pan, looking out of
the whole. I ask if he has ever found traces among

O

194 IDLEHURST :

his people of any pleasure derived purely from the
landscape ? He doubts ; but thinks there is more of
what we call "poetry" to be met with in the common
life than we generally imagine. Certain people see
it, he thinks, as some see humour.

"I met Gascoyne of Ashcombe at the Deanery
Chapter on Tuesday," he says; "he is poetical, and the
poetry comes to him. He was telling me of a girl in
his parish, a servant at one of the farms, who was * in
trouble ' — the man, a labourer on the next farm, had
gone away from the place. That very wild night this
Spring when it was raining in sheets and blowing a
bitter gale, she let herself out of the house, and walked
for hours all over the farm with the child in her arms.
She came back about daybreak ; the child was quite
dead and cold. She said afterwards that she had
heard him whistle, as he used to do as a signal when
he came to the farm ; and she had gone over every
lane and field where they used to walk together,
always hearing the whistle in front of her. There's
dramatic matter in that. Gascoyne had another
story from one of his old people ; but it doesn't prove
anything, because it goes back before the railways.
A farmer's son, Mark Pierce, at one of the Down
farms behind Firle Beacon, was courting a girl, Mary
Cheesman, who lived at another farm a couple of

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 195

miles away. A handsome, bullying, travelled stranger,
a sailor or smuggler, who called himself Brewster,
came on the scene and very soon carried off pretty
Mary from her swain. Mark Pierce seems to have
been a youth of solid parts ; did nothing rashly, but
kept his eyes open and waited. When he found that
the interloper meant to take the girl to Brighton, he
laid his plans in an original way. There was a path
across the Downs to Mary's home ; at one point a
sheep-track made a short cut across a bend of the
path ; this sheep-track led close to the edge of a very
deep chalkpit ; on the land side there were remains
of an old flint wall, so that there was only about
eighteen inches of practicable path between that and
the almost vertical side of the pit. Pierce must have
been very much in earnest, as his plan was to make
an end of himself and his rival together. He knew
that the sailor used the narrow path on his journeys to
the farm, and knew when he would cross it, or perhaps
waited indefinitely for him. At last one night the two
met in the middle of the ledge, and clutched one
another. Pierce explained that they were both going
to the bottom. A struggle was, of course, the certain
way of sending them over ; and as they gripped each
other's collars or elbows, it was clearly impossible for
one to stay behind, Brewster probably had not the

196 IDLEHURST :

least intention of dying yet for a girl the more or less,
and begged for his life, swearing that he would go
down to Newhaven at once, and go to sea in the first
ship he could find. No doubt Pierce began to find
life somewhat sweeter than he thought ; so he backed
Brewster very carefully down the ledge, both hold-
ing tight, I imagine, till they reached the end of the
wall, and got out on to the open down. I suppose
Brewster reflected that so very serious a rival would
be a recurring danger if he stayed within reach ;
at any rate, he seems to have kept his word and left
the neighbourhood. Gascoyne believed that Mary
Cheesman married Mark in the end ; he is going to
look them up in the Selmer registers when he next
goes that way."

" But as to poetry," says the Rector, " how much
turns on conditions ! My man Awcock told me this
April that Spring had begun when you could set your
foot on three daisies at once. It's a poetical touch,
but what a difference it would make, even in the
almanac, whether the foot were in Awcock's hobnails
or in Alice's new party-shoe with the beads on it ! "

We sat silent for some time after these histories,
in a lulling silence of that positive kind which is one
of the best country luxuries — not the mere vacuum
of sound, but a most recreative element. From

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY.

where I sat I could see the Rector's profile against
the dark of the firs, and could see something of the
troubled thought which I knew very well had brought
him here to-night, that gloom which waits upon
strong souls, and rebukes our easy optimisms.

There is no time for confidences like a dark, still
summer night — not even the wintry small hours when
the last flicker has died from the logs, and the rain
beats at the window. But the Rector very rarely
indeed opens the penetralia. To-night I merely guess
something of causes in his work — some soul in his
care snapped from the branch, as I may find a rose-
shoot broken after a windy night ; or the latter rain
denied.

" After all," he was saying, " one must leave people
their posse damnari, as the sarcastic Schoolman called
it. By the way, how little we observe the sarcasm
of the Gospels! — the 'just persons that need no
repentance/ and ' the poor have the Gospel preached
unto them,' and the rest. Milk diet, all our lives !
and not very good of its kind. We had a paper on
Evolution at our Deanery Meeting: it isn't the
change in opinions which interests me, but the quick-
ness of the change. You know I always was an
Involutionist. The Chapter think worse of me than
their fathers did of the Essays and Reviewers. I

198 IDLEHURST :

told Miss Gascoyne at the lunch, that I thought
the present state of the Science and Faith question
something like what a debate would be on the sig-
nificance of Salisbury spire between an average brick-
layer and an average Minor Canon. Miss Gascoyne
thinks I ought to be presented for heresy."

This is unwonted discursiveness of the Rector's ;
and the night stillness soon returns. It grows late ;
all the village windows but one are dark. I see the
Rector down to the meadow gate, past the glimmer-
ing flowers of the garden fast asleep ; and coming
back to the silent house, I see it as it may look when
my tenancy is over ; and once more I make an old
comparison between the results of his economy and
mine.

August ist. — Often, as to-day, the Autumn seems,
to a watchful mind, to come in high summer — a sort
of memento mori to the full year. Recent showers
have cooled and moistened the land, and the early
mornings are drenched in dew ; spiders' webs are
thick about hedge-sides ; there is a grey haze across
the landscape which takes the colour out of the
sheaves ranked along the hill-side. There is no chorus
of the birds ; only the whispering calls of a family
of nuthatches, with the tap-tap of one of them at

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 199

work, and the incessant mournful little virelai of the
robins, come through the still air. The robins are
everywhere, perching suddenly with coquettish friend-
liness close beside me, fluttering from under my feet
in the walks. This morning I was out early, and
after an hour busy with next year's cabbages and
lettuces, the prospective labour that refines the daily
round of gardening, I heard the church clock chime
half-past seven, and gave the half-hour before break-
fast-time up to idleness. The sun was just beginning
to strike warm on the face, and the earthy, grassy
smells of the dew to give way to the honey-scents of
the flowers. I idly admired the pink and purple
contrasts of the season, as characteristic as is the
yellow and white note of Spring. Beside me spikes
of rosy hollyhock overlooked a clump of deep crimson
phlox : a little further were the light pink of the
lavatera and the soft pure scarlet of the Brenchley
gladiolus, whose rolled-up buds shake themselves out
like little red burgees on the signal halliards. These
were the main elements of the symphony ; but half-
seen touches of yellow in a distant sunflower, of
lavender in a Canterbury Bell — unsuspected tones of
variously green leaf and pale sky — went to make the
full concert : for I think we generally do not make
sufficient allowance for the reactions of colour on

2OO IDLEHURST :

colour in the compositions of Nature. The garden
has need of all this opulence and depth of tone, for
in this high summer display there is no touch of
sentiment and imagination, such as the wind-dashed
daffodils of March, or the shining wet leaves of April
possess. To-day foliage is dry and harsh ; curves are
set and stiff in woody fibre ; hopes and fears are
mostly done with ; and until Autumn brings in its
vein of moralities and sense of farewell, we must take
our pleasure in splendour of colour and lusty life —
the body, not the soul of the garden.

Thoughts in this manner, latterly mixed with hint
of crackling rashers borne across the herb-scents,
brought me to eight o'clock ; and I went indoors to
find my nephew Bob, arrived yesterday on a short
visit during the holidays, deeply engaged with an old
cricket-bag I had turned out for his occupation. His
delight in the spiffing batting-gloves and a much-
pegged Cobbett, tempered by the critical faculty
proper to thirteen and a House-Cap, only yielded
to the buttered eggs and marmalade. We have a
busy morning before us, I tell him ; and he certainly
prepares himself against the chances of a late lunch.

For several days past there has been the usual
immigration into the village in view of the August
Fair. Flocks of lambs and yearling sheep, droves of

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 2OI

heifers and horses, have gone by my gate, to be
lodged on any spare grass in the neighbourhood ; and
caravans of every sort have assembled and pitched
on the Green. To-day was Fair Day, and about ten
o'clock Bob and I started to view the sights. As we
neared the village street a various uproar grew on
our ears, bleat of sheep and scurrying yelp of dogs
behind them, lowing of distracted bullocks, and the
amazing human noises that are traditional accom-
paniment to the herding of beasts. Once through
the village, blocked with cattle and endless rows of
farmers' traps on their shafts, dangerous with the
wild career of rough-riders, we find the Green in a
state very unlike the wonted solitude where geese
cackle and small boys play cricket. Under the
dull equal light of a low grey sky its thirteen acres
are dense with men and beasts. A large part of the
upper end is laid out in wattle pens for the lambs
which properly constitute the Fair. Between the
pens run lanes along and across, crowded with all
the sheep interest in Sussex, farmers and dealers of
every degree. Below the pens stand the cattle, small
bullocks and heifers rounded up in rings that con-
stantly stampede and are re-formed with frantic
din ; further still are the horses, tied by the head in
long lines, or galloped with amazing exhibitions of

202 IDLEHURST :

horsemanship up and down the grass. All along the
western edge of the Green runs the Pleasure Fair,
a wide street lined with a hundred vans, with shows
and stalls and gipsy tents, and capacious booths for
beer.

At the edge of the Green we met with Mrs. Lydia,
Margaret Fletcher, Alice and a tribe of her friends.
To them I handed over Bob ; and I saw the youngsters
plunge at the double into that enchanted ground
where lines of cocoanut shies, attended by mellifluous
and urbane gentlemen in picturesque costumes,
masked a dim magnificent background of swings,
roundabouts, and a menagerie with real live lions. I
turned back to the sheep-pens and went the round,
with a look now and then at the fat-backed, clean-
woolled lambs packed between the wattles, but oftener
at the crowd which moves about the lanes or stands
bargaining at the corners. In the pens shepherds
are busy counting the lambs, picking out strays, or
marking the sold lots ; shepherds from all parts of
the county, oldish, worthy-looking men for the most
part, weather-burnt and rusty-bearded, many wearing
the slate-coloured frock, and carrying the ancient
green umbrella with whalebone ribs. The shining
crooks are stuck in the ground at the pen-side, and
under them are chained the dogs, resting, nose on

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 203

paws, after the morning's scrimmaging and endlessly
clever and zealous work. There are a few indeter-
minate mongrels among them, but the chief part are
a distinct and very fine race, big, rough-haired, pepper-
and-salt coloured animals with a white foot or two
and a tangle of hair over their honest eyes. Round
the pens lounge the odd-job men, who live their
lives at such meetings as this — nomads hardly less
animal-looking than the beasts they follow, wild old
fellows with long grey locks ; gigantic, shambling
hulks ; blear-eyed toothless dwarfs — figures of a
Rembrandt etching. Than the breeders and dealers
who lean over the wattles nothing less picturesque
could be found on the Green. There is one old man
in gills and a blue-spotted neckerchief, wearing a low-
crowned silk hat — the old John Bull attire of the fat
years gone by ; but he only serves to set off the ex-
treme ugliness of the current bucolic style. Most of
the men here are big and stout ; they are mainly a
strident, aggressive people, heavy-handed and hard-
faced; their countenances, too commonly, are gross
and vacant, too often shaded by long use of what we
call " tipping it up." There are a few younger men
in the crowd in smart riding-breeches, fancy waist-
coats, and knowing bowlers ; but the majority are
monotonous in tailcoats of greyish hue and ample

204 IDLEHURST :

cut, square-topped felt hats, and leather leggings.
All about the pens business goes on with the cus-
tomary tortuous approaches and leisurely stages of
advance. A hundred lambs change hands at thirty
shillings a head, a score of tegs at forty-two. The
County Bank's representative sits in a brougham on
the fringe of the Green all the morning, and through
the window pass the handfuls of cheques and notes of
a depressed agricultural interest. The farmers com-
miserate one another's losses with uproarious shouts
of laughter ; they adjourn frequently to the booths
which the Crown and the Crocodile, and twenty other
of the neighbouring inns, pitch very profitably on
Fair Day. Once more the reflective observer rumi-
nates upon the mystery of a Ruined Class.

Turning at the upper limit of the sheep-fair, and
looking back over the long ascent, alive with confused
motion and noise — here the admirable stock, here
the gross, hearty men, the apparent signs of abundance
and easy circumstances, — one wonders (forgetting
perhaps for the moment the corn-interest) what the
good years can have had to show more than this ?

I walk round the cattle ground ; beasts are selling
fairly ; and, if the trade in horses is disproportionate
to the noise and energy of the dealers, to the shouts
of " hi — hi — hi ! " and rattling of pink calico flags,

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 205

there is business doing at good prices. The half-
gipsy dealers of our own country and the visitors from
Cork are not doing ill : fifty pounds for a young Irish
horse, much too soft for our up-and-down roads, seems
sufficient. Still, there are worse animals than the
rough-coated mount of the blue-chinned, bullet-headed
"gippo," whose long grey Newmarket flies behind
him, and whose seat is worth seeing. He is a type
of the horse-interest as definitely as the lantern-jawed,
sandy-bearded Saxon is of the race that deals with
the " Ship."

I went back to look for Bob in the Pleasure Fair,
and found him, at the far end of the half-crown I
had commissioned him to spend, shooting at eggshells
poised on a small fountain ; while Alice and the rest
of the party, laden with cocoanuts and jumbles and
fairing toys, respectfully looked on. I was seized
straightway ; and although the small people had been
all round the shows twice, from the Fat Lady to the
Theatre Royal (alternately rendering an abridged
Faust and the Green Bushes), was made to go round
with them again. At ordinary times I should loathe
the tawdry pandemonium, and hold sound opinions
about the duty of local bodies towards the physical
and spiritual nastiness of a Yahoo camp once a year
in our midst ; but through the hold of a small hand,

2O6 IDLEHURST :

and incantation of children's eager babble, one is
conjured back somewhere near, at least, to the magic
country of old, and it becomes a thing possible that
there were years when the gilded cars, the roaring
steam orchestras, the painted terrors of the forest,
were glory and loveliness, a morning's Paradise and
dreams for a week.

When we tore ourselves away, we all went to lunch
at the Rectory ; and most of the afternoon the elders
sat by the garden-door steps, watching by glimpses
and fits the noble game of " I-spy " as played by
Alice and Bob, General Aske's boy Peter, Kitty
Culpeper, and others of their fellowship. As the
shrill tumult flashed about the garden (a careless
wilderness given up to romps like these, and perhaps
the better for it than my serene groves), one per-
ceived through hedge-gaps and orchard vistas that
Alice and Bob — she quick-footed and lithe beyond
the other girls, learned in every burrow and short cut
in the ground ; the boy a head above the rest, bold
to dash through quickset or jump the cabbage rows —
were always together on the heights of chance,
hunter or huntress, captured or derided from the
hard-won "home."

Then all at once they changed the game to
" French and English ; " and for a few moments Alice,

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 2O/

a dishevelled prisoner, was interned beside us under
the Gloire-de-Dijon of the porch. I tell her I am
afraid they never have such good games in my
garden.

" No," says Alice, combing the hair out of her
eyes to watch the game ; " but I think we could. You
see, we know all the hides there are here ; but in
your garden it would take — oh, years to find them
all out. And the gardener dug up all the nut trees
where we used to play at jungles, and he planted a
lot of silly old rhubarb there instead — and what games
can you play in rhubarb ? We did try to do the
jungle, but it was no good."

" I thought the rhubarb was always rather under-
sized," says the Rector to Mrs. Lydia.

" It got trodden down so," Alice explains. " Kitty
and Peter both wanted to be the tiger, and when
they both tried to hide in the same place, they
squashed it. I do wish we hadn't found out all the
hides quite so soon, though."

A desperate charge of Bob's through the enemy
here rescues the captive ; and the two rush away to
restore the fight. The Rector moralises a little on
Alice's text about the hiding-places ; he thinks we
may presently have to regulate exploration and
scientific research, to leave humanity sufficient exercise

208 IDLEHURST :

ground. There are people who are always grubbing
up Enchanted Forests to plant rhubarb upon. Mrs.
Lydia declares that none of my nectarines are so
good as the mere chance of finding a stray Victoria
deep in the leaves, an oversight of the pickers. And
I recall the longing felt in childish walks to be
among the dim blue hills far, far away, the magic
distance that fled before me, and still flies, year by
year, further from one's feet.

At last the light began to fade, and Bob and I
took our road home. I asked him if he didn't think
the girls rather jolly for girls ? Well, yes, some of
them. Alice was rather jolly, I should think ? Yes,
very.

" They want us to ask them all to tea on Thursday,"
I remarked ; " but of course we can't, because we are
going to fish at the mill that day."

" Of course/' says Bob ; without enthusiasm, I
think.

Halfway through supper Bob suggests, " I say,
Uncle, how would it be if we fished first, and had
them up to tea afterwards ? "

I find he is not quite prepared to put off the fish-
ing till next week ; so we arrange to divide the day
between the mill and the garden. When Bob says
good night, he wants to know, in an offhand manner,

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 2OQ

if Alice will be here next summer ? I said, most
likely.

" And the year after that ? " I replied, perhaps ;
but some year soon she would be going out again to
her people in India.

He inquires no further, but with a reminder about
moss for the worms for bait, retires, assuredly to
dream of blue eyes and yellow hair, of a large red
and green float and shiny hooks. Perhaps he finds
the Indian Civil, that vague doom which has over-
shadowed his young horizon, the lever used to per-
suade to superfluously good reports for the half,
to-night grown something of a promise, a light upon
still greater dreams. Whatsoever the visions may
be, I think not a few of us would change with Bob
when he wakes to-morrow and the delightful world
takes shape for him again, like clear-coming images
of a glorious dissolving-view.

loth. — This morning I went over to Tisfield for
some small necessaries which are above the range of
Arnington custom, but may be found in the Tisfield
" Emporium." The day was cloudy, and the northerly
breeze rustled the yellow-green wheat-ears above the
dusty hedges — perfect weather for walking. Of late
the temperature has made exercise a burden ; the
comfortable condition lies within a very small range

P

210 IDLEHURST:

of the mercury. If any modern should follow that
delightful precisian Aquinas, who fixed the universal
age of the saints in glory at thirty-three, and should
apply the thermometer to the empyrean, he might be
conjectured to determine the figure at 65° Fahrenheit.
A little more, a little less, and how self-conscious do
we become !

Halfway on my road, a cart pulled up beside me,
and I was hailed by old Avery, with an offer of a lift
into the town. The springs of the conveyance were
perfunctory things, and space was cramped by a well-
grown calf under a net behind the seat ; but the offer
was not to be declined. I got up at once ; the mare
Polly was persuaded by much jerking of the reins to
start ; and we jogged on towards Tisfield market. I
find that Avery has had trouble lately ; he has lost
two cows through milk fever, and his wife has been
laid up for a fortnight with " the kidney ; " but he
possesses that very real form of piety, as I think it,
which shows itself under misfortune by an enlarged
sense of the humour of things.

" I wasn't able to go to market last week," he tells
me ; " had the landlord's agent down to look round :
come all the way from London, and of course he
couldn't know it was market day ; could he ? A rare
lot of money they loses, doing things that way ! My

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 211

landlord, well, I don't see him more'n once or twice a
year, when they shoots the big wood and the planta-
tions ; mos' generally they has lunch at my place,
but of course you can't do no business then. It's
alias the agent, when you want anything done ; and
they sends down a young chap in new trousers and
brown leather boots, to walk through my yard to look
at the pig-pound that wants new-healin'. Brown ?
Yes, they was brown enough when we come out ! O'
course you can't expec' Mr. Newcome, as made his
money in hay-rated waters, to know anything about
farmin' ; but that agent's young man as comes down
from the office in town, he'll lose 'em a tidy few hun-
dreds a year, I reckon. I says to him, ' Mr. Weeks/
I says, ' it 'ud pay you to get a man to tell you the
difference between a two-shear teg and a Old Gate-
post mangel. I give you my word,' I says, * I'm
doing the land as it ought to be done ; but for ought
you knows I might be skinnin' the farm down to the
gravel.' "

" Of course," I say, " a landowner ought to under-
stand the land ; and then it would pay him to look
after the farms himself."

" I didn't never hear of nobody as wouldn't say
so, that had tried it," is Avery's somewhat Sibylline
response, with a fine Sussex collocation of negatives.

212 IDLEHURST:

" There's another thing they does," he begins
again, as Polly checks at the hill up to Dudman's
Gate, and the reins can mind themselves as she snorts
her way up the long elm-shadowed rise ; " about
lowering rents. They'll hardly ever take anything
off for an old tenant ; but when they've got a farm on
their hands, they'll cut it down for a new tenant as
they don't know much about. Last year there was
Clark, what was over at Framepost, near Rispham
village, and Joe Tester at Camomile Cross, this side
o' Blackhatch in our perrish ; they'd both on 'em been
at their landlords to take something off the rent,
and they wouldn't. So they settled it between them-
selves. The farms was about the same size, and not
much to choose between them ; Joe had got mostly a
bargetty soil, but very good water — and there was a
beautiful bit of garden at Framepost. So they both
gives notice for Michaelmas, and just changes over,
and both the landlords puts the rent down twenty
or twenty-five pounds. That's not what I calls
sense ; not in no fashion."

As we reach the crossways at the top of the hill,
we fall in with other marketers, driving beasts on
foot, or carting pigs and calves. I observe that
our calf attracts notice, and say so to Avery. He
allows that it's a " middlin' good calf ; " he don't hold

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 213

with rubbish. Terrible poor truck you often see at
the market. Meat ? He doesn't call it meat.
"They tell me," he goes on, "that the gentry in
Arn'ton, they grumbles a good bit about their beef-
steaks and that You ask the butchers where all the
old cows go to ! My missus being laid up, we was
short of our butter last week, and I bought some in
the village for ourselves, so's to send away the full
weight. ' Butter ? ' my missus says when she looks
at it ; 'I reckon I'll churn next week, kidney or no
kidney.' There's still plenty of good butter to be
got, if you pay for it. But look at cheese now —
that 'Merican stuff! and ham : we makes a few the
old way, that'll keep nigh on two years, and we
smokes 'em in the chimney where there's nought but
oakwood burnt ; but there's not many cares for them
now, 'cept 'tis you and Muster Lewknor. ' Mild-
cured ' they sells in the shops — stuff as won't keep a
week."

It is not the first time that I and Avery have
indulged a common regret about our food-supply.
With the disappearance of so many of the real
country products, the country loses one of its prin-
cipal charms in the breakfast-table. Eggs are too
often only gathered at uncertain intervals, and a
casual beating up of hedge-bottoms and the odd

214 IDLEHURST :

corners that hens affect brings to table things of all
degrees of suspicion and dread certainty. Shop-jams
are a poor make-believe after the fine aromas, the
gold and ruby syrups, the all but natural fruits of the
right home-made conserves. And the worst of it is,
as Avery says, that a great many people don't see
much difference.

" Half the people in Arn'ton village thinks as how
they've only just learnt what's good to eat, and that
we old 'uns used to live on tater-peelings. When I
was a boy we used to live in a bit of a wood where
there was a brook runnin' by, and a lot of wet
meadas, and sallys growin' about. My father he
was won'erful clever with traps, and he'd a gun — the
keepers didn't say much generally — and most days
we'd have a hare (we didn't make much account of
rabbits, they was so common), or a pheasant as he'd
pick up a day or two after a shoot ; and we'd wild-
duck sometimes ; and I got trout out of the brook
sometimes up to a pound and a half, and eels ; and
we'd plenty of honey, and alias eggs ; and apples most
years round to Easter ; and then the nuts and the
mushrooms. There's plenty of people nowadays as
don't live better than that."

Not bad faring, and all fresh and fine ; and I
fancy that most of the outlying cottages could still

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 21$

furnish their larders almost as well. The trout grow
scarcer ; but they are still to be had, stout pounders,
here and there by the alder roots and the sluice-posts
in the slow yellow brooks, but two yards across, and
too thick to see a foot into.

Just before we gained Tisfield street, we met the
Vicar, a youngish man newly come to the living.
Avery knows Tisfield affairs pretty well, and doesn't
think Mr. Hawkins gets on very particular with the
people. They look back to the late Vicar, a man
whom the new generation called unclerical, but
who was a real countryman in the country, knew
the ways and thoughts of his flock, and was well
versed in several branches of learning ignored by
the rural parson in these times of deepened
spirituality. But it was this man's predecessor, the
Reverend John Scrase, who was Avery's ideal parish
priest ; he was a famous vet., and had a power with
pigs that overcame the customary belief that pig-
maladies are incurable, and that when a pig " fails "
he should be made butcher's meat at once. Avery
cannot see that this gift was any detriment to the
practice of spiritual medicine. He remembers that
when his old master and the sow were both con-
sidered to be in extremis, Parson Scrase was fetched
to both, over the heads of Lunsford the farrier and

2l6 IDLEHURST:

the incumbent of the parish. At the master's desire
the sow was attended to first. Avery helped the
parson to bleed her, and then took his place with the
rest of the household at the death-bed ministrations in
the best bedroom. I judge that the office was said with
a power and spirituality which Avery has never for-
gotten. He is quite certain that his master went away
easier because the Parson told him, " Reuben, put that
sow off your mind. She'll be quite right again in two
days." "And then," says Avery, "he waited a bit, like
as if he was thinking, rubbing the lancet on his coat-
sleeve ; and then he began the prayers. Now him,"
he continues, indicating the present Vicar with a
backward jerk of his head, " what does he know
beyond his Latin and Greek ? Muster Scrase knew
all that, and Hebrew too, I've heard say ; and he
was SL man besides. If a man's got the real thing
in him, it isn't much for him to understand a bit
of farming, or about animals and that. Now most
people would ha' cut that sow acrost the ear with
a knife, and not used the lancet ; but he knew what
she wanted."

I put it to Avery that perhaps the modern in-
cumbent has not so much time for extraneous
labours.

" I dessay they took things easier when I was a

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 2 1/

boy ; you see they'd only have the Sunday service,
and not alias that. When I was at Bessingworth, my
master was churchwarden. There wasn't no regular
parson then — sometimes we'd have one, and some-
times another. I've known my master and the old
perrish-clerk set off on horseback early on a Sunday
morning to find some one to take the prayers. The
one we had mostly came over from Lewes ; he used
to drive in his own trap, and when he got to the toll-
gate that used to stand near the Church, he'd alias
have a row with the gatekeeper, 'cause he wanted to
go through free, being on duty like ; but the keeper
he wouldn't have it, 'cause he wasn't the reg'lar parson
of the place. I rec'lec* one Sunday when the school-
children was a-coming by, they was at it ; and the
parson he off with his coat and threw it in the trap,
and the gatekeeper was ready for a bit of fun, and
they had a pretty tidy fight out there in the middle of
the road. People wasn't near so strict as they be now.
I rec'lec' old Muster Best, at what used to be the
Hall — what they calls Arn'ton Park now. Ah ! there
was alterations when he died ! They turned the deer
out of the park ; one old 'un bolted right through the
village and got into the pond. The old gen'lman kept
a pack of hounds, four or five couple — not safe to go
near the house it wasn't — and a huntsman. After he

2l8 IDLEHURST :

was dead, the heir come and turned Madam out of the
house ; she was niece to Comber the clocksmith in
Tisfield, and she'd been there some time afore the old
lady died. She thought she would ha' had the house
left her, and she wouldn't go ; but they carried her
out in a chair, and put her down, chair and all, in the
road outside the gates. There was goings on then,
and no mistake ! Ridin' all day and drinkin' all night,
and cards, and shootin' at the family portraits with
their pistols, and all manner of wickedness. They
said the old gen'lman was alias sober on Bench-days
for nigh on twenty years ; and he generally come to
Church in his old yella carriage, and the ringers used
to keep on till they see him come in. They was
reg'lar besieged once by the bailiffs ; shut up in the
house for a week, and pullin' up their victuals through
a winda in a basket of a night. We heard the old
gen'lman firin' his guns out of the upstairs' windas to
frighten 'em ; and if he'd hit one on 'em he wouldn't
have cared. After a bit, the heir began to cut the
timber, and in a year or two he sold the whole place ;
and that was the end of that lot. It seems to me
like as if the old fam'lies got wore out, same as chicken
and garden-stuff, if you goes on alias with the same
old stock."

So Avery moralises the fall of the long line of the

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 2Ip

Bests, the poison of whose decay yet works among us.
The Averys,

" Humiles, vulgi pars ultima nostri,"

still thrive in all corners of the county ; and the old
man's sons, whom he left cutting the oats at home
to-day, bid fair to carry on their branch of the tribe
still sound and vigorous.

By this we were come into the market, and I
descended amid the hubbub of men and beasts, the
distraught cattle and huddling sheep, the pigs who
never in direst misfortune quite lose their sense of
humour, and whose most agonising yells seem to
contain a note of the burlesque. I passed the Bank
and the attorney's office, with their knots of clients
hanging about the doors, and addressed myself to
the task of arguing with the young gentlemen of
the Emporium as to what my wishes were. The
swinish chorus from the market-pens shrieked
momently behind me, a jocose undertone becoming
decidedly more perceptible as the new arrivals
settled into their lodgings, and forgot the ash-plants
and tail-pullings of their conductors. Something
might be said, I think, for their rationale. Perhaps
the sense of humour may ultimately prove a
better defence against our more trivial and diurnal

22O IDLEHURST :

misfortunes than the consolations of philosophy ;
better as slipping rather than parrying the blow, and
as leaving the more solid guards for those weightier
assaults which will not fail at their own season to
require all the defence we know.

i8/& — Yesterday I had need to go to the county
town ; so leaving Bob in charge of Lucy and Bish,
with orders to the latter to fetch up the old pony
from the meadow and divert the young gentleman
with him if matters became too adventurous, I walked
the three miles to Tisfield, the congeries of stucco
villas and builders' lots, nursery grounds and brick
yards fenced with corrugated iron and barbed wire,
which has sprung up, magalia quondam, during the
last thirty years round about a dreary wooden pile of
buildings perched high on a red clay embankment —
Tisfield Junction, the railway station for this part of
the world. Waiting for the nine o'clock train, I find
half Arnington on the platform. We are all travellers
now : it is only the old folk who have never been five
miles from home ; even vegetative natures like Bish
have been to Brighton, under strong necessity, three
or four times in a lifetime. There is no doubt that
fixity contributes to peace. I found old Mrs. Roser
not long ago placidly making tea, quite untroubled
by the fact that the French, as she had just heard

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 221

Jenny read in the newspaper, had landed at Gravesend.
I don't know what West African port the old ears had
translated so, but it was all perfectly immaterial to
her. There is loss as well as gain in excursions and
market tickets, and the complete educational system
of the Brighton Front for nineteen-pence.

In the train I found myself in company with Mr.
Biles, insurance agent and dealer in sewing-machines,
a political, social, and (to use the copious affixes
affected by his race) educationalist leader in Arning-
ton. Arnington opinion, in the stratum which Mr.
Biles touches, is not sufficiently in earnest about any-
thing to be led at all coherently just yet ; and Mr.
Biles' demagogy, conducted chiefly by means of
contributions of the adjectival Baboo kind to the
local press, is not, I understand, considered dangerous
by the most Conservative stockbrokers in the neigh-
bourhood. The nucleus of vital Radicalism in our
village lies with a half-dozen of working-men, fair
workmen, soberer than the common, irreligious, good '
family-men, who do a little reading, are civil, and (let
me as an ingrained Tory say it) very superior to the
ordinary labourer of the place. They are actively
ignorant, bitterly prejudiced, stupendously incapable
of clear views or any approach to argument ; but
their opinions are a live force working against the

222 IDLEHURST :

mixed landed and moneyed interest at present
dominant in the county. The attitude of the local
Conservative managers to men of this class appears
to me to be the prius dementat order ; and when the
perdition arrives, it will be none the better for having
Mr. Biles and his kind riding the whirlwind and
directing the storm they did not raise. When our
Parish Council was first elected, the Radical ground-
swell of the place swept over us all. Those were
wild times. The Major's coachman beat his master
by three places. Old Tomsett was nearly elected.
Bish, to his agony and terror, found himself incredibly
nominated. The Doctor got in as the doctor. The
Rector stood out and watched the fray, telling us it
was all make-believe. And Mr. Biles was easily head
of the poll. Then we waited to see how the new
broom, with Biles at the handle as Chairman, supported
by the coachman, the publican, the brewer's-cad, the
schoolmaster, and the two small farmers, would deal
with our destinies. After this interval we are begin-
ning to fancy that nothing particular is going to
happen ; that there are higher powers still left, that
the new Council was only a toy pistol for the Arcadian
Demos to play with. So far, after punctual meetings,
heightened oratorical style of Mr. Biles, a few vulgar
" breezes " (one satisfactorily concluded with fists on

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 223

an adjournment to the lane behind the School House),
the Council has achieved absolutely nothing. The
impression that there is nothing for it to do seems to
be growing. We surmise that this was perhaps in-
tended from the first ; and I think that for some little
time we have been breathing freely again.

At the next station to Tisfield there got into our
compartment three County Councillors going to
Lewes for a Council meeting, well-set-up men in
tweeds and straw hats, with a pleasant country look
about them. Two are retired Army men, the other a
landowner. General Rich, who represents Arnington
with the half-dozen adjacent parishes, a grey-
moustached cavalryman, with a fine earnest face and
masterful eyes, nods to Mr. Biles, who replies with
jerky nervousness. The fame of the demagogue has
not reached the other councillors, who represent the
Seckington and Ashcombe divisions. The land-
owner is lean, grey-whiskered, with something of a
Royal Society look through his pince-nez ; the other
officer is a big handsome man, burned to leather by
Indian sun, grave and quiet, with all the discipline of
the world about him. The three talk in easy half-
slang (which must be scandal to Mr. Biles, whose
lightest moments are Macaulayan), looking over the
agenda-papers of their meeting. We hear of such

224 IDLEHURST :

odds and ends as the extinction of steam roundabouts,
tail-lights for timber waggons, and the needs of roads
and drains. Our County Council is perhaps a little
ambitious, is still making the clean sweeps of the new
broom : but at least it has work to do ; it does not
adjourn for fisticuffs : the Radical tongue- itch has not
affected it at present. As we came into Lewes, I
thought that when Biles and his friends, verbose, raw,
undrilled in the great world, displace at the County
Council our General and his comrades, we shall be in
the last days. Meanwhile, the present dispensation
of Government has elements of an assuring kind.

Up one of the break-neck lanes from the station
to the Castle Hill, and do my business with my
attorney in a still little office shut off by its wire
blind from the changeful world ; in its dusty light,
its brown book-shelves and slow-ticking clock, year
to year the same. Then I rambled about the town,
from the top of the hill down the prone street to
the river-level ; turning into the lanes that run
southward — Watergate, Castlegate, St. Andrews — and
show remainders of old timbering and gable-ends in
odd perspectives on the steep incline.

At last I came through the Cliffe to that steep
down by the great chalkpits, and climbed the face
of it by the rough stairs of the sheep-tracks scored

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 22$

through the thin grass into the chalk. The whole
slope blooms thick with eye-bright, mauve scabious,
and wild parsley : overhead, as I toiled up, the edge
of the down cut the zenith, a most magnificent
contrast of light yellow, the flush of the tanned and
seeded grass, against pure azure, an opening in the
rolling clouds, crossed with a few fine threads of
white cirrus. I sat for an hour on the top in the
still, hot afternoon air, looking down upon those
dismal flats beneath the town, slashed and fouled
by acres of railway siding ; upon the curves of the
Ouse; upon the town piled high about the Castle,
seen through a haze of gold-coloured smoke. The
Downs surround the whole, showing here and there
the least hint of mountain character in their forms ;
between their scarped ends lies the blue airy distance
of the Weald. The cope of soft grey bellying clouds
shifts slowly from the south-west. The great expanse
of sky seen from this height gives full sense of the
motion of the whole heaven, a hemisphere a-sail,
with infinite changes within itself, perspective open-
ings-out, occultations and adumbrations. Beyond
Mount Harry the fading streak of a shower trails
across Chailey Common ; southwards by Newhaven
the sun is out upon a bar of numberless small, rounded

Q

226 IDLEHURST :

clouds, a pale golden horizon. The business of the
atmosphere is visibly going on in that manner of
serene purpose and unity which makes the opera-
tions of Nature so good a refreshing after human
modes.

Looking down on the town again, I find the
compact little whole, a busy hive, bounded concisely
enough this way by trees and meadows, to be not
altogether out of tune with the quiet heaven. The
barges are coming up slowly with the tide ; with
them comes the smell of the sea and knots of
drifting seaweed : the men at the puntpoles wear
oilskins and sou'westers. Country waggons wind
through the Cliffe streets ; Down folk and Weald
folk are marketing, banking, seeing their lawyers, up
and down the Hill. In the County Hall my three
Councillors and their fellows are devising liberal
things for the commonweal. A fairly consentaneous
chorus of easy-going chimes gives the hour, with no
sense of wishing to hurry any one. The place is
alive with businesses done with very little noise,
smoke, or stench. It seems to fulfil all the needs of
a town ; and one regrets that some sort of centralisa-
tion of noxious trades and decentralisation of ordinary
human aggregations should not at least preserve

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 22/

to us the good parts of country towns like this —
a city not too dense for the swallows to build at
the eaves of the street, for lilies to look over the
fences in the steep closes, for breaths of the Down
grass to come across the inmost lanes. Let us
have Brighton ("a stenchy place," in Lucy Sayers'
compendious description after her one visit) to
absorb riches and civic zeal, notables, criminals,
and the strange woman ; let us keep a country
town or two as preserves for clean atmospheres of
body and soul, for the almost lost secret of sitting
still.

The warm air, the silence, or sounds that seem a
part of silence, the least rustle of breeze in the dead
grass, the wiz-wiz-wiz of the grasshoppers, have a
drowsy spell. I find myself tangled in half-dreams
of a devolution by which, when national amenity
shall have become mentionable besides personal
pence, London shall attract to herself all the small
vice, as she does already most of the great, from the
country, all the thrusters after gain, the vulgar,
heavy-fingered intellects, the Progressive spouters,
the Bileses, the speculating brigandage, and shall
give us back from the foggy world of clubs and
cab-ranks the geniuses, the poets and painters, all

228 IDLEHURST :

the nice and witty and pretty people, to make towns
such as this, conserved and purified, into country-
side Athenses ; to form distinct schools of letters and
art, individual growths, not that universal Cockney
mind, smoke-ingrained, stage-ridden, convention-
throttled, which now masquerades under the forms
of every clime and dialect within reach of a tourist-
ticket.

Towards which state of things may County Coun-
cillors, not the least my three friends (whom I meet
on my way back through the town, fiincti officio,
smoking well-deserved Regalias), help to bring us.
Of late they have shown signs of appreciating the
worth of natural beauty ; a trifle, indeed, in face of the
coming Light Railways and the prevailing estimate
of protests against a three per cent. Vandalism as
maudlin affectation ; but a beginning that may grow.
A little more education, and the state of the Kaffir
market, or the registrations, or the birds, may still
leave our C.C.'s leisure to be conservative in a sense
posterity will conspire to praise. Yet a little more,
and Mr. Biles the educationalist may read Plato,
abjure Macaulay, and ultimately throw over his dis-
torted dream of Progress, four-fifths Bumble and the
rest Sansculotte, for service of his generation holding

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 22Q

fast that which is good, in the necessary rural ways of
Arnington.

2$rd. — Bob has left me, and I miss his cheerful
criticism of life ; though, to tell truth, I found the
boy at times father to the man in a somewhat dis-
composing manner. We fished the brook together,
and I found that my conceptions of bottom-tackle
were superannuated, on the authority of Vines major.
When the Jollands' Corner eleven came over to play
the Arnington Juniors, Bob and I opened the innings.
It was a treat to see the boy's school-discipline come
out in contrast to the lumbering clumsiness and slink-
ing tricks of the village lads ; if anything could make
one young again, it would be that shrill call, " Come
on, Uncle ! " to my rusty snick behind the wicket.
But the one-eyed umpire, who counted the over by
depositing a halfpenny for each ball behind the
middle stump ; the old tailor, who kept wicket in an
embroidered waistcoat and braces ; the floury miller,
who varied erratic round-arm bowling with absolute
straight sneaks — all these I learned to appraise by the
standard of the House Eleven and Vines major, and
to contemn in obedience to a call to higher things. We
do try to copy the ways of the County. We place our
fields for the miller's round-arms just as Richardson's

230 IDLEHURST :

fields are placed ; we stand twenty yards out at point
to the batting of the grocer's young men ; we take
our guard and look round the field precisely as you
see them do at Lord's ; but Bob is at most merely
tolerant. " I say, Uncle," he remarked as we
came home from the match, " I think if you hadn't
tried to cut that ball, it would have missed, you

know. Vines major never tries to cut unless "

And so forth, and so forth, to the furbishing of the
virtue Humility.

The match was matter for conversation for a week,
and Bob's criticisms led me to reflect now and then
upon the present state of our country cricket. The
science shown on the village pitches is in truth poor
stuff from which to raise a champion County. Any
lad seems to be able to perspire into some tolerable
sort of bowling ; not one in fifty ever learns the
merest rudiments of hand and foot with the bat.
The bowling is more and more after one pattern —
energetic in action, very commendably straight, and
as fast as the expositor can make it. " They don't
much like my bowling, up on the Green," said my
garden-boy the other day, with a pleasant smile,
going on to tell with modest pride how a certain brick-
layer whom he had hit had not been able to go to

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 23 1

work for two days. And perhaps the terrorising plan
is really the easiest way into the wicket, while the
current theories of defence obtain. The batsman
dodges towards leg from the projectile and tries a
speculative horizontal swipe, with fairly constant
results.

In our neighbourhood there is a middle-aged land-
owner who once kept wicket for the Gentlemen, and
a hard-hitting Blue ; both great supporters of the
game. Sir James keeps a groundman and an eleven
of his own, and has matches in his park ; the other
is not happier at Lord's, I think, than when hitting
the village bowlers across the Common into the pond.
But neither touches the root of the matter. If they
and their likes would take the trouble to give the
rustic batsmen some occasional coaching at the nets,
and would persuade the bowlers of other qualities
than speed, I think the native talent available for
the County would be notably increased. In another
way the real country cricket suffers. The Arnington
first eleven sometimes contains but three or four
Arnington men. Mr. Denison the Blue will be
playing, and Captain Dean of Ockington, and Quartus
Nye, a clever mercenary who is known on most of
the grounds in these regions, and perhaps four or

232 IDLEHURST :

five Brighton players, nominal members of the Arning-
ton club, who come out for a day in the country and
the good of their averages. The standard of play is
raised, of course ; but the system must injure local
cricket ; and surely the village grounds ought to be
the nurseries of county fame. The Vicar of Tyefold,
a neighbouring parish, does something in the right
direction with his Institute, but lacks the authority of
accomplishment. When I have seen him on warm
Wednesday afternoons wiping his glasses after being
bowled by three successive balls, or sending down
his highly popular lobs, I can only be sorry for a
lost opportunity. He tells me his matches are some-
times rather melancholy work. The boys are apt
to prolong the interval promenading with cigarettes,
or even visiting the Green Man ; they are on occasion
mutinous ; and are apt to regard the outing more than
the game.

While Bob was with us, a match was arranged
between the Arnington second eleven and Buckfield
Down, a hamlet a few miles to the north ; and Bob
and I were included in the Arnington team. When
I last played at Buckfield, a good many years ago,
cricket there had a touch of originality. Two brothers,
whose daylight crafts of fettling and ratcatching

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 233

thinly veiled the professional poacher, were the main-
stay of the Club. Both were fine players of the
dashing sort. Jethro, the elder, had some rudiments
of civility ; Fred (commonly anagrammatised into
Derf or Derfy) was an unmitigated ruffian, who played
tricks in the field like a vicious monkey, and rarely
got through a match without fighting a backer of the
opposing side. Both the brothers were constantly
in trouble : more than once Petty Sessions have lost
Buckfield the game. Once when Jethro was bowling
to me in the annual match at Arnington, I turned
after playing the ball, and found the bowler had
vanished from the crease and was running hard for
the nearest wood, pursued by a man who had
emerged suddenly from the pavilion with a writ.
And it was Jethro and Fred who once came over to
the Arnington cricket dinner, and had to be taken
home in a conveyance. The charge for this con-
venience appeared in the Club's accounts at the
General Meeting, and with a friendly understanding
that it should not form a precedent, was duly passed.
Nowadays Jethro is respected and a little feared as
an umpire ; Frederick is definitely on the parish ;
and there is no longer need to include a boxer in an
eleven visiting Buckfield.

234 IDLEHURST :

On the morning of the match-day we were picked
up at the Tanyard corner by the Arnington drag,
well loaded with the Second Eleven and their bags.
At Blackhatch we took up old Tom Fillery, a huge,
withered old fellow with a shrunken arm, and quite
the unfairest umpire it has been my fortune to play
against. I think we all felt a secret relief to find
such an ally with us, or at least to know he was
not to be on the other side. A little further on we
hailed a young farmer on the top of a rick, to come
and fill the place of Bill Wickens, who had informed
the distracted Secretary at starting-time " as how he
didn't seem not to care to come, like." The farmer
comes on board, dusting the hayseed out of his
breeches ; and in another twenty minutes we reach
the Buckfield ground and find the Buckfield eleven
zealously practising. The ground is a patch of peaty
turf, cleared out of the edge of the heathy moorland
rising to the Forest Ridge. The pitch has a quaint
indiarubbery feeling to the tread, the outfield is
hillocky and adorned with gorse bushes ; there is a
tent, and half a dozen forms from the neighbouring
National Schoolroom. Our horses are turned out
to graze ; we lose the toss and take the field, not
a little relieved, most of us, that we can rub the

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 235

anxious edge off the day before we are called upon
to bat.

The game is not eventful : the wickets fall at fairly
regular intervals for about four runs apiece. Bob
brings off a couple of good catches, and is out leg-
before for two in our first innings. About three o'clock,
after a wasp-haunted lunch in the flapping tent, a
lunch at which we consume enough aerated waters to
inflate All England, Arnington is going in for the
second time, to get thirty-five runs to win the match.
The Buckfield bowling on its native heath is really
murderous, and six wickets fall for eighteen runs in
half an hour. Then Bob goes in and saves the game.
We sit about on the hard forms, the afternoon sun
strong on our shoulder-blades, and realise the beauty of
the game. There is by this time quite a little fringe
of spectators round the field : the Vicar comes by
and stops to watch the play ; the school-children
troop out and sprawl in the grass close to long-on's
legs ; a pair of dashing bays champ and paw at the
roadside, while the garden-party hats and parasols
behind them perceptibly stimulate the fielders. Bob
plays forward again and again, ducks to the bumping
horrors, swipes the leg balls, and runs like a hare ;
but no one stays with him ; and it comes to the last

236 IDLEHURST :

wicket and seven runs still to be got. Then arrives
to Sam Veness, the last man in, that lucky hour which
awaits the feeblest bat, once perhaps in a season.
While Bob plays beautifully, Sam makes wonderful
strokes from the handle or tip of his bat, puts up easy
catches which no one can reach, and hits the only
really good-length ball of the match into the road for
five. He is too much astonished at himself to think
about running, and the strain upon Bob must be
serious while he exhorts and implores and advises for
five or six overs, until a generous overthrow gives us
the match, and we thump the benches lustily to
relieve our feelings. One over more, and Bob, fall-
ing by

" A mortal stroke
What time the foeman's line is broke,"

puts up one in the slips, and trots into the tent the
hero of the day.

The horses are caught, and away we go for home,
swaying and jolting through the honeysuckle lanes,
with song and chorus and compliments to Bob ; and
to him the negative compliment of wholesomer talk
than is customary in these outings, and perhaps of the
shortened stoppage at the Compasses on the way.

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 237

We are put down at the Tanyard, and tug the cricket-
bag up the hill together, pleasantly tired, and with a
wholesome regard for supper. We have had a happy
day in the sunshine, and I hope done something to
remember, and to set our backs up for work again
next half.

Bob departed, a double silence falls on the follow-
ing Sunday. The day is still a day of rest in
Arnington ; I think the land may be said to enjoy
her Sabbaths. Excepting certain of the " big-house "
people, Londoners in villegiatura, who by carrying
over inane junketings to Sunday afternoons throw
away a cheap zest to their organised amusements, in
this corner of the world we really use once a week
that admirable refection of quietude. The morning
was grey and still, a weather-Sabbath in itself. As
my custom is at times, I had sent the household to
church, and stayed at home myself to watch the small
needs of the curtilage. All being in train in the stable
and the yard, I idled in the garden, merely enjoying
the borders, at truce with chickweed and shell-sneg ;
careless, for the time, of rotation of crops and succes-
sions. The year's labours are nearly done. As I
pass, the onion crop is sunning under old cucumber-
lights, ready to be housed ; the potatoes are raised,

238 IDLEHURST :

all save a late plot ; all next year's crops that start
on this side of New Year are sown and planted. If
there is a Sabbath in the gardener's calendar, I enjoy
it now.

An hour such as this repays a world of painful
cares. The gardener knows consolations which must
fail in many a loftier "mystery." There is a time,
I think, to the literary and artistic workman when
horrid doubts grow, that the critics were perhaps
right after all ; and when the large editions or the
great canvas shrink ghastly in some keener atmo-
sphere. But no breath of conscience can touch the
gardener's results ; those silvery lettuces cold in
morning dew, those great sunburnt Beurres, those
first Ashleaves of the year, are facts immutable by
the course of Time. A novel may turn to outmoded
chatter, a play become a shuddering memory ; but
who challenges the Frontignacs or the Moor Parks
that were good ten years ago? I would have all
men gardeners ; then when Treaties are torn up and
Parties wrecked, Philosophies superseded and Art
damned, there would remain a solid ground of satis-
faction to each one, cauliflowers that cannot be im-
peached, pippins whose aroma endures. In the
borders the double dahlias, those Philistines of the

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 239

garden, sanctified by childish recollections, shone
richly among the autumnal aspects — tiger-lilies un-
curling the volutes of their petals before they fall,
the rampant twine of the convolvulus carrying its
purple trumpets unfaded until noon. The Autumn
crocus — Hesper of the year, as his yellow brother of
March is Phosphor — stands in leafless tufts of clear
pink-purple, one of the most satisfying pure colours
that we know.

Sitting under the holly hedge, I looked over all
the valley to the Downs ; the chimneys of the village,
the grey spire against the dark mass of its neighbour
yews — a very portrait of peace. There was no sound
but the whistle of birds about the garden, and the
mellow, mournful changes of the bells across the
south-west wind — bells which clash merrily enough
about the village street, but at this distance always
have a penetrating melancholy. They cease ; then,
scarcely heard, the quick shrill ting-tang calls in
the belated worshippers ; and the moment after, Morn-
ing Prayer has begun. Sitting still in perfect idleness,
I find a pleasure in merely leaving the mind open to
the least things that move about me : to note the
wagtail making his short quick runs on the lawn ;
the young swallows trying their wings in circles from

240 IDLEHURST :

the great apple-tree, while the old birds incessantly
feed them, a clamorous, fluttering brood ; the nut-
hatch hammering his wedged filbert with intense
application of science and strength ; the humble-bee
opening the trap-doors of the snapdragons, visible
at his work through the translucent tube. By silence
and keeping still one may come something closer to
the little lives. Most creeping things regard one at
all times merely as a fortuitous mountain range, to
be scuttled over ; but birds will come close to any one
who will preserve the bearing of a field scarecrow
for a reasonable time ; a week's persistence would
give results probably surprising to the learned
Societies.

The landscape was everywhere tuned down to the
dull, heavy green of late Summer ; one oak showed
a rusty bronze ; here and there in the apple-trees a
bright yellow leaf foretold the fall. There were two
ashes in the middle distance, to which the eye re-
turned once and again with vague pleasure in their
mere green tuftiness — pleasure reducible to no known
rules of the Beautiful, and without any touch of
association. From these trees the eye was drawn
off by a flash of yellow on the slope of one of the
Major's fields, a wild autumn garden of ragwort,

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 241

docks, scabious, seeded thistles — lovely but deso-
late. I never carry my feud with the weeds beyond
my own hedges; once over the bounds, all the
growths which within the sacred ground cause
an almost instinctive action of the trenchant spud,
are safe ; I recognise their nobility, their admirable
lustiness of growth and procreation. For all that,
this field, with its dead wiry grass full of hard-
heads and five-foot thistles, is a blot on the pastoral
landscape.

The grey cloud slowly draws off, leaving a shining
noon of tempered warmth and soft light. Spaces of
oblivion, perhaps, shorten the time ; for I hear Lucy
Sayers astir in the house before I had thought of
dinner. I imagine that she has hurried up the hill
from Church, her mind with the pots and the oven,
which indeed I fear may have even come across the
Psalms or the sermon. Lucy lives wholly in her work ;
for sure she will die in it. Two summers ago she was
very ill ; and one afternoon it came to be understood
in the close dark room (it was haytime and cloudless
weather) that Lucy would die. She has no kin to
trouble about ; but she went over all her world of
kitchen-things — told us where such a thing lay — how
there was one custard-cup broken, and that the black

R

242 IDLEHURST !

pepper was just done. She gave instructions, with

beseeching earnestness, as for orphans in an unfriendly

world, about the linen then out in the top meadow,

and the morning's milk in the pancheons, and the

smearing of the skep when the bees were taken. If

she had a thought for her kind, that she had served so

unfailingly for fifty years, it was about little Jenny

the kitchen-maid, who had lately shown tendencies

to crockery-breaking, and had been late down twice

in a month. Then she went to sleep, and two days

after rose at her immitigable five in the morning, and

went about her matters as though nothing had come

between. Once or twice afterwards she referred to

the horror of that week's holiday. " I felt," she told

me, "just like a kitchen towel that had missed going

to the wash. We've all got to die some day ; but if

I could, I'd die all of a sudden, when I'd got all my

work done and tidied up of a Saturday night."

There may be worse ends than that, most faithful

Lucy.

My book has fallen unawares upon the grass. I
get up and stretch my legs round the garden. In the
warm south corner the peaches are ripening fast. As
I look at them, a swallow sweeps over the wall, and
the tortoiseshell butterfly skips into the air and

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 243

settles down again on the orange and silver lichens,
flirting its wings and sitting close to the warm brick.
Through a mile of gold-coloured air, steamed up from
copse and meadow and yard, redolent of grass and
mould, of smoke, hayricks, woodland tangle, comes
the stroke of one o'clock, no more stringent monition
than the thin shadow of the dial half hidden in the
peach leaves on the gable end. I take the forwardest
peach and throw the stone over the wall — no garden-
party peaches approach the Noblesse from one's own
south corner — and move towards the house, bowing
to Pomona as I pass beneath the branches bent with
heavy-headed Louises, and pleasantly conscious of a
right salad and a certain Sauterne to come. At the
steps Zero uncoils and greets me with prodigious
yawn and elaborate stretching of fore and hind legs
in due order, and with a subdued tail-wagging which
approves both myself and the coming dinner-time.
It is a day when all seems well. Here the garden
prosperously meets September. Down in the village
the Sunday dinners are being turned out, generous as
fits the good times : no one is out of work ; there is
hardly any sickness in the houses. Down in the lane
I can see Liza Packham and her young man, rather
late for the Packham dinner-hour, but by no means

244 ibLEHURST J

hurrying up. The whiff of old Tomsett's pipe hangs
by the field-path where he passed a moment ago,
creeping in vacant enjoyment about the farm. It is
an hour when the mind launches away into boundless
seas, forecasting, remembering ; but always under
the pervading intense happiness, irrational, serene,
that sometimes runs through a pleasant dream.
Such ease of heart will be balanced all too soon by
another hour, when the travelling clouds seem to
touch the garden walls and the daylong rain sweeps
across the desolate frosted plots ; when the village,
a nest of sordid roofs seen between the storms, is a
hold of coarse vice and worthless lives, the men out
of work, typhoid fever in Mill Lane, and the propa-
ganda of "decline" at the full. Then the mind
ranges over all manner of miserable things it has
no concern with —

" 'An my sins
Come drizzlin' on my conscience sharp ez pins ; "

the mass of London crime and wretchedness, forty
miles away, lies heavy on the wilful Arcadian ; heavy
lies that future to which Mr. Biles' educationalism
leads the herd ; the unchecked defilement of the
old beautiful country ; the passing away of the

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 245

old race ; that vast hypocrisy which proposes to
Conserve.

An idle afternoon in most perfect weather ; the air
no mere average gaseous compound, but vivifying
element, rich and keen, a delight to breathe and move
in. I read ; made a progress round the farm, noting
once'more the immense deep-set humour of pig-nature,
the wise conservatism of the cows that follow their
wonted path round to the yard gate, never cutting
off the corner, for serene reasons of their own. To-
wards evening a great web of pale golden cirrus cloud
drew slowly over the western sky, and about sundown
the bells began to ring again to Church. Leaving
Lucy to promenade in the garden with Bish and his
wife, who had walked across from Dogkennel, I set
off to the village for evening service. The bells were
being failed as I reached the churchyard gate ; and
before I was settled in my accustomed place by the
middle pillar, the organ began, drowning the faint
clink of the ting-tang. Mrs. Lydia always plays for
some little time before the service, music which
seems to tune all the air to the coming solemnity.
Now we are all in, four hundred or so of familiar
faces, mostly of the street dwellers, the tradespeople,
the shop-boys, the nursemaids and " generals ;" there

246 IDLEHURST :

is hardly one of the " great-house " folk, not many
of the farm people and outliers. Near to where I sit
are three or four very old men, two of them in the
white frocks of years gone by. They will remember
the time when there was no organ, but a gallery
with singers, a clarionet, and an "octave," and the
school-children to help out the anthems ; when school
was held in the church ; when all was done on
ampler, easier lines.

The Rector's voice, neither dry nor dramatic, of a
quality which seems to lose itself in the sense it con-
veys, begins the service as the last beat of the bourdon
dies away. I have an inherent trick of the mind in
standing back at odd times, to see things as it were
at a little distance; and just now I find myself
wondering how the immemorial words come to old
Tomsett, sitting for sixty years by the same pillar
in the aisle ; and whether they ever penetrate the
feathered and ribboned head of Mae'ry Bish. I hear
the clear monotone and the answering roll of the
response, the rustle and shuffle of the people that
stand up for the Psalms, while I think of the genera-
tions who were here on such nights as this in three
centuries past — the folk whose names are yellow in
the Register Book, whose heirs erected the range of

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 247

marbles along the wall before me— the pillared and
fastigiated Latin of the Baronet of 1728, the mean
little tablet that commemorates the last of his race,
dead in 1810.

We sing the Psalms ; our choir of boys and men,
thanks to Mrs. Lydia's chastening, is much better than
most of the choirs in our country ; but we are a
hopelessly unmusical race, and our facility in rolling
our R's on a note nearly a semitone flat is appar-
ently ingrained. I think it is possible that the old
order of church singers and musicians, which was
largely hereditary and was a very distinct " mystery "
in Sussex, may have absorbed almost all the country
talent, and left a void when the Tractarian brooms
began to sweep the western galleries. At present the
people join almost inaudibly in the chants — here a
fancy tenor, there a feminine trill. In the better-
known hymn tunes they make themselves heard,
tugging at the air, and seesawing fervidly with the
choir-boys. Of late years the Rector has relaxed
somewhat a high standard in the choice of the hymns
—as he has let go several other matters, to grasp
weightier, perhaps. We now rhyme "woes" and
" clo'es ; " we describe our religious symptoms with
delighted analysis and many accidentals ; we mingle

248 IDLEHURST :

reminiscences of the Missa and the camp-meeting ;
we do much, I am afraid, to show by doggerel verse
and worthless settings, that anything is good enough
for Church.

By sermon-time the church is growing dark ; the
windows have turned from pale aquamarine to deep
azure ; the doors are wide to the evening air. From
where I sit I can see the shadowy loom of the Downs,
the black gloom that hangs under the yew-boughs,
where the bats circle to and fro along the flagged
path and wheel up against the green sky. We are
all very quiet, for we never tire of listening to the
Rector bringing forth things new and old from his
treasure; things old as our catechisms, new with
sudden life of meanings and force undivined. To-
night he is most simple and direct. There is not the
exquisite fitness of words, the eloquence growing out
of the subject, not clothing it, which we often hear.
Half conscious, in the twilight, of the man leaning
over his desk between the wavering candles, of the
intensely mental face, grown sadder and older of
late, we listen to the great effort to set the unseen
before slow hearts, to lead his people beyond the
little hedge of their lives to thoughts of the Real
beyond. Beyond to-morrow with its pleasant return

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 249

of busy life ; beyond the village ways within the
old circle of the hills, work, wage-nights, holidays,
weddings, burials ; past all this a thousand ages
dead, a whisper of memory, the soul holds on its
way, never to lose itself or to wear out the mark
of each least thought and deed in the earthly years
so far behind.

»'.#:*»-»

The church is very still. All, save some few like
old Tomsett, whose head has dropped upon his
hands crossed over his stick, are held by the preacher.
Mae'ry Bish forgets to giggle and adjust her hairpins ;
the grocer's lad for the time forgets Mae'ry ; the boys
by the west door, who usually begin to feel for their
pipes during the last hymn, are for the moment in
deep waters.

To-morrow, we know, the village round will go its
way. Mae'ry will be back at her sluttish flirtations,
and Henery's malevolent little eyes look through the
smoke of his clay pipe on a hated world ; Mr. Eliab
Blaber will pursue that curious commercial path,
serpentine between much fundamental integrity and
time-honoured trade fictions ; Botting and Marchant
and all their kind will renew their walk of beer-
alleviated toil. Through the preacher's spell comes

250 IDLEHURST :

the recollection of week-day realities ; comes to the
preacher himself, I think, closing sadly, a shade
perfunctorily perhaps, to-night. But for the hour
our ears are open ; the years of sober, consistent
goodness speak in the clear fine sentences to the
flock that listens, at least. Something, one assures
one's self, must accrue in a lifetime from such nights
as these ; some touches of light, reaching on into the
sordid week, add themselves for ultimate unguessed
good.

Dismissed into the starry dusk, we stand in shadowy
knots about the churchyard, or move in twos and
threes up the pavement and the street. Pipes glow
amongst drifts of smoke ; the Arnington dialect is
loud and free. As I pass the entry, there comes a
foul word out of the shadow, a girl's shrill retort, and
a burst of that coarse laughter, tuneless and detest-
able, which I know too well. The street clears by
degrees, perceptible currents setting towards the
Greyhound and the Crocodile. I am not sorry to
lose the last of the company at the Tanyard corner
and to set my face to where Capella glints among
the dark masses of my firs, that grove which
shelters in busiest times a Sabbath once acquiesced
in, now beginning to disclose its proper charm.

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 2$I

Happy he whose dreams of conquered worlds
come true, at forty-five or so, in a garden plot,
some roods of subject earth under a sky that is
only peace.

2$th. — The Rectory garden, long suffering under
the Rector's theories of horticulture, and Alice and
her friends' practice of romps, is saved from entire
desolation by Mrs. Lydia's repairs, and by the loan
of Bish for a day, which I make from time to time
in the summer, as a reinforcement to the Rectory
factotum's somewhat ineffectual labours. Mrs. Lydia
finds time to spare from her house, and the Clubs,
and the District, to make the annual pink pipings
and geranium cuttings, and to trim and weed in the
long summer evenings. For Bish, whom the Fates
in youth by his parents kept from Sunday School
for fear he should learn bad language, and the rest
of whose life in the green solitude of Dogkennel and
my quiet parterre has been after that beginning —
for Bish those days down in the village are land-
marks. I think he knows a fearful joy to feel in
the secure covert of the Rectory walks the stress of
Arnington life surge about him ; to hear the trades-
men's carts, the bell for morning service, the stir of
feet and voices, to see the postman three several

252 IDLEHURST :

times in the day come down the churchyard path.
But no excitement in the least affects his work; if
he were set to sweep the Bank crossing to-morrow,
he would do his slow, equable, tireless day's labour.
His touch was evident when I entered the drive at
the Rectory yesterday : there was an unwonted well-
kept look about the gravel and the edges quite be-
yond the reach of Awcock's rake and shears. In any
state, the garden is a pleasant place. The modest
white-fronted parsonage stands half hidden between
two beeches, round which an irregular lawn slopes
and winds, hedged by high shrubberies and careless
flower-borders. The churchyard wall makes the
boundary on one side — grey stone shagged with huge-
stemmed ivy ; over the wall peer the graveyard
grasses, with one or two of the old wooden monu-
ments ; through the outmost feathering branches of
the great yew trees and between their trunks, black as
night, the chancel-wall of the church shows its silver-
green lichens. At every corner of the garden the
spire looks down over the trees, iron-grey in storm,
to-day glistening white against the pale blue sky.

As I came up the drive I thought that the sense
of peace which always dwells there had never before
seemed so deep : the still cool air of the morning, the

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 253

faint shadows thrown by the half-veiled sun, the
murmur of the village beyond the bounds, all went
to produce the feeling of an aspersion of calm. Half
hidden by a group of hollyhocks, Alice read, elbow-
propped on the garden-seat by the tulip tree ; a little
flock of fantail pigeons on the grass before her.
Through the open windows came Mrs. Lydia's music,
filling all the garden with the gaiety of the Arabeske.
The sundial at the cross paths, old and green, with
the Rector's motto new cut on its mossy plate —
Donee aspiret dies et inclinentur umbrcs — told eleven
o'clock with almost invisible shadow. The hour
chimed from the church ; and as I found myself a
little before the appointed time, unwilling to break
the spell either of the fairy-tale or the Schumann, I
turned into the box-bordered labyrinth of the kitchen
garden, a herbary which usually suffices to put me
in conceit with my own. The impression of pre-
vailing restfulness of a slightly autumnal quality
was still in my thoughts, and led to a considera-
tion of some of the Rector's methods. The Rector
has a theory that the Christian qualities are best
disseminated in a parish when they noticeably
prevail in the parsonage; that the priest's house-
hold where unpaid bills, scandal, pride, or strife

254 IDLEHURST :

of tongues are not found, has a quite peculiar
influence upon the people. So far as I have ob-
served, this theory is not very common in clerical
society ; from peppery Diocesans to giddy Deacons,
the clergy rely, as it appears to me, too much
upon precept. But the Rector of Arnington is
singular, as is well understood in the Deanery by
this time.

To the Rectory bank of graces (so to call it)
Mrs. Lydia's chief contribution is this impregnable
peace : it is almost solely hers ; or what part of
it may now be the Rector's, assuredly began from
her. His own peace, if one may judge, is of the kind
which has to be fought for and held by the sword ;
a sort which can have little pacific effect upon
others. Be this as it may, the repose that never
leaves the Rectory precincts has a positive in-
fluence in the life of the parish ; and I know
how often I have come to be charmed out of a
restless temper in its magic air. Many other
virtues are there that blow upon the village from
that household, like Plato's " breeze bringing health
from out of good neighbourhoods ; " but for its own
wealth and its peculiar use in present needs, that gift
of stillness is above all the rest.

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 255

As I was counting the six or seven greengages on
the eastern wall of the fruit quarter, I saw the Rector
coming up the " twitten " with Dr. Culpeper and
General Aske. I met them on the lawn, and we held
our conference under the beeches — mostly upon
parochial polity of a rather minute nature, such as
arranging a common line of action in the matter of
the new lamps which the Progressives want to put up
in Deadman's Lane, and of the mending of the Mill
Lane footpath ; but with more human interest when
the Doctor told the Rector about some of his cases.
Old Mrs. Hillman is dying at last, through days
and weeks of delirium ; under the shadow of death
all the ordinary virtues of a worthy old age seem to
fall from her. Her daughter and granddaughter are
probably injured for life by the burden of nursing her.
It is a grim ending ; but one much commoner than
the moralists conceive. And sudden death at eighteen
has delivered Sarah Bennett from lengthened sickness,
by haemorrhage in the early stages of " decline."
There are cases still to be watched by the two
physicians : when the Doctor goes to finish his in-
terrupted round, the Rector goes with him, silent, his
brows bent. He has ceased long ago to hold the
common belief in a necessary inverse ratio between

256 IDLEHURST :

bodily and spiritual health ; he knows the sapping,
numbing power that sickness can have ; he has seen,
I have heard him say, the wreck of the body take
down the soul with it. The General and I were asked
to lunch ; and while the Rector was away we sat with
the ladies by the study window ; Mrs. Lydia with
her work, Alice on the grass at her feet, catechised
in her Hindustani by the old Indian. The two
specialists were soon engaged upon Meerut and
Allahabad, and Father's orderlies, and the Rains ;
whilst we other two talked our common English
matters until the Rector came back, and I took
a couple of turns with him along the walk by the
churchyard wall. The sombre mood had passed, and
he was ready with that eye-laughter which is so quick
and can be so deep. He had been in London for a
few days recently, and had come back with relief to
the levels of the Sussex mind ; that supposed superior
sharpness of town-intellect lies only in one particular
direction. The Londoner, he thinks, has all his strength
in the front line : one can never tell what reserves the
countryman may not deploy in his slow way. " I like
that phrase of ' Silly Sussex,' " the Rector says, "and
the way we take it to ourselves ; it is better, after
all, than ' Canny owd Cummerlan'/ or calling ourselves

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 257

' free and enlightened citizens ' or * heirs to all the
ages ; ' and of course we say it ought to be ' Seely
Sussex/ or even ' Selig ; ' but that won't do. You'll
have heard them say, * It's may'ap in Sussex/ and
about the Sussex rule never to shut a gate behind you.
After all, we are not so bad : we have something of
the New England quality, besides 'guessing' and
' reckoning' and ' hurry ing-up.' I had a good deal of
talk with an American I met at the hotel : he had the
acute rural mind — Hosea Biglow's pattern — very re-
freshing. Don't you love a good American ? Talking
to one always seems to me like seeing one's own side-
face, as you do sometimes with two looking-glasses. I
went to the Abbey with him ; heard Horner preach
— a very popular course — crowd of carriages : his
mind always seems to me a little costive, somehow.
It was on the Future State ; you know the form :
exordium to show we are providentially kept in the
dark about the Hereafter — then the light modestly
turned up. When we came out my American guessed
some people could tell us the pattern of the carpet in
the Bottomless Pit ; and then guessed I called that
irreverent. I said the word was very loosely used at
present. I had in mind the Tisfield curate who asked
me to subscribe to a more reverent harmonium for

258 IDLEHURST :

his iron church : I replied that the unsound state of
our heating apparatus took all I had to spare. But
suppose Sussex as silly as you like ; the country
wants a large preserve of fallow brains ; you can't
manure the intellect for close-cropping. Isn't it
Renan who attributes so much to solid Breton
stupidity in his ancestors ? " But our virgin soil is
going fast. My Lords keep the drill at work ; you
know the kind of seed ; ' urit avense,' eh ? " The
lunch-bell, echoing the half-past chime, called us into
the house, where we found an invasion of Alice's
friends, come for a sort of farewell festivity. Bob
is gone already ; Alice goes away next week ; and
all the company will soon be scattered. As the after-
noon was cool, and the want of Bob's leadership was
evidently felt, the elders were impressed into the
after-lunch game of hide-and-seek, with a handsome
implied compliment in Kitty Culpeper's preliminary
charge to us all to keep to terra firma — "And I say,
you know, we won't have any climbing trees ! " But
even on the earth the wild career was too much for
some of us, who found breath to suggest a mushroom-
gathering. So we got baskets, and all trooped across
the meadows behind the church ; and while we elders
did our share of picking (for what more engrossing

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 259

sport is there than finding the buttons and broadbrims
in the lush pasture ?), the children of the lesser growth
strayed away in the fields beneath, with shouts of
discovery, with races and a squabble or two, perhaps,
for the prizes.

From the top of the first meadow there is a favourite
view of mine — a vista between two dark green
oaks in the neighbouring chase, a view which one
can shut out with one hand at arm's length. First
comes a hillside of sloping meadows and hedges,
rising to a cluster of red roofs among stripes of corn-
land dotted with sheaves ; next, woodland, ridge over
ridge ; beyond a dip of the woods a streak of light
that means the broad levels of the Weald ; last, a
blue hill that meets the sky twenty miles away.
This always seems to me an epitome of the true
England — not dockyard forests, nor groves of chim-
neys, nor roaring streets ; this is the heart still, I tell
myself. It is for this, at bottom, that the Aldershot
guns are at work to-day, shaking the still air with a
dull abrupt thunder ; for this that Bob and Peter are
so soon to be sent across the world. As we rest by
the field-gate, the General listens to the sound of the
firing, thinking perhaps of the different intonation
which shell gives to the guns — the guns to which

26O IDLEHURST :

his boy Peter is destined. The Rector gives Peter
a little coaching : he is a fine upstanding lad, but
slow with his algebra.

" Do you think he gets on, Lewknor ? " asks
the General, a little anxiously : the shadow of
the coming "shots" and failures for Woolwich is
already upon him. " My father only gave me my
uniform and his blessing," he says ; " and as to
exams., well, I think I had to sign my name to
something. Now, what with the crammers and the
exams,, I tell you, sir, I really dread the next few
years more than I can say."

u When he gets through," I say, " I suppose you
would wish him to go to India ? "

" Oh, of course," answers the soldier.

"And," suggests the Rector, with perhaps an
obscure hint of consolation for coming failure, "if
there should be trouble on the frontier, he might be
sent up to the front, and perhaps be hit in his first
action."

" He'll never get the chance ! " sighs the General,
mournfully, with that barrier of Trigonometry before
his eyes, to withhold his boy from the paternal career
and his rightful chance of a bullet.

Still the guns rumbled intermittently, and we

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 261

watched the landscape and the children making their
good-bye holiday beneath us. I thought of the longer
good-byes to be made in four or five summers' time,
when Bob and Peter and Alice shall go to the ends
of the earth ; but shall keep, I trust, the memory of
these hills and woods to say to them when they need
it—" England ; " and perhaps to steer them back in
due time to the green meadows, to gather mush-
rooms staidly, while the next children shout and
race below.

Teatime closed the long afternoon, and brought
back the foragers with their pink-and-silver spoils,
no swarthy-gilled ancients amongst that plenty.
Back to the garden again, with tea under the beeches,
and romps not perceptibly affected by any thought
that they are the last. Then good-byes — some
for weeks and weeks — but all full of cheerful
noise.

I find myself the last to go, receiving from Alice
orders as to the tastes of a dormouse which I am to
take care of for her while she and Aunt Lyddy and
Uncle Phil are away.

" But suppose I go away too ? "

" You ? " says Alice, with fine scorn, putting me
in my place and showing serene appreciation of the

262 IDLEHURST:

constitution of things : " You ? You never go
away ! "

And perhaps that is one reason why I always
seem to be saying Good-bye.

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 263

POSTSCRIPT.

MY DEAR PATERSON

September iotk.— The year is going out peacefully :
no gales wreck the fading garden, no frost cuts down
the lingering beauty of the borders. Yesterday was
all pale sunlight, almost shadowless ; wherein Bish,
working among the turnips, was but a flat shade
among airy spaces of colour, a ghostly gardener in a
silent world. To-day the wind blusters from the
south; the sky is heavy with grey cloud; overhead the
gathering swallows wheel and balance. To-morrow
may be high summer again, with the sun of July
breaking out of the morning mists. But whatsoever
the day may be, summer is gone past recall—

" Scende la vita, ch' alfin cade."

264 IDLEHURST :

We begin to prepare for hybernation ; summer
friends are leaving us. Gervase French is in the
North ; Margaret Fletcher has gone back to her folk,
and taken Alice with her. Mrs. Kitty meditates
Cromwell Road. Very soon we shall be settled
down to the bare woods and miry ways, the deeper
quiet of winter, the long looking forward to that
February day which shall mark again the opening
year.

In the dead time, and in the failing season before
it, we have pleasures enough of our own ; and I
could tell you histories even in the three-days'
drowning rain and under the hedge-deep drifts. But
my little diurnal of the year ends rightly here ; it
has been a history of a summer, and closes with its
matter. The swallows are already going ; with their
departure my mind turns (I confess) to the palms
and temples of the south. I feel that much is to be
said in favour of migratory habits, since in your case
(perhaps also in mine) the further land ever grows
the dearer. Without yielding my old position in our
question of the homing and the straying natures, I
will say at least that some day I may with the

A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 265

swallows break from the little green horizon and try
the world where

" hills enow, and far-resounding seas,
Pour out their shades and deeps " —

and so come to learn the true worth of those country
ways — if country there be left from London's
tentacles — which I have tried in some sort to set
before you.

ENVOY.

SMILING you blame the idle mood which clings
Still to one corner of the marvellous earth,
And holds a rood of English garden worth

The harvest of your far-held wanderings.

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High in the blue, or, stooping, trills her mirth
About the lowly eaves that saw her birth,

Along, the lawns where first she felt her wings.

With me she loves the silent isle of flowers
Between the meadows and the chimneys grey,

Loves the close paths and solitary bowers,
The narrow precinct and the trim array ;

Yet some still morning, after certain hours,
Over the marvellous earth she sweeps away.

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iS.-MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS,

SKETCHES, AND REVIEWS; CONTRI-
BUTIONS TO 'PUNCH.'

London: SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 Waterloo Place.

RURAL ENGLAND.

' A scries of books of really incomparable freshness and interest! — ATHEN^UM.
' Books unmrjxissed in power of observation and sympathy with natural objects
ly anything that has appeared since the days of Gilbert White.' — DAILY NEWS.

WORKS BY THE LATE RICHARD JEFFERIES.

THE GAMEKEEPER AT HOME ; or, Sketches of Natural

History and Aural Life. New Edition, with all the Illustrations of the former Edition.

Crown 8vo. 5.-.

' Delightful sketches. The lover of the country can hardly fail to be fascinated whenever
he may happen to open the pages. It is a book to read and keep for reference, and should
be on the shelves of every country gentleman's library.' — SATURDAY REVIEW.

ROUND ABOUT A GREAT ESTATE. New Edition. Crown

8vo. 5s.

' To read a book ol his is really like taking a trip into some remote part of the country,
where the surroundings of life remain very much what they were thirty or forty years ago
Mr. Jefferies has made up a very pleasant volume.' — THE GLOBE.

WILD LIFE IN A SOUTHERN COUNTY. New Edition.

Crown 8vo. 6s.

'A volume which is worthy of a place beside White's "Selborne." In closeness of obser-
vation, in power of giving a picture far beyond the power of a mere word- painter, he is the
equal of the Selborne rector— perhaps his superior. ' This is a book to read and to treasure.'

THE ATHENAEUM.

THE AMATEUR POACHER. New Edition. Crown 8vo. 5s.

' We have rarely met with a book in which so much that is entertaining is combined with
matter of real practical worth.' — THE GRAPHIC.

HODGE AND HIS MASTERS. New Edition. Cr. 8vo. 7s. Gd.

' The one great charm of Mr. Jefferies' writings may be summed up in the single word
"graphic." He has a rare power of description, and in "Hodge and his Masters" we find
plenty of good reading.' — STANDARD.

WOODLAND, MOOR, AND STREAM ; being the Notes of a

Naturalist. Edited by J. A. OWES. Third Edition. Crown 8vo. 5s.
'As a specimen of word-painting, the description of the quaint old fishing village close
to the edge of the North Kent marshes can hardly be surpassed. . . . The bock is capitally
written, full of good stories, and thoroughly commendable.' — THE ATHENAEUM.

FOREST TITHES ; and other Studies from Nature. By the

Author of ' Woodland, Moor, and Stream,' &c. Edited by J. A. OWEV. Crown 8vo. 5*.
4 The book should be read. It is full of the spirit of the South Country, and as we read
it we seem to hear again the clack of the millwheel, the cry of the water-fowl, and the splash
of fish.'— SPECTATOR.

ALL THE YEAR WITH NATURE. By P. ANDEKSON

GRAHAM. Crown Svo. 5s.

' Of the 28 papers composing the volume there is not one which does not brim over with
love of Nature, observation of her by-paths, and power of sympathetic expression.' — OBSERVER.

A YEAR IN THE FIELDS. Selections from the Writings of

JOHN BURROUGHS. With Illustrations from Photographs by CLIFTON JOHHSON.
Crown Svo. 65.

'An excellent example of its kind, pleasant, chatty, and readable. . . . Fresh and graphic,
instinct with country sights, Fcents, and sounds.' — LAND AND WATKR.

POT-POURRI FROM A SURREY GARDEN. By Mrs. C. W.

EARLB. With an Appendix by Lady CONSTANCE LVTTON. Thirteenth Edition.

Crown Svo. 7s. ftd.

Dean HOLE, in an article upon the work in the ' Nineteenth Century,' says : — ' There is no
time for further enjoyment of this sweet, spicy " Pot-Pourri" ; no space for further extracts from
this clever and comprehensive book ; only for two more earnest words to the reader — Buy it.'

London: SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 Waterloo Place.

by f. flflSTEY.

THE TALKING HORSE ; and other Tales. Popular

Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s. Cheap Edition. Crown 8vo. limp red
cloth, 2s. 6d.

From The Saturday Review.—' A capital set of stories, thoroughly clever and
witty, often pathetic, and always humorous.'

From The Athenceutn. — c The grimmest of mortals, in his most surly mood, could
hardly resist the fun of " The Talking Horse." '

THE GIANT'S ROBE. Popular Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s.
Cheap Edition. Crown 8vo. limp red cloth, 2s. 6d.

From The Pall Wall Gazette. — ' The main interest of the book, which is very
strong indeed, begins when Vincent returns, when Harold Caffyn discovers the secret,
when every page threatens to bring down doom on the head of the miserable Mark. Will
he confess? Will he drown himself ? Will Vincent denounce him? Will Caffyn inform
on him ? Will his wife abandon him ? — we ask eagerly as we r^ad, and cannot cease
reading till the puzzle is solved in a series of exciting situations.'

THE PARIAH. Popular Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s. Cheap
Edition. Crown 8vo. limp red cloth, 2s. 6d.

From The Saturday Review. — ' In " The Pariah " we are more than ever struck
by the sharp intuitive perception and the satirical balancing of judgment which makes
the author's writings such extremely entertaining reading. There is not a dull page — we
might say, not a dull sentence — in it. ... The girls are delightfully drawn, especially
the bewitching Margot and the childish Lettice. Nothing that polish and finish, clever-
ness, humour, wit and sarcasm can give us is left out.'

VICE VERSA ; or, A Lesson to Fathers. Cheap Edition.

Crown 8vo. limp red cloth, 2s. 6d.

From The Saturday Review.—' If ever there was a book made up from beginning
to end of laughter, and yet not a comic book, or a " merry " book, or a book of jokes, or
a book of pictures, or a jest book, or a torn-fool book, but a perfectly sober and serious
book, in the reading of which a sober man may laugh without shame from beginning to
end, it is the book called " Vice Versa ; or, A Lesson to Fathers." . . . We close the
book, recommending it very earnestly to all fathers in the first instance, and their sons,
nephews, uncles, and male cousins next.'

A FALLEN IDOL. Cheap Edition. Crown 8vo. limp red
cloth, 2s. 6d.

From The Times. — ' Will delight the multitudinous public that laughed over "Vice
Versa." . . . The boy who brings the accursed image to Champion's house, Mr. Bales,
the artist's factotum, and, above all, Mr. Yarker, the ex-butler who has turned police-
man, are figures whom it is as pleasant to meet as it is impossible to forget.'

LYRE AND LANCET. With 24 Full-page Illustrations.

Square i6mo. $s.

From The Speaker. — ' Mr. Anstcy has surpassed himself in "Lyre and Lancet."
. . . One of the brightest and most entertaining bits of comedy we have had for many
a day.'

From The Globe. — ' The little book is amusing from beginning to end.'
From The Scotsman. — 'The story makes most delightful reading, full of quiet
fun.'

London : SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 Waterloo Place.

NOVELS BY H. S. MERRIMAN.

IN KEDAR'S TENTS. Seventh Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s.

THE PALL MALL GAZETTE.—1 After the few first pages one ceases to
criticise, one can only enjoy. ... It is a story of intense excitement, yet the psychology
and the characterization are admirable. In a word — the use of which, unqualified, is
such a rare, and delicious luxury— the book is good.'

- THE DAILY TEL EG R A PH.-' From the first to the final chapter the plot
moves merrily, with undeniable spirit and dramatic force.'

THE SOWERS. SEVENTEENTH EDITION. Crown 8vo. 6*.

THE A THENJEUM.—'lhz best and strongest romance which he has yet given
to the public.'

THE GRAPHIC.— 'His absorbingly interesting story will be found very difficult
indeed to lay down until its last page has been turned.'

Mr. JAMES PAYN, in THE ILLUSTRA TED LONDON NEWS.-1 From first
to last the book teems with interest. . . . There have been few such good novels for years.'

WITH EDGED TOOLS. Fcp. 8vo boards, Pictorial Cover,

2s. ; or, limp red cloth, 2s. 6d.

THE DAILY TELEGRAPH.—1 The book cannot be too highly praised.'
THE SPEAKER.—1 An exceptionally good story.'
THE SA TURDA Y REVIEW.—1 Full of life from beginning to end.'
THE WESTMINSTER GAZETTE.—1' Admirably conceived as a whole, and

most skilful in its details. The story never flags or loiters.'

FROM ONE GENERATION Tp ANOTHER.

Fcp. 8vo. boards, Pictorial Cover, 2s. ; or, limp red cloth, 2s. 6d.
THE ILLUSTRA TED LONDON NEWS.—1 The book is a good book. The
characters of Michael Seymour and of James Agar are admirably contrasted. The
duel between these antagonists, which extends throughout the story, is exciting. . . .
The circumstances described are strange, as is usual with the author of "The Slave of
the Lamp," but they are possible, and he makes them appear probable. There is a very
fair allowance of wrong-doing in the novel ; but, on the other hand— which is quite
unusual in a story nowadays — things all come right at last.'

THE BOOKMAN.—1 There is not a really dull page in the book.'
THE SPEAKER.-1 We can recommend "FROM ONE GENERATION TO
ANOTHER " as thoroughly readable.'

THE SLAVE OF THE LAMP. Fcp. 8vo. boards,

Pictorial Cover, 2s. ; or, limp red cloth, 2s. 6d.

THE MANCHESTER GUARDIA N.— ' A masterly story ... so like real
life, and so entirely unconventional.'

THE BRITISH WEEKLY.—' A most interesting and clever book.'

THE DAILY GRAPHIC.— 'The characters are drawn firmly, consistently,
and with great skill, and the story is at once fascinating and well balanced.1

THE GUARDIAN.— ' So cleverly has Mr. Henry Merriman fulfilled his task
that we read through his two thrilling volumes without any feeling of incredulity.'

THE GREY LADY. Square i6mo. 4*. ; or, with 12 Full-
page Illustrations by ARTHUR RACKHAM, crown 8vo. 6s.

THE OBSERVER. — 'An excellent story. . . . The volume is among the
cleverest and most interesting of recent novels.'

THE GLOBE.— ' A story of striking merit throughout.'

THE BRITISH WEEKLY.— ' An interesting, thoughtful, carefully- written
story, with a charming touch of pensiveness.'

London: SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 Waterloo Place.

ILLUSTRATED EDITION OF THE

LIFE AND WORKS OF CHARLOTTE BRONTE

(CURRER BELL) AND HER SISTERS

EMILY and ANNE BRONTE

(ELLIS AND ACTON BELL).

In Seven Volumes, large crown 8vo. handsomely bound in cloth,
price 5s. each.

1. JANE EYRE. By CHARLOTTE BRONTE. With Five Illustrations.

2. SHIRLEY. By CHARLOTTE BRONTE. With Five Illustrations.

3. VILLETTE. By CHARLOTTE BRONTE. With Five Illustrations.

4. THE PROFESSOR, and POEMS. By CHARLOTTE BRONTE. With Poems by her
' Sisters and Father. With Five Illustrations.

5. WUTHERING HEIGHTS. By EMILY BRONTH. AGNES GREY. By ANNE

BRONTE. With a Preface and Biographical Notice of both Authors by CHARLOTTE
BRONTM. With Five Illustrations..

6. THE TENANT OF WILDFELL HALL. By ANNE BRONTE. With Five Illustrations.

7. LIFE OF CHARLOTTE BRONTE. By Mrs. GASKELL. With Seven Illustrations.

*«* The Volumes are also to be had in small post 8vo. limp green cloth,
or cloth boards, gilt top, price 2s. 6d. each. And in small fcap. 8vo.
bound in eloth, gilt top, with Frontispiece to each volume, price Is. 6d.
each ; or the Set in gold-lettered cloth ease, 12s. 6d.

ILLUSTRATED EDITION OF

MRS. GASKELL'S NOVELS AND TALES.

In Seven Volumes, bound in cloth, each containing Four Illustrations,
price 3s. 6d. each.

CONTENTS OF THE VOLUMES:

VOL. I. WIVES AND DAUGHTERS. I VOL. III. SYLVIA'S LOVERS.
VOL. II. NORTH AND SOUTH. | VOL. IV. CRANFORD.

Company Manners— The Well of Pen-Morpha— The Heart of John Middleton— Traits
and Stories of the Huguenots — Six Weeks at Heppenheim— The Squire's Story —
Libbie Marsh's Three Eras — Curious if True— The Moorland Cottage — The Sexton's
Hero— Disappearances— Right at Last— The Manchester Marriage— Lois the Witch—
The Crooked Branch.

VOL. V. MARY BARTON.

Cousin Phillis— My French Master— The Old Nurse's Story— Bessy's Troubles at Home
—Christmas Storms and Sunshine.

VOL. VI. RUTH.
The Grey Woman — Morton Hall — Mr. Harrison's Confessions — Hand and Heart.

VOL. VII. LIZZIE LEIGH.

A Dark Night's Work— Round the Sofa— My Lady Ludlow— An Accursed Race— The
Doom ol the Griffiths— Haifa Lifetime Ago— The Poor Clare— The Half- Brothers.

V The Volumes are also to be had in small post 8vo. limp eloth, or
cloth boards, gilt top, price 2s. 6d. each : and in Eight Volumes, small
fcp. 8vo. bound in cloth, with gilt top, price Is. 6d. each ; or the Set in
gold lettered cloth case, 14s.

London: SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 Waterloo Place.

NOVELS BY MRS. HUMPHRY WARD.

KELBECK OF BANNISDALE. Third

Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s.

From THE TIMES.—1 A book which will take rank with Mrs. Humphry Ward's best
work. . . . The story is a story of a great passion worthily told. Fine luminous
passages, fraught with delicate significances, permit us to understand the atmosphere in
which the two chief actors move.'

From THE SPECTATOR.— 'Very few men and women will, we predict, be able to
close Mrs. Ward's book without the sense that they have been profoundly interested and
deeply touched. We follow the searchings of heart experienced both by Laura and the
Squire with intense interest. We never lose our human interest, nor do the chief
combatants ever cease to be real people, and so we shall venture to predict for
Mrs. Ward's new book a success quite as great as that which fell to hes last two novels.'

SIR GEORGE TRESSADY. Third Edition

Crown 8vo. 6-r

From THE TIMES : — 'In every sense this is a remarkable novel. . . . The writer
takes an even wider range than before, and deals with contemporary politics and the
burning questions of the morrow with the verve and no little of the knowledge of a
Disraeli. . . . The charm of the novel is the actuality of the personages. Mrs. Ward
has been living with them : so they live and breathe.'

From THE STANDARD :— '" Sir George Tressady" is an exceedingly able book.
We doubt if any other living woman could have written it. ... It is a work that does
her heart and imagination infinite credit.'

MARCELLA. Sixteenth Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s.

CHEAP POPULAR EDITION, bound in limp cloth. Crown 8vo. 25. 6d.
From THE TIMES : — ' Mrs. Humphry Ward again thrusts her hand into the hot fire
ofliving interests. Perhaps from this reason not a page is insipid. Everywhere is fresh,
bright "actuality"; everywhere are touches of intimacy with the world which she
describes.'

THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE.

Ninth Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s CHEAP POPULAR EDITION, bound in limp cloth.

Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d.

From THE SPEAKER :— 'This we can affirm— that in masterly grasp of the various
phases of spiritual thought and conflict in the England of to-day, " David Grieve " stands
alone in modern fiction and must be confessed as what it is— a masterpiece.'

ROBERT ELSMERE. .' Twenty-seventh Edition.

Crown 8vo. 6s. CHEAP POPULAR P^DITION, bound in limp cloth. Crown 8vo.
2s. 6d. CABINET EDITION, Two Volumes. Small 8vo. 12^.

From THE SPECTATOR :—' This is a very remarkable book. . . . Profoundly as
we differ from Mrs. Humphry Ward's criticism of Christianity, we recognise in her book
one of the most striking pictures of a sincere religious ideal that has ever been presented
to our generation under the disguise of the modern novel.'

THE STORY OF BESSIE COSTRELL.

Square i6mo. 2.?

From THE CHRISTIAN WORLD :-'Mrs. Ward has done nothing finer than this
brief story. The sustained interest, which does not permit the reader to miss a line ;_the
vivid clearness in which each character stands out in self-revelation ; the unfailing insight
into the familiar and confused workings of the village mind — all represent work of the
highest class. " The Story of Bessie Costrell " will become an English classic.'

London: SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 Waterloo Place.

by JflJVIES PflYfl.

'A little masterpiece.'— NATIONAL OBSERVER.
Crown 8vo. limp red cloth, 2*. 6d.

The DISAPPEARANCE of GEORGE DRIFFELL

The Spealter. — ' Mr. Payn has never written a more excellent story.'

The Athenwum. — ' Uncommonly well told. . . . The book is full of those good
spirits and those dashes of fun which have lighted up all his writings.'

The Daily News. — ' The story evolves through a sequence of ingeniously devised
and vividly presented scenes, and the dialogue has unfailing point and wit. The interest
holds us to the end.'

The Christian World. — ' A capital story, told in the artistic photographic style
in which Mr. Payn is a master.' _

' Replete -with good stories.1 — THE TIMES.
SECOND EDITION. Crown 8vo. 35. 6d.

GLEAMS OF MEMORY;

WITH SOME REFLECTIONS.

The World. — ' Of all the personal books that have appeared of late years, Mr.
James Payn's "Gleams of Memory" is the most attractive. ... It is not a book to be
analysed or criticised ; it is to be read, liked, and simply believed.'

Punch. — ' Within its modest limits of space will be found not only some of the best
stories of the day, but stories the best told. Not a superfluous word spoils the gems.'

The Saturday Jlevieiv.— 1 Mr. Payn's " Gleams" are gleams of sunlight ; memo-
ries of old laughter echo through his unaffected pages.'

' One of the pkasantest books that has appeared for some time.''

PALL MALL GAZETTE.

Fcp. 8vo. limp cloth, zs. 6d.

SOME LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS.

The Athenwum.—' To say that Mr. Payn is seen at his best in the book is as
much as to sav that it is remarkably pleasant reading. The stories it contains are not
all new. . . . But, old and new, the stories are all well told. . . . And then the spirit
of the book is eminently generous and gay. ... In brief, his book is one of those which,
like that of Maxim du Camp, if for somewhat different reasons, leave a good taste in the
mouth. . . . For that reason, if for no other, it should have readers in abundance.'

The Saturday Revieiv.—1 In a season of biographies and reminiscences Mr.
Payn's " Recollections" have several peculiarities of their own. First, they are short —
we wish they were longer. . . . Again, Mr. Payn's Memories are all good-natured. . . .
Thirdly, Mr. Payn's Memories have nothing to do with politics. . . . Mr. Payn's
" Recollections" are quite full of anecdotes of authors, editors, publishers, yea, even of
publishers' readers, and are everywhere buoyant and attractive with humour and good
humour.'

Fcp. 8vo. boards, Pictorial cover, zs. ; or limp cloth, zs. 6d.

THE HEIR OF THE AGES.

The Spectator. — ' '* The Heir of the Ages " is as pleasant and attractive a story as
one can expect to come across.'

The Athenaeum. — ' Mr. Payn has always taken a cheerful view of life, but in "The
Heir of the Ages " he surpasses himself. . . . Through it all Mr. Payn is at his best.'

The Scotsman. — 'An excellent tale, with some touches in it, as we think, higher
than any Mr. Payn has yet attempted.'

The Academy. — ' As bright, as clever, and as interesting as any of its predecessors.
In one respect — namely, as regards clear, sympathetic, and ^ graphic delineation of
character — it is almost superior to any others by the same writer.'

London: SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 Waterloo Place.

NEW EDITION OF W. M. THACKERAY'S WORKS.

IN COURSE OF ISSUE IN THIRTEEN MONTHLY VOLUMES.

Large Crown 8vo, Cloth, Gilt Top, 6s. each.

THE BIOGRAPHICAL EDITION OP

I, I. THACKERAY'S COMPLETE WORKS,

THIS NEW AND REVISED EDITION

COMPRISES

ADDITIONAL MATERIAL AND HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED
LETTERS, SKETCHES, AND DRAWINGS

Derived from the Aiithors Original Manuscripts and Note-Bookst
And each Volume includes a Memoir, in the form of an Introduction, by

MRS. RICHMOND RITCHIE.

The following will be the order of the volumes : —

1. VANITY FAIR. With 20 Full-page Illustrations, II Woodcuts, a

Facsimile Letter, and a New Portrait. [Ready.

2. PENDENNIS. With 20 Full-page Illustrations and 10 Woodcuts. [Ready.

3- YELLOWPLUSH PAPERS, etc. With 24 Full-page Reproductions of

Steel Plates by GEORGE CRUIKSHANK, n Woodcuts, and a Portrait of the Author
by MACLISK. [Ready.

4- THE MEMOIRS OF BARRY LYNDON : The Fitzboodle Papers,

etc. With 16 Full-page Illustrations by J. E. MILLAIS, R.A., LUKH FILDES, A.R.A.,
and the Author, and 14 Woodcuts. [Ready.

5. SKETCH BOOKS : The Paris Sketch Book, The Irish Sketch

Book, Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo, etc. With 16
Full-page Illustrations, 13 Woodcuts, and a Portrait. [Ready.

6. CONTRIBUTIONS TO * PUNCH,' etc. With 20 Full-page Illustra-

tions, 26 Woodcuts, and an Engraving of the Author from a Portrait by SAMUEL
LAURENCE. [Ready.

7. THE HISTORY OF HENRY ESMOND ; and THE LECTURES.

With 20 Full-page Illustrations by GEORGE DU MAURIER, F. BAKNARD, and FRANK
DICKSEE, R.A., and n Woodcuts. [Ready.

8. THE NEWCOMES. With 20 Full-page Illustrations by RICHARD

DOYLK. [On Nov. 15.

9- CHRISTMAS BOOKS, etc. I 11. PHILIP, etc.
10. VIRGINIANS. 12. DENIS DUVAL, etc.

13. MISCELLANIES, etc.

From the DAILY CHRONICLE.—' We shall have, when the thirteen volumes of this
edition are issued, not indeed a biography of Thackeray, but something which will
delightfully supply the place of a biography, and fill a regrettable gap in our literary records.'

From the ACADEMY. — 1 Thackeray wished that no biography of him should appear.
It is certain that the world has never ceased to desire one, hence the compromise effected
in this edition of his works Mrs. Ritchie, his daughter, will contribute to each volume in
this edition her memories of the circumstances under which her father produced it. Such
memoirs, when complete, cannot fall far short of being an actual biography.'

From the GUARDIAN.—' Messrs. Smith, Elder, & Co. have done well to give a
thoroughly "holdable" as well as readablejorm to the BIOGRAPHICAL EDITION OF
THACKERAY. The new " Vanity Fair " is handsome enough for dignity, and yet light
enough to be read with comfort.'

%* A Prospectus of the Edition^ with Specimen Pages, will be sent post free on application.
London: SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 Waterloo Place.

SMITH, ELDER, & CO.'S POPULAR LIBRARY.

Fcp. Sv0. limp green doth ; or cloth boards ', gilt top. 2s. 6d. each,

By the Sisters BRONTE.

JANE EYRE. By Charlotte Bronte.

rf H I RL E Y. By Charlotte Bronte.

VILLETTE, By Charlotte Bronte.

THE TENANT OF WILDFELL HALL. By Anne Bronte.

WUTHERING HEIGHTS. By Emily Bronte. AGNES GREY. By Anne Bronte.

With Preface and Memoir of the Sisters, by Charlotte Bronte.
THE PROFESSOR. By Charlotte Bronte. To which are added the Poems of Charlotte,

Emily, and Anne Bronte.

By Mrs. GASKELL.

WIVES AND DAUGHTERS.
NORTH AND SOUTH.
SYLVIA'S LOVERci.
CRANFORD, AND OTHER TALES.

MARY BARTON, AND OTHER TALES.

RUTH, AND OTHER TALES.

LIZZIE LEIGH, AND OTHER TALES.
LIFE OF CHARLOTTE BRONTE.

By LEIGH HUNT.

IMAGINATION AND FANCY ; or, Selections from the English Poets.

THE TOWN : Its Memorable Characters and Events. Illustrated.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT.

MEN, WOMEN, AND BOOKS ; a Selection of Sketches, Essays, and Critical Memoirs.

WIT AND HUMOUR: Selected from the English Poets.

A JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA; or, Sweets from Sicily in Particular,

and Pastoral Poetry in General.
TABLE TALK. To which are added IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS OF POPE

AND SWIFT.

Uniform with

THE SMALL HOUSE AT ALLING-
TON. By Anthony Trollope.

THE CLAVERINGS. By Anthony
Trollope.

FRAMLEY PARSONAGE. By Anthony
Trollope.

ROMOLA. By George Eliot.

TRANSFORMATION. By Nathaniel
Hawthorne.

DEERBROOK. By Harriet Martineau.

HOUSEHOLD EDUCATION. By
Harriet Martineau.

LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH
HUMOURISTS OF THE EIGH-
TEENTH CENTURY. By W. M.
Thackeray.

the above.

PAUL THE POPE AND PAUL THE

FRIAR. By T. A. Trollope.
THE ROSE-GARDEN. By the Author

of 'Unawares.'
CHRONICLES OF DUSTYPORE. A

Tale of Modern Anglo-Indian Society.

By the Author of ' Wheat and Tares.'
IN THE SILVER AGE. By Holme Lee.
CARITA. By Mrs. Oliphant.
WITHIN THE PRECINCTS. By

Mrs. Oliphant.
SOME LITERARY RECOLLEC-

TIONS. By James Payn.
EXTRACTS FROM THE WRITINGS

OF W. M. THACKERAY.
FALLING IN LOVE; with other

Essays. By Grant Allen.

Also the following in limp red cloth, crown 8vo, 2*. 6a. each.

THE GIANT'S ROBE. By F. Anstev.
THE VAGABONDS. By Margaret L.

Woods.
THE MARTYRED FOOL. By D.

Christie Murray.
CRANIA. The story of an Island. By the

Hon. Emily Lawless.
THE DISAPPEARANCE OF GEORGE

DRIFFELL. By James Payn.
THE WAYS OF LIFE. By Mrs.

Oliphant.

A BRIDE FROM THE BUSH. By E.

THE STORY OF ABIBAL THE TSOU-

RIAN. Edited by Val C. Prinsep,

A.R.A.
HOLIDAY PAPERS. Second Series. By

the Rev. Harry Jones.
VICE VERSA. By F. Anstey
A FALLEN IDOL. By F. Anstey.
THE TALKING HORSE : and other

Tales. By F. Anstey.
THE PARIAH. By F. Anstey.

London: SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 Waterloo Place.

SMITH, ELDER, & CO.'S POPULAR

Fcp. 8vo. Pictorial Cover sy 2s. each; or limp red cloth) 2s. 6d. each.

By HENRY SETON MERRIMAN.

WITH EDGED TOOLS. I THE SLAVE OF THE LAMP.

FROM ONE GENERATION TO ANOTHER.

By the Author of ' Molly Bawn.'

MOLLY BAWN.

PHYLLIS.

MRS. GEOFFREY.

AIRY FAIRY LILIAN.

ROSSMOYNE.

DORIS.
PORTIA.

BEAUTY'S DAUGHTERS.
GREEN PLEASURE AND
GREY GRIEF.

FAITH & UNFAITH.
LADY BRANKSM ERE.
LOYS, LORD BERRES-
FORD, and other Tales.
UNDERCURRENTS.

By GEORGE GISSING.

DEMOS: a Story of Social
1st Life in England.

By the Author of ' Mehalah.'

A LIFE'S MORNING.
THYRZA.

THE NETHERWORLD.
NEW GRUB STREET.

MEHALAH: a Story of

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