 Chapter 11 of Our Village Volume 1 by Mary Russell Mitford, read by Anne Fletcher Hobart 2020, this LibriVox recording is in the public domain, Our Village Volume 1, Chapter 11, A Country Cricket Match. I doubt if there be any scene in the world more animating or delightful than a cricket match. I do not mean a set match at Lord's Ground for money, hard money, between a certain number of gentlemen and players, as they are called, people who make a trade of that noble sport and degrade it into an affair of bettings and hedgings and cheatings it may be, like boxing or horse racing. Nor do I mean a pretty fate in a gentleman's park, where one club of cricketing dandies encounter another such club, and where they show off in graceful costume to a gay marquee of admiring bells, who condescend so to purchase admiration, and while away a long summer morning, in partaking cold collations and conversing occasionally and seeming to understand the game, the whole being conducted according to ballroom etiquette so as to be exceedingly elegant and exceedingly dull. No, the cricket that I mean is a real solid old-fashioned match between neighbouring parishes, where each attacks the other for honour and a supper, glory and half a crown a man. If there be any gentleman amongst them it is well, if not it is so much the better. Your gentleman cricketer is in general rather an anomalous character. Eldily gentlemen are obviously good for nothing, and young bow are, for the most part, hampered and trampled by dress and habit, the stiff cravat that pinched in waste the dandy walk, oh they will never do for cricket. Now our country lads, accustomed to the flail or the hammer, your blacksmiths are capital hitters, have the free use of their arms, they know how to move their shoulders, and they can move their feet too, they can run. Then they are so much better made, so much more athletic, and yet so much lissomer to use a Hampshire phrase which deserves at least to be good English. Here and there indeed one meets with an old Etonian who retains his boyish love for that game which forms so considerable a branch of his education. Some even preserve their boyish proficiency, but in general it wears away like the Greek, quite as certainly and almost as fast. A few years of Oxford or Cambridge or the Continent are sufficient to annihilate both the power and the inclination. No, a village matches the thing where our highest officer, our conductor, to borrow a musical term, is but a little farmer's second son, where a day labourer is our bowler, and a blacksmith our longstop, where the spectators consist of the retired cricketers, the veterans of the green, the careful mothers, the girls, and all the boys of two parishes, together with a few amateurs, little above them in rank and not at all in pretension, where laughing and shouting and the very ecstasy of merriment and good humour prevail. Such a match in short as I attended yesterday, at the expense of getting twice wet through, and as I would attend tomorrow at the certainty of having that ducking doubled. For the last three weeks our village has been in a state of great excitement, occasioned by a challenge from our north-western neighbours, the men of B, to contend with us at cricket. Now we have not been much in the habit of playing matches. Three or four years ago indeed we encountered the men of S, our neighbours south by east, with a sort of doubtful success beating them on our own ground, whilst they, in the second match, returned the compliment on theirs. This discouraged us. Then an unnatural coalition between a high church curate and an evangelical gentleman farmer drove our lads from the Sunday evening practice, which as it did not begin before both services were concluded, and as it tended to keep young men from the ale house, our magistrates had winked at, if not encouraged. The sport therefore had languished until the present season, when under another change of circumstances the spirit began to revive. Half a dozen fine, active lads of influence amongst their comrades grew into men and yearned for cricket. An enterprising publican gave a set of ribbons, and his rival, mine host of the Rose, an outdoer by profession, gave two, and the clergyman and his lay ally, both well-disposed and good-natured men, gratified by the submission to their authority, and finding perhaps that no great good resulted from the substitution of public houses for out-of-doors diversions, relaxed. In short, the practice recommenced, and the hill was again alive with men and boys and innocent merriment. But farther than the ribbon matches amongst ourselves, nobody dreamed of going till this challenge. We were modest and doubted our own strength. The bee-people, on the other hand, must have been braggers born, a whole parish of Gasconaders. Never was such boasting, such crowing, such ostentatious display of practice, such mutual compliments from man to man, bowler to batter, batter to bowler. It was a wonder they didn't challenge all England. It must be confessed that we were a little astounded, yet we firmly resolved not to decline the combat. And one of the most spirited of the new growth, William Gray by name, took up the glove in a style of manly courtesy that would have done honour to a knight in the days of chivalry. We were not professed players, he said, being little better than schoolboys and scarcely older. But since they had done us the honour to challenges, we would try our strength. It would be no discredit to be beaten by such a field. Having accepted the wager of battle, our champion began forthwith to collect his forces. William Gray is himself one of the finest youths that one shall see. Tall, active, slender and yet strong, with a piercing eye full of sagacity, and a smile full of good humour. A farmer's son by station, and used to hard work as farmers' sons are now, liked by everybody, and admitted to be an excellent cricketer. He immediately set forth to muster his men, remembering with great complacency that Samuel Long, a bolder, comillionaire, the very man who had knocked down nine wickets, who had beaten us and bowled us out at the fatal return match some years ago at S, had, luckily, in a remove of a quarter of a mile last lady-day, crossed the boundaries of his old parish, and actually belonged to us. Here was a stroke of good fortune. Our captain applied to him instantly, and he agreed at a word. Indeed, Samuel Long is a very civilised person. He is a middle-aged man, who looks rather old amongst our young lads, and whose thickness and breadth give no token of remarkable activity. But he is very active, and so steady a player, so safe. Weat half gain the match when we secured him. He is a man of substance, too, in every way, owns one cow, two donkeys, six pigs, and geese and ducks beyond count, dresses like a farmer, and owes no man a shilling, and all this from pure industry, sheer day labour. Note that your good cricketer is commonly the most industrious man in the parish. The habits that make him such are precisely those which make a good workman, steadiness, sobriety, and activity. Samuel Long might pass for the beau ideal of the two characters. Happy we were to possess him. Then we had another piece of good luck. James Brown, a journeyman blacksmith and a native, who, being of a rambling disposition, had roamed from place to place for a half-dozen years, had just returned to settle with his brother at another corner of our village, bringing with him a prodigious reputation in cricket and in gallantry, the gay lethario of the neighbourhood. He is said to have made more conquests in love and in cricket than any blacksmith in the county. To him also went the indefatigable William Gray, and he also consented to play. No end to our good fortune. Another celebrated batter, called Joseph Hearn, had likewise recently married into the parish. He worked at his true at the A. Mills, but slept at the house of his wife's father in our territories. He also was sought and found by our leader. But he was grand and shy, made an immense favour of the thing, courted, courting, and then hung back. Didn't know that he could be spared, had partly resolved not to play again, at least not this season, thought it right to accept the challenge, thought they might do without him. Truly, I think so too, said our spirited champion. We'll not trouble you, Mr. Hearn. Having thus secured two powerful auxiliaries and rejected a third, we began to reckon and select the regular native forces. Thus ran our list. William Gray, one. Samuel Long, two. James Brown, three. George and John Simmons, one capital, the other, so-so. An uncertain hitter but a good fieldman. Five. Joel Brent, excellent. Six. Ben Appleton. Here was a little pause. Ben's abilities at Cricket were not completely ascertained, but then he was so good a fellow, so full of fun and waggery. No doing without Ben. So he figured in the list. Seven. George Harris. A short halt there, too. Slowish. Slow, but sure. I think the proverb brought him in. Eight. Tom Copper. Oh, beyond the world, Tom Copper. The red-headed gardening lad whose left-handed strokes send her, a cricket ball like that other moving thing a ship is always of the feminine gender, send her spinning a mile. Nine. And Harry Willis, another blacksmith. Ten. We now had ten of our eleven, but the choice of the last occasion summed him up. Three young Martins, rich farmers of the neighbourhood, successively presented themselves, and were all rejected by our independent and impartial general for want of merit, a cricketal merit. Not good enough, was his pithy answer. Then our worthy neighbour, the half-pay lieutenant, offered his services. He, too, though with some hesitation and modesty, was refused. Not quite young enough, was his sentence. John Strong, the exceedingly long son of our dwarfish mason, was the next candidate. A nice youth. Everybody likes John Strong. And a willing, but so tall and so limp, bent in the middle, a thread-paper six feet high. We were all afraid that in spite of his name his strength would never hold out. Wait till next year, John, quoth William Gray, with all the dignified seniority of twenty speaking to eighteen. Copers a year younger, said John. Copers a foot shorter, replied William. So John retired. And the eleventh man remained unchosen, almost to the eleventh hour. The eve of the match arrived, and the post was still vacant, when a little boy of fifteen, David Willis, brother to Harry, admitted by accident to the last praxis, saw eight of them out, and was voted in by acclamation. That Sunday evening's practice, for Monday, was the important day, was a period of great anxiety, and to say the truth of great pleasure. There's something strangely delightful in the innocent spirit of party. To be one of a numerous body, to be authorised to say we, to have a rightful interest in triumph or defeat, is gratifying at once to social feeling and to personal pride. There was not a ten years old urchin, or a set to generic woman in the parish, who did not feel an additional importance, a reflected consequence in speaking of our side. An election interest in the same way, but that feeling is less pure. Money is there, and hatred, and politics and lies. Oh, to be a voter, or a voter's wife, comes nothing near the genuine and hearty sympathy of belonging to a parish, breathing the same air, looking on the same trees, and listening to the same nightingales. Talk of a patriotic elector, give me a parochial patriot, a man who loves his parish. Even we, the female partisans, may partake the common-arder. I'm sure I did. I never, though tolerably eager and enthusiastic at all times, remember being in a more delicious state of excitation than on the eve of that battle. Our hopes waxed stronger and stronger. Those of our players who were present were excellent. William Gray got forty notches off his own bat, and that brilliant hitter Tom Copper gained eight from two successive balls. As the evening advanced, too, we had encouragement of another sort. A spy, who had been dispatched to reconnoiter the enemy's quarters, returned from their practising ground with a most consolatory report. Really, said Charles Grover, our intelligentser, a fine old, steady judge, one who had played well in his day. They're no better than so many old women. Any five of ours would beat their eleven. This sent us to bed in high spirits. Morning dawned less favourably. The sky promised a series of deluging showers, and kept its word, as English skies I won't to do on such occasions, and a lamentable message arrived at the headquarters from our trusty comrade Joel Brent. His master, a great farmer, had begun the hay harvest that very morning, and Joel, being as eminent in one field as in another, could not be spared. Imagine Joel's plight, the most ardent of our eleven, a knight held back from the tourney, a soldier from the battle. The poor swain was inconsolable. At last, one who is always ready to do a good-natured action, great or little, set forth to back his petition, and by dint of appealing to the public spirit of our worthy neighbour and the state of the barometer, talking alternately of the parish honour and thundershowers of lost matches and soft hay, he carried his point, and returned triumphantly with the delighted Joel. In the meantime, we became sensible of another defalcation. On calling over our role, Brown was missing, and the spy of the preceding knight, Charles Grover, the universal scout and messenger of the village, a man who will run a half dozen miles for a pint of beer, who does errands for the very love of the trade, who if he had been a Lord would have been an ambassador, was instantly dispatched to summon the truant. His report spread general consternation. Brown had set off at four o'clock in the morning to play in a cricket match at M, a little town twelve miles off, which had been his last residence. Here was desertion, here was treachery, here was treachery against that goodly state our parish. To send James Brown to Coventry was the immediate resolution, but even that seemed too light a punishment for such delinquency. Then how we cried him down. At ten on Sunday night, for the rascal had actually practiced with us, and never said a word of his intended disloyalty, he was our faithful mate, and the best player, a take-in for all in all, of all the eleven. At ten in the morning he had run away, and we were well rid of him. He was no better compared with William Gray or Tom Copper, not fit to wipe the shoes of Samuel Long as a bowler, and nothing of a scout to John Simmons. The boy David Willis was worth fifty of him. I trust we have within our realm five hundred good as he was the universal sentiment. So we took tall John Strong, who with an incurable hankering after the honour of being admitted, had kept constantly with the players to take the chance of some such accident. We took John for our pisallé. I never saw any one prouder than the good-humoured lad was of this not very flattering piece of preferment. John Strong was elected, and Brown sent to Coventry. And when I first heard of his delinquency, I thought the punishment only too mild for the crime. But I have since learned the secret history of the offence, if we could know the secret histories of all offences, how much better the world would seem than it does now. And really my wrath is much abated. It was a piece of gallantry, of devotion to the sex, or rather a chivalrous obedience to the one chosen fair. I must tell my readers the story. Mary Allen, the prettiest girl of them, had, it seems, revenged upon our blacksmith the numberless inconstancies of which he stood accused. He was in love over head and ears, but the nymph was cruel. She said no, and no, and no. And poor Brown, three times rejected, at last resolved to leave the place partly in despair, and partly in that hope which often mingles strangely with the lover's despair, the hope that when he was gone he would be missed. He came home to his brothers accordingly, but for five weeks he heard nothing from or of the inexorable Mary, and was glad to beguile his own vexing thoughts by endeavouring to create in his mind an artificial and factitious interest in our cricket match. All unimportant as such a trifle must have seemed to a man in love. Poor James, however, is a social and warm-hearted person not likely to resist a contagious sympathy. As the time for the play advanced, the interest which he had first affected became genuine and sincere, and he was really, when he left the ground on Sunday night, almost as enthusiastically absorbed in the event of the next day, as Joel Brent himself. He little foresaw the new and delightful interest which awaited him at home, where on the moment of his arrival, his sister-in-law and confidante presented him with a belay from the lady of his heart. It had, with the usual delay of letters sent by private hands in that rank of life, loitered on the road in a degree inconceivable to those who were accustomed to the punctual speed of the post, and had taken ten days for its twelve-mile journey. Have my readers any wish to see this belay do? I can show them, but in strict confidence a literal copy. It was addressed for Mr. Jem Brown Blacksmith by S. The inside ran thus. Mr. Brown, this is to inform you that our parish plays Bramley Men next Monday is a week. I think we shall lose without you, from your humble servant to command Mary Allen. Was there ever a prettier relenting, a summons more flattering, more delicate, and more irresistible? This precious epistle was undated, but having ascertained who brought it, and found by cross examining the messenger that the mundane question was the very next day, we were not surprised to find that Mr. Brown forgot his engagement to us, forgot all but Mary and Mary's letter, and set off at four o'clock the next morning to walk twelve miles and play for her parish and in her sight. Really, we must not send James Brown to Coventry, must we? Though if, as his sister-in-law tells our damsel Harriet he hopes to do, he should bring the fair Mary home as his bride, he will not greatly care how little we say to him, but he must not be sent to Coventry. True love forbid! At last we were all assembled, and marched down to H. Common, the appointed ground, which though in our dominions, according to the map, was the constant practising place of our opponents and terror incognita to us. We found our adversaries on the ground as we expected, for our various delays had hindered us from taking the field so early as we wished, and as soon as we had settled all preliminaries the match began. But alas! I've been so long settling my preliminaries that I have left myself no room for the detail of our victory, and must squeeze the account of our grand achievements into as little compass as Cowley, when he crammed the names of eleven of his mistresses into the narrow space of four eight-syllable lines. They began the warfare, those boastful men of B. And what, thank you, gentle reader, was the amount of their innings? These challengers, the famous eleven, how many did they get? Think, imagine, guess, you cannot—well, they got twenty-two, or rather they got twenty, for two of theirs were short notches and would never have been allowed, only that seeing what they were made of, we and our umpires were not particular. They should have had twenty more if they'd chosen to claim them. Oh, how well we fielded, and how well we bowled! Our good play had quite as much to do with their miserable failure as their bad. Samuel Long is a slow bowler, and George Simmons a fast one, and the change from Long's lobbing to Simmons's fastballs posed them completely. Oh, poor simpletons, they were always wrong, expecting the slow for the quick and the quick for the slow. Well, we went in. And what were our innings? Guess again, guess, a hundred and sixty-nine, in spite of soaking showers and wretched ground, where the ball would not run a yard, we headed them by a hundred and forty-seven. And then they gave in, as well they might. William Gray pressed them much to try another innings. There was so much chance, as he courteously observed, in cricket, that advantageous as our position seemed, we might very possibly be overtaken. The B-men had better try. But they were beaten sulky, and would not move, to my great disappointment. I wanted to prolong the pleasure of success. What a glorious sensation it is to be, for five hours together, winning, winning, and winning, always feeling what a wist player feels when he takes up four honours and seven trumps. Who would think that a little bit of leather and two pieces of wood had such a delightful and delighting power? The only drawback on my enjoyment was the failure of the pretty boy David Willis, who, injudiciously put in first, and playing for the first time in a match amongst men and strangers, who talked to him and stared at him, was seized with such a fit of shame-faced shyness that he could scarcely hold his bat, and was bowled out without a stroke from actual nervousness. He will come of that, Tom Copers says. I am afraid he will. I wonder whether Tom had ever any modesty to lose. Our other modest lad, John Strong, did very well. His length told in fielding, and he got good fame. Joel Brent, the rescued mower, got into a scrape and out of it again, his fortune for the day. He ran out, his mate Samuel Long, who I do believe, but for the excess of Joel's eagerness would have stayed in till this time, by which exploit he got into sad disgrace. And then he himself got thirty-seven runs, which redeemed his reputation. William Gray made a hit, which actually lost the cricket ball. We think she lodged in a hedge a quarter of a mile off, but nobody could find her. And George Simmons nearly lost his shoe, which he tossed away in a passion for having been caught out, owing to the ball glancing against it. These, together with a very complete summer set of Ben Appleton, our longstop, who floundered about in the mud, making faces and attitudes as laughable as Grimaldi, none could tell whether by accident or design, were the chief incidents of the scene of action. Amongst the spectators, nothing remarkable occurred, beyond the general calamity of two or three drenchings, except that a form, placed by the side of a hedge under a very insufficient shelter, was knocked into the ditch in a sudden rush of the cricketers to escape a pelting shower, by which means all parties shared the fate of Ben Appleton, some on land and some by water, and that, amidst the scramble, a saucy gypsy of a girl contrived to steal from the knee of the demure and well apparelled Samuel Long a smart handkerchief, which his careful dame had tied around it to preserve his new—what is the mincing feminine word—his new inexpressibles, thus reversing the story of Desdemona and causing the new Othello to call aloud for his handkerchief to the great diversion of the company. And so we parted, the players retired to their supper and we to our homes, all wet through and all good-humoured and all happy, except the losers. Today we are happy too, hats with ribbons in them go glancing up and down, and William Gray says with a proud humility, we do not challenge any parish, but if we be challenged, we are ready. Chapter 12 of Our Village Volume 1 by Mary Russell Mitford, read by Anne Fletcher Hobart, 2020. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. There are certain things and persons that look as if they could never die. Things of such vigour and hardiness that they seem constituted for an interminable duration, a sort of immortality. An old pollard oak of my acquaintance used to give me this impression. Never was tree so gnarled, so knotted, so full of crooked life, garlanded with ivy and woodbine, almost bending under the weight of its own rich leaves and acorns. Tough, vigorous, lusty, concentrating as it were the very spirit of vitality into its own curtailed proportions. Could that tree ever die? I have asked myself twenty times, as I stood looking on the deep water over which it hung, and in which it seemed to live again. Would that strong dwarf ever fall? Alas! the question is answered. Walking by the spot today, this very day, there it lay, prostrate, the ivy still clinging about it, the twigs swelling with sap, and putting forth already the early buds. There it lay, a victim to the taste and skill of some admirer of British woods, who with the tact of Ugo Foscolo, that prince of amateurs, has discovered in the knots and nails of the exterior coat the leopard-like beauty which is concealed within the trunk. There it lies, a type of silver instability, fallen like an emperor. Another piece of strong nature in a human form used to convey to me exactly the same feeling, and he is gone too. Tom Cordery is dead, the bell is tolling for him at this very moment. Tom Cordery dead. The words seem almost a contradiction. One is tempted to send for the sexton and the undertaker to undig the grave to force open the coffin lid. There must be some mistake. But alas! it's too true. The typhus fever, that axe which levels the strong as the weak, has hewed him down at a blow. Poor Tom Cordery. This human oak grew on the wild north of Hampshire country, of which I have before made honourable mention, a country of heath and hill and forest, partly reclaimed, enclosed and planted by some of the greater proprietors, but for the most part uncultivated and uncivilised. A proper refuge for wild animals of every species. Of these the most notable was my friend Tom Cordery, who presented in his own person no unfit emblem of the district in which he lived, the gentlest of savages, the wildest of civilised men. He was by calling rat-catcher, hair-finder and broom-maker, a triad of trades which he had substituted for the one grand profession of poaching which he followed in his younger days with unrivaled talent and success, and would undoubtedly have pursued till his death, had not the bursting of an overloaded gun, unluckily shot off his left hand. As it was, he still contrived to mingle a little of his old unlawful occupation with his honest callings. With a reference of high authority among the young aspirants, an advisor of undoubted honour and secrecy, suspected and more than suspected, as being one who though he played no more or looked the cards. Yet he kept a winward of the law, and indeed contrived to be on such terms of social and even friendly intercourse with the guardians of the game on M Common, as may be said to prevail between reputed thieves and the mere middens of justice in the neighbourhood of Bow Street. Indeed, his a special crony, the head-keeper, used sometimes to hint when Tom, elevated by ale, had provoked him by over-crowing, that a stump was no bad shield, and that to shoot off a hand and a bit of an arm for a blind would be nothing to so daring a chap as Tom Cordry. This conjecture, never broached till the keeper was warm with roth and liquor, and Tom, fairly out of hearing, seemed always to me a little super-subtle. But it is certain that Tom's new professions did bear rather a suspicious analogy to the old, and the ferrets and terriers and mongrels by whom he was surrounded, did really look, as the worthy keeper observed, fitter to find Christian hares and pheasants than rats and such vermin. So, in good truth, did Tom himself, never did any human being look more like that sort of sportsman commonly called a poacher. He was a tall, finely built man, with a prodigious stride, that cleared the ground like a horse, and a power of continuing his slow and steady speed, that seemed nothing less than miraculous. Neither man nor horse nor dog could out-tire him. He had a bold, undaunted presence, and an evident strength and power of bone and muscle. You might see by looking at him, that he did not know what fear meant. In his youth, he'd fought more battles than any man in the forest. He was, as if born, without nerves, totally insensible to the recoils and disgusts of humanity. I have known him take up a huge adder, cut off his head, and then deposit the living and writhing body in his brimless hat, and walk with it coiling and breathing about his head like another medusa, till the sport of the day was over, and he carried it home to secure the fat. With all this iron stubbornness of nature, he was of a most mild and gentle demeanour, had a fine placidity of countenance, and a quick blue eye beaming with good humour. His face was sunburnt into one general pale vermilion hue that overspread all his features. His very hair was sunburnt, too. His costume was generally a smock frock of no doubtful complexion, dirt-coloured, which hung around him in tatters like fringe, rather augmenting than diminishing the freedom, and, if I may say so, the gallantry of his bearing. This frock was furnished with a huge inside pocket in which to deposit the game killed by his patrons. For of his three employments, that which consisted of finding hairs for the great farmers and small gentry, who were won't to course on the common, was by far the most profitable and most pleasing to him and to them. Everybody liked Tom Cordery. He had himself an aptness to like, which is certain to be repaid in kind. The very dogs knew him and loved him, and would beat for him almost as soon as for their master. Even May, the most sagacious of Greyhounds, appreciated his talents, and would as soon listen to Tom so hoeing as to Old Tray giving Tong. Nor was his conversation less agreeable to the other part of the company. Servants and masters were equally desirous to secure Tom. Besides his general and professional familiarity with beasts and birds, their ways and doings, a knowledge so minute and accurate that it might have put to shame many a professed naturalist, he had no small acquaintance with the goings-on of that unfethered biped called Man. In short, he was, next after Lucy, who recognised his rivalry by hating, decrying and undervaluing him, by far the best news-gatherer of the countryside. His news, he of course picked up on the civilised side of the parish, there is no gossiping in the forest, partly at that well frequented in the Red Lion, of which Tom was a regular and noted supporter, and partly among his several employers, and partly by his own sagacity. In the matter of marriages, pairings he was won't to call him, he relied chiefly on his own skill in noting certain preliminary indications, and certainly for a guesser by profession and a very bold one, he was astonishingly often right. At the ale-house especially, he was of the first authority, an heir of mild importance, a diplomatic reserve on some points, a great smoothness of speech, and that gentleness, which is so often the result of conscious power, made him there an absolute ruler. Perhaps the effect of these causes might be a little aided by the latent dread which that power inspired in others. Many an exploit had proved that Tom Cordery's one arm was fairly worth any two on the common. The pommelling of Bob Arlott, and the levelling of Gemsurle to the earth by one swing of a huge old hair, which unusual weapon was, by the way, the first slain of Mayflower, on its way home to us in that walking cupboard his pocket, when the unlucky Ron Contra with Gemsurle broke two heads, the dead and the living. Arguments such as these might have some cogency at the Red Lion. But he managed everybody, as your gentle-mannered person is apt to do. Even the rude squires and rough farmers, his temporary masters, he managed particularly as far as concerned the beat, and was sure to bring them round to his own peculiar fancies or prejudices, however strongly their own wishes might turn them aside from the direction indicated, and however often Tom's sagacity in that instance might have been found at fault. Two spots in the large wild enclosures into which the heath had been divided were his special favourites. The Hundred Acres, alias the poor allotment, alias the burnt common, do any or all of these titles convey any notion of the real destination of that many-named place, a piece of moorland apportioned out to serve for fuel to the poor of the parish. This was one. O the barrenness of this miserable moor, flat, marshy and dingy and bare, hear that piece of green treachery abog, there parched and paired and shriveled and black with smoke and ashes, utterly desolate and wretched everywhere, except where amidst the desolation blossomed as in mockery the enameled gentianella. No hairs ever came there, they had too much taste, yet thither would Tom lead his unwary employers. Thither, however warned or cautioned or experienced, would he by reasoning or induction or gentle persuasion or actual fraud entice the hapless gentleman, and then to see him with his rabble of finders pacing up and down this precious sitting-ground, before so was Tom, thriftless liar won't to call it, pretending to look for game, counterfeiting a meurze, forging a form and telling a story some ten years old of a famous hair once killed on that spot by his honour's favourite bitch, Marygold. I never could thoroughly understand whether it were design, a fear that too many hairs might be killed, or a real and honest mistake, a genuine prejudice in favour of the place that influenced Tom Cordery in this point, half the one perhaps and half the other, mixed motives let Pope and his disciples say what they will are by far the commonest in this particular world. Or he had shared the fate of greater men and lied till he believed, a coursing cromwell beginning in hypocrisy and ending infinaticism. Another pet spot was the gallows' piece, an enclosure about as large as the hundred acres, where a gibbet had once borne the bodies of two murderers with the chains and bones, even in my remembrance clanking and creaking in the wind. The gibbet was gone now, but the name remained, and the feeling, deep, sad, and shuddering. The place too was wild, awful, fearful, a heathy, fursy spot, sinking into broken hollows where murderers might lurk, a few withered pines at the upper end, and amongst them half hidden by the brambles, the stone in which the gallows had been fixed, the bones must have been mouldering beneath. All Tom's eloquence, seconded by two capital courses, failed to drag me thither a second time. Tom was not, however, without that strong sense of natural beauty, which they who live amongst the wildnesses and fastnesses of nature so often exhibit. One spot where the common trenches on this civilized world were scarcely less his admiration than mine. It is a high hill, half covered with furs and heath and broom, and sinking abruptly down to a large pond, almost a lake, covered with wild waterfowl. The ground, richly clothed with wood, oak and beech and elm, rises on the other side with equal abruptness, as if shutting in those glassy waters from all but the sky, which shines so brightly in their clear bosom. Just in the bottom peeps a small sheltered farm, whose wreaths of light smoke and the white glancing wings of the wild ducks as they flit across the lake, are all that give token of motion or of life. I have stood there in utter oblivion of greyhound or of hair, till moments have swelled to minutes and minutes to hours, and so has Tom, conveying by his exclamation of delight at its pleasantness exactly the same feeling which a poet or a painter, for it breathes a very spirit of calm and sunshiny beauty that a master painter loves, would express by different but not truer praise. He called his own home pleasant too, and there though one loves to hear any home so called, there I must confess that favourite phrase which I like almost as well as they who have no other, did seem rather misapplied, and yet it was finely placed, very finely. It stood in a sort of defile, where a road almost perpendicular wound from the top of a steep abrupt hill crowned with the tuft of old Scottish firs, into a dingle of fern and wild brushwood. A shallow, sullen stream oozed from the bank on one side, and after forming a rude channel across the road sank into a deep dark pool half hidden amongst the sallows. Behind these sallows, in a nook between them and the hill, rose the uncouth and shapeless cottage of Tom Cordery. It is a scene which hangs upon the eye and the memory, striking, grand, almost sublime, and above all, eminently foreign. No English painter would choose such a subject for an English landscape. No one in a picture would take it for English. It might pass for one of those scenes which have furnished models to Salvatore Rosa. Tom's cottage was, however, very thoroughly national and characteristic, a low, ruinous hovel, the door of which was fastened with a sedulous attention to security that contrasted strangely with the tattered thatch of the roof and the half-broken windows. No garden, no pigsty, no pens for geese, none of the usual signs of cottage habitation. Yet the house was covered with nondescript dwellings, and the very walls were animate with their extraordinary tenants— pheasants, partridges, rabbits, tame wild ducks and half-tame hares, and their enemies by nature and education, the ferrets, terriers, and mongrels, of whom his retinue consisted. Great ingenuity had been evinced in keeping separate these jarring elements, and by dint of hutches, cages, fences, and kennels, and half a dozen little hurdled enclosures, resembling the sort of courts which children are apt to build around their card-houses, a peace was, in general, tolerably well preserved. Frequent sounds, however, of fear or of anger, as their several instincts were aroused, gave tokens that it was but a forced and hollow truce, and at such times the clamour was prodigious. Tom had the remarkable tenderness for animals when domesticated, which is so often found in those whose sole vocation seems to be their destruction in the field, and the one long, straggling, unsealinged barn-like room, which served for kitchen, bed-chamber, and hall, was covered with bipeds and quadrupeds of all kinds and descriptions, the sick, the delicate, the newly caught, the lying in. In the midst of this menagerie sat Tom's wife, for he was married, though without a family, married to a woman lame of a leg, as he himself was minus an arm, now trying to quiet her noisy inmates, and now to outscold them. How long his friend the keeper would have continued to wink at this den of live game, none can say. The roof fairly fell in during the deep snow of last winter, killing, as poor Tom observed, two as fine littles of rabbits as ever were kittened. Remotely I have no doubt that he himself fell a sacrifice to this misadventure. The overseer, to whom he applied to reinstate his beloved habitation, decided that the walls would never bear another roof, and removed him and his wife, as in a special favour, to a tidy, snug, comfortable room in the workhouse. The workhouse. From that hour, poor Tom visibly altered. He lost his hilarity and independence. It was a change such as he himself had often inflicted a complete change of habits, a transition from the wild to the tame. No labour was demanded of him. He went about as before, finding hares, killing rats, selling brooms, but the spirit of the man was departed. He talked of the quiet of his old abode, and the noise of the new, complained of children and other bad company, and looked down on his neighbours with the sort of contempt with which a cock pheasant might regard a barn door fowl. Most of all did he, braced into a gypsy-like defiance of wet and cold, grumble at the warmth and dryness of his apartment. He used to foretell that it would kill him, and assuredly it did so. Never could the typhus fever have found out that wild hillside or have lurked under that broken roof. The free touch of the air would have chased the demon. Alas, poor Tom, warmth and snugness and comfort, whole windows and an entire ceiling were the death of him. Alas, poor Tom. 13. An Old Bachelor There is no effect of the subtle operation of the association of ideas more universal and more curious than the manner in which the most trivial circumstances recall particular persons to our memory. Sometimes these glances of recollection are purely pleasurable. Thus I have a double liking for Mayday, as being the birthday of a dear friend whose fair idea burst upon me with the first sunbeam of that glad morning, and I can never hear certain airs of moat's art and handle without seeming to catch an echo of that sweetest voice in which I first learned to love them. Pretty often, however, the point of association is less elegant, and occasionally it's tolerably ludicrous. We happen today to have for dinner a couple of wild ducks, the first of the season, and as the master of the house, who is so little of an epicure that I'm sure he would never, while he lived out of its feathers, know a wild duck from a tame, whilst he, with little affectation of science, was squeezing the lemon and mixing cayenne pepper with the gravy, two of us exclaimed in a breath, poor Mr. Sidney. I rejoin the squeezer of lemons, poor Sidney. I think he would have allowed that these ducks were done even to half a turn. And then he told the story more elaborately to a young visitor, to whom Mr. Sidney was unknown. How, after eating the best parts of a couple of wild ducks, which all the company pronounced to be the finest and best dressed wild ducks ever brought to table, that judicious critic in the gastronomic art limited the two sweeping praise by gravely asserting that the birds were certainly excellent, and that the cookery would have been excellent also had they not been roasted half a turn too much. Mr. Sidney has been dead these fifteen years, but no wild ducks have ever appeared on our homely board without recalling that observation. It is his memorable saying, his one good thing. Mr. Sidney was, as might be, conjectured and epicure. He was also an old bachelor, a clergyman, and senior fellow of a certain college, a post which he had long filled, being, although only a second son, so well provided for, that he could afford to reject living after living in expectation of one favourite rectory to which he had taken an early fancy from the pleasantness of the situation and the imputed celebrity of the air. Of the latter quality indeed he used to give an instance which however satisfactory as confirming his prepossession could hardly have been quite agreeable as preventing him from gratifying it, namely the extraordinary and provoking longevity of the incumbent, who at upwards of ninety gave no sign of decay and bad fare to emulate the age of old par. Whilst waiting for the expected living, Mr. Sidney, who disliked a college residence, built himself a very pretty house in our neighbourhood which he called his home, and where he lived as much as a love of Bath and Brighton and London and Lords would let him. He counted many noble families amongst his near connections and passed a good deal of his time at their country seats, a life for which he was by character and habit peculiarly fitted. In person he was a tall, stout, gentlemanly man, about fifty or by our lady inclined to three score, with fine features, a composed gravity of countenance and demeanour, a bald head most accurately powdered, and a very graceful bow, quite the pattern of an elderly man of fashion. His conversation was in excellent keeping with the calm imperturbability of his countenance and the sedate gravity of his manner, smooth, dull, commonplace, exceedingly safe, and somewhat imposing. He spoke so little that people really fell into the mistake of imagining that he thought, and the tone of decision with which he would advance some second-hand opinion was well calculated to confirm the mistake. Gravity was certainly his chief characteristic, and yet it was not a clerical gravity either. He had none of the generic marks of his profession, although perfectly decorous in life and word and thought, no stranger ever took Mr. Sidney for a clergyman. He never did any duty anywhere that I ever heard of, except the agreeable duty of saying grace before dinner, and even that was often performed by some lay host in pure forgetfulness of his guest's ordination. Indeed, but for the direction of his letters, and an eye to the particular rectory, I am persuaded that the circumstance might have slipped out of his own recollection. His quality of old bachelor was more perceptible. There lurked, under all his polish, well covered but not concealed, the quiet selfishness, the little whims and precise habits, the primness and prigishness of that disconsolate condition. His man Andrews, for instance, valet, groom, and body-servant abroad, butler, cook, caterer, and major domo at home, tall, portly, powdered, and black-coated as his master, and like him in all things but the knowing pigtail which stuck out horizontally above his shirt-collar, giving a ludicrous dignity to his appearance. Andrews, who, constant as the dial pointed nine, carried up his chocolate and shaving water, and, regular as the chimes at midnight, prepared his white wine-way, who never forgot his gouty shoe in travelling, once for two days he had a slight touch of that gentlemanly disorder, and never gave him the newspaper unaird. To whom could this jewel of a valet, this matchless piece of clockwork, belong but an old bachelor? And his little dog, Viper, unparagoned of terriers, black, sleek, sharp, and shrewish, who would beg and sneeze, and fetch and carry like a Christian, eat olives and sweet meats and mustard, drink coffee and wine and liqueurs? Who but an old bachelor could have taught Viper his multifarious accomplishments? Little Viper was a most useful person in his way, for although Mr. Sydney was a very creditable acquaintance to meet on the King's Highway—your dull man, if he rides well, should never think of dismounting—or even on the level ground of a carpet in the crowd of a large party. Yet when he happened to drop in to take a family dinner, a pretty frequent habit of his when in the country, then Viper's talents were inestimable in relieving the ennui occasioned by that grave piece of gentility his master—not only dull in himself, but the cause of dullness in others. Anything to pass away the heavy hours till Wist or Piquet relieve the female world from his intolerable silence. In other respects these visits were sufficiently perplexing. Every housewife can tell what a formidable guest is an epicure who comes to take pot luck—how sure it is to be bad luck, especially when the unfortunate hostess lives five miles from a market town. Mr. Sydney always came unseasonably, on washing day or Saturday or the day before a great party. So sure as we had a scrap dinner, so sure came he. My dear mother, who with true benevolence and hospitality cared much for her guest's comfort and nothing for her own pride, used to grieve over his disconfiture and try all that could be done by potted meats and omelets and little things tossed up on a sudden to amend the Bill of Fair. But cookery is an obstinate art and will have its time. However you may force the component parts, there is no forcing a dinner. Mr. Sydney had the evil habit of arriving just as the last bell rang, and in spite of all the hurry-scurry in the kitchen department the new niceties and the homely dishes was sure to disagree. There was a total want of keeping. The kick-shores were half raw, the solids were mere rags, the vegetables were cold, the soup was scalding, no shallots to the rump-stakes and no mushrooms with the broiled chicken, no fish, no oysters, no ice, no pineapple. Poor Mr. Sydney, he must have had a great regard for us to put up with our bad dinners. Perhaps the chance of a rubber had something to do with his visits to our house. If there be such a thing as a ruling passion, the love of whist was his. Cards were not merely the amusement but the business of his life. I do not mean as a money-making speculation, for although he belonged to a fashionable club in London, and to every card meeting of decent gentility within reach of his country home, he never went beyond a regular moderate stake, and could not be induced to bet, even by the rashest defyre of calculation or the most provoking undervaluer of his play. It always seemed to me that he regarded whist as far too important and scientific a pursuit to be degraded into an affair of gambling. It had in his eyes all the dignity of a study, an acquirement equally gentlemanly and clerical. It was undoubtedly his test of ability. He had the value of a man of family and a man of the world for rank and wealth and station and dignities of all sorts. No human being entertained a higher respect for a king, a prince, a prime minister, a duke, a bishop or a lord. But these were conventional feelings. His genuine and unfaigned veneration was reserved for him who played a good rubber, a praise he did not easily give. He was a capital player himself, and held all his country competitors except one in supreme and undisguised contempt which they endured to admiration. I wonder they didn't send him to Coventry. He was the most disagreeable partner in the world, and nearly as unpleasant an adversary. For he not only enforced the Pythagorean law of science, which makes one hate wist so, but used to distribute quite impartially to everyone at table little disagreeable observations on every card they played. It was not scolding or grumbling or fretting. One has a sympathy with those expressions of feeling, and at the worst can scold again. It was a smooth, polite commentary on the errors of the party, delivered in the calm tone of undoubted superiority, with which a great critic will sometimes take a small poet or a batch of poets to task in a review. How the people could bear it! But the world is a good-natured world, and doesn't like a man the less for treating it scornfully. So passed six evenings out of the seven with Mr. Sydney, for it was pretty well known that on the rare occurrence of his spending a day at home without company, his factotum Andrews used to have the honour of being beaten by his master in a snug game at Double Dumby. But what he did with himself on Sunday occasioned me some speculation. Never in my life did I see him take up a book, although he sometimes talked of Shakespeare and Milton and Johnson and Burke, in a manner which proved that he had heard of such things, and as to the newspaper which he did read, that was generally conned over long before night. Besides, he never exhibited spectacles, and I have a notion that he could not read newspaper type at night without them. How he could possibly get through the after-coffee hours on a Sunday puzzled me long. And chance solved the problem. He came to call on us after church, and agreed to dine and sleep at our house. The moment he was over, without the slightest apology or attempt at conversation, he drew his chair to the fire, set his feet on the fender, and fell first to sleep in the most comfortable and orderly manner possible. It was evidently a weakly habit. Every sense and limb seemed composed to it. Viper looked up in his face, curled himself round on the hearth rug, and went to sleep too. And Andrews, just as the clock struck twelve, came in to wake him that he might go to bed. It was clearly an invariable custom, a settled thing. His house and grounds were kept in the neatest manner possible. There was something even disagreeable in the excessive nicety, the dutch preciseness of the shining gravel walks, the smooth shaven turf of the lawn, and the fine sifted mould of the shrubberies. A few dead leaves or scattered flowers, even a weed or two, anything to take away from the artificial toy-like look of the place, would have been an improvement. Mr. Sidney, however, did not think so. He actually caused his gardener to remove those littering plants called roses and gum-systasis. Other flowers fared little better. No sooner were they in bloom than he pulled them up for fear they should drop. Indoors matters were still worse. The rooms and furniture were very handsome, abounding in the luxurious turkey carpets, the sofas, easy chairs, and ottomans, which his habits required. And yet I never in my life saw any house which looked less comfortable. Everything was so constantly in its place, so provokingly in order, so full of naked nicety and so thoroughly old, bachelor-ish. No work, no books, no music, no flowers. But for those two things of life, viper and a sparkling fire, one might have thought the place uninhabited. Once a year indeed it gave signs of animation in the shape of a Christmas party. That was Mr. Sidney's shining time. Nothing could exceed the smiling hospitality of the host or the lavish profusion of the entertainment. It breathed the very spirit of a welcome splendidly liberal, and little viper, frisked and bounded, and Andrew's tail vibrated, I was going to say, wagged, with cordiality and pleasure. Andrews, on these occasions, laid side his customary black in favour of a blue coat and a white silk-court waistcoat, with a light running pattern of embroidery and silver spangles, assumed to do honour to his master and the company. How much he enjoyed the applause which the wines and the cookery elicited from the gentleman, and how anxiously he would direct the lady's attention to a manuscript collection of riddles, the compilation of some deceased countess, laid on the drawing-room table for their amusement between dinner and tea. Once, I remember, he carried his attention so far as to produce a gone-by toy called a bandolore for the recreation of myself and another little girl, admitted by virtue of the Christmas holidays to this annual festival. Poor Andrews, I am convinced that he considered the entertainment of the visitors quite as much his affair as his master's, and certainly they both succeeded. Never did parties pass more pleasantly. On those evenings Mr. Sidney even forgot to find fault at Wist. At last, towards the end of a severe winter during which he had suffered much from repeated colds, that certain rectory became vacant, and our worthy neighbour hastened to take possession. The day before his journey he called on us in the highest spirits, anticipating a renewal of health and youth in this favourite spot, and approaching nearer than I had ever heard him, to adjust on the subject of looking for a wife. Married all single, he made us promise to visit him during the ensuing summer. Alas! long before the summer arrived, our poor friend was dead. He had waited for this living thirty years. He did not enjoy it thirty days. End of Chapter 13 Chapter 14 of Our Village Volume 1 by Mary Russell Mitford. Read by Anne Fletcher Hobart 2020. This liprevoque recording is in the public domain. Our Village Volume 1 Chapter 14 A Village Bow The finest young man in our village is undoubtedly Joel Brent, half-brother to my Lizzie. They are alike, too, as much alike as a grown-up person and a little child of different sexes well can be. Alike in a vigorous uprightness of form, light, firm and compact as possible. Alike in the bright, sparkling triumphant blue eye, the short curled upper lip, the brown wavy hair, the white forehead and sunburned cheeks, and above all, in the singular spirit and gaiety of their countenance and demeanour, the constant expression of life and glee, to which they owe the best and rarest part of their attractiveness. They seem, and they are, two of the happiest and merriest creatures that ever trod on the Greensward. Really, to see Joel walking by the side of his team, for this enviable mortal, the pride of our village, is by calling a carter. To see him walking on a fine, sunny morning by the side of his bell team, the forehorse decked with ribbons and flowers, like a countess on a birthday, as consciously handsome as his driver, the long whip poised gracefully on his shoulder, his little sister in his hand, and his dog Ranger, a beautiful red and white spaniel, everything that belongs to Joel is beautiful, frisking about them. To see this group and to hear the merry clatter formed by Lizzy's tongue, Joel's whistling and Ranger's delighted bark, is enough to put an amateur of pleasant sounds and happy faces in good humour for the day. It is a graceful sight in other respects, for Joel is a very picturesque person, just such a one as a painter would select for the foreground of some English landscape, where nature is shown in all her loveliness. His costume is the very perfection of rustic coquetry, of that grace which all admire and few practice, the grace of adaptation, the beauty of fitness. No one ever saw Joel in that wretched piece of deformity a coat, or that still wretched a apology for a coat, a dock-tailed jacket. Broadcloth, the common stale of peer and peasant, approaches him not, neither does the poor creature Faustian. His upper garment consists of that prettier jacket without skirts, a call it for the more grace a doublet, of dark velveteen hanging open over his waistcoat, giving a Spanish or an Italian heir to his whole appearance, and setting off to great advantage his trim yet manly shape. To this he adds a silk handkerchief, tied very loosely round his neck, a shirt collar opens so as to show his throat, as you commonly see in the portraits of artists, very loose trousers and a straw hat. Sometimes in cold weather he throws overall a smockfrock, and last winter brought up a fashion amongst our lads, by assuming one of that light blue waterloo, such as Butcher's wear. As soon as all his comrades had provided themselves with a similar piece of rustic finery, he abandoned his, and indeed generally sticks to his velveteen jacket, which by some magical influence of cleanliness and neatness always looks new. I cannot imagine how he contrives it, but dirt never hangs upon Joel. Even a fall at cricket in the summer or a tumble on the ice in the winter fails to soil him, and he is so ardent in his diversions, and so little disposed to let his coxcomery interfere with his sports that both have been pretty often tried. The former, especially ever since William Gray's secession, which took place shortly after our great match for no cause assigned, Joel has been the leader and chief of our cricketers. Perhaps indeed Joel's rapid improvement might be one cause of William's withdrawal. For without attributing anything like envy or jealousy to these fine young men, we all know that two stars keep not their motion in one sphere, and so forth, and if it were absolutely necessary that either our Harry Hotspur or the Prince of Wales should abdicate that fair kingdom the cricket ground, I must say that I am content to retain our present champion. Joel is in my mind the better player, joining to William's agility and certainty of hand and eye, all the ardour, force and gaiety of his own quick and lively spirit. The whole man is in the game, mind and body, and his success is such as dexterity and enthusiasm united must always command, and to be sure he is a little overeager, that I must confess, and does occasionally run out a slow mate, but he is sure to make up for it by his own exertions, and after all what a delightful fault Zeal is. Now that we are on the subject of faults, it must be said not that Joel has his share, which is of course, but that they are exceedingly venial, little shades that become him and arise out of his brighter qualities as smoke from the flame. Thus if he sometimes steals one of his active holidays for a revel or a cricket match, he is sure to make up the loss to his master by a double portion of labour the next day, and if now and then, at tied times, he loiters in the chimney corner of the rose rather longer than strict prudence might warrant, no one can hear his laugh and his song pouring through the open door like the very voice of jest and youthful jollity without feeling certain that it is good fellowship and not good liquor that detains him. Indeed, so much is he the delight of the country lads who frequent that well accustomed in, so much is his company sought after in all rustic junkettings that I am only astonished at the strength of resolution and power of resisting temptation which he displays in going thither so seldom. If our village lads be so fond of him, it is not to be doubted that our village maidens like him too. The pretty brunette, Sally Wheeler, who left a good service at B to take in needlework and come home to her grandmother, she being, to use Sally's phrase, anket for want of company, though do note, Dame Wheeler is as deaf as a post, a cannon would not rouse her, is thought in our little world to have had an eye to joe in this excess of dutifulness. Ms. Phoebe, the lass of the rose, she also before her late splendid marriage to the pattern-maker, is said to have be curled and be flounced herself at least two tears higher on club nights and Sundays and holidays, and whenever there was a probable chance of meeting him. The gay recruiting sergeant and all other bows were abandoned the instant he appeared. Nay, it is even hinted that the pattern-maker owes his fair bride partly to peek at Joel's indifference. Then, Miss Sophia Matthews, the schoolmistress on the lee, to whom in point of dignity Miss Phoebe was nothing, who wears a muff and a veil, walks mincingly and tosses her head in the air, keeps a maid, a poor little drab of ten years old, follows, as she says, a gentile profession. I think she may have twenty scholars at eight pence a week. And when she goes to dine with her brother, the collar-maker, hires a boy for a penny to carry her clogs. Miss Sophia, it is well known, hath permitted her dignity in the matter of Joel, hath invited the whole family to tea, only think of Joel at a tea-party, hath spoken of him as a person above the common, a respectable young man, a one who with a discreet and accomplished wife, a woman of reading and education. Miss Sophia in the days of her father, the late collar-maker of happy memory, before she taught the young idea how to shoot, had herself drunk deeply at that well of knowledge the circulating library of B. Not too young, Miss Sophia calls herself twenty-eight, I wonder what the register says, no brazen-faced gypsy like Sally Wheeler. Miss Sophia's cast of countenance is altogether different from Sally's dark and sparkling beauty, she being pink-eyed, red-haired, lean, pale, and freckled. All the jewel-flirt are feebly, but to cut short a narration, which in spite of the lady's gentility began to grow rather scurrilous, one fact was certain, that Joel might, had he so chosen, have worn the crown matrimonial in Miss Sophia's territories, consisting of a freehold cottage, the little the worse for where, a good garden, a capital orchard, and an extensive rite of common, to say nothing of the fair damsel and her school, or, as she is accustomed to call it, her seminary. Joel's proud, bright eye glanced, however, carelessly over all. There was little perceptible difference of feeling in the gay, distant smile with which he regarded the coquettish advances of the pretty brunette Sally Wheeler, or the respectful bow with which he retreated from the undignified condescension of Miss Sophia. He fluttered about our village bells like a butterfly over a bed of tulips, sometimes approaching them for a moment, and seeming then ready to fix, but oftener above and out of reach, a creature of a sprightlier element, too buoyant and volatile to light on an earthly flower. At last, however, the rover was caught, and our damsel Harriet had the glory of winning that indomitable heart. Now Harriet is in all things Lucy's successor, in post and favour and beauty and lovers. In my eye she is still prettier than Lucy. There is something so feminine and so attractive in her loveliness. She is a tall young woman, finally though for eighteen rather fully formed, with a sweet childlike face, a fair blooming complexion, a soft innocent smile, and the eye of a dove. Add to this a gentle voice, a quiet modest manner, and a natural gentility of appearance, and no wonder that Harriet might vie with her predecessor in the number of her admirers. She inherited also a spice of her coquetry, although it was shown in so different a way that we did not immediately find it out. Lucy was a flirt active, Harriet was a flirt passive. Lucy talked to her beau, and Harriet only listened to hers. Lucy went challenged on the number of her conquests, denied the thing, and blushed and laughed, and liked to be laughed at. Harriet, on a similar charge, gave no token of liking or denial, but said quietly that she couldn't help it, and went on winning hearts by dozens, prodigal of smiles but cherry of love, till Joel came, pleased her by manners most unlike her own, and gave to her delicate womanly beauty the only charms it wanted, sensibility and consciousness. The manner in which we discovered this new flirtation, which, unlike her others, was concealed with the pretty reserve and mystery that wait on true love, was sufficiently curious. We had noted Joel more frequently than common about the house. Sometimes he came for Lizzie, sometimes to bring news of a cricket match, sometimes to ask questions about bats and balls, sometimes to see if his dog Ranger had followed my May, sometimes to bring me a nose-gay. All this occasioned no suspicion. We were too glad to see Joel to think of inquiring why he came. But when the days shortened, and evening closed in dark and cold before his work was done, and cricket and flowers were over, and May and Lizzie safe in their own warm beds, and poor Joel's excuses fairly at an end, then it was that in the after-dinner pause, about seven, when the clatter of plates and dishes was over, that the ornithological ear of the master of the house, a dapler in natural history, was struck by a regular and melodious call, the note, as he averred, of a skylark. That a skylark should sing in front of our house at seven o'clock on a December evening seemed, to say the least, rather startling. But our ornithologist, happening to agree with Mr. White of Selbourne, in the opinion that many more birds sing by night than is commonly supposed, and becoming more and more confident of the identity of the note, thought the thing possible, and not being able to discover any previous notice of the fact, had nearly inserted it as an original observation in the naturalist calendar, when running out suddenly one moonlight night to try for a peep at the nocturnal songster, he caught our friend Joel, whose accomplishments in this line we had never dreamt of, in the act of whistling a summons to his lady-love. For some weeks our demure coquette listened to none but this bird-like wooing, partly from pride in the conquest, and partly from real preference, and partly, I believe, from a lurking consciousness that Joel was by no means a lover to be trifled with. Indeed, he used to threaten between jest and earnest a ducking in the goose-pond opposite to whoever should presume to approach his fair intended, and the waters being high and muddy, and he at all points a formidable rival, most of her former admirers were content to stay away. At last, however, she relapsed into her old sin of listening. A neighbouring farmer gave a ball in his barn to which both our lovers were invited and went. Now Harriet loves dancing, and Joel, though arrayed in a new jacket and thin cricketing pumps, would not dance. He said he could not, but that, as Harriet observes, is incredible. I agree with her that the gentleman was too fine. He chose to stand and look on, and laugh and make laugh the whole evening. In the meantime, his fair betrothed picked up a new partner and a new bow, in the shape of a freshly arrived carpenter, a grand, martial-looking figure as tall as a grenadier, who was recently engaged as foreman to our civil wheeler, and who, even if he had heard of the denunciation, was of a size and spirit to set Joel and the goose-pond at defiance. David might as well have attempted to goose-pond Goliath. He danced the whole evening with his pretty partner, and afterwards saw her home, all of which Joel bore with great philosophy. But the next night he came again, and Joel, approaching to give his own Skylark signal, was startled at seeing another lover leaning over the wicket, and his faithless mistress standing at the half-open door, listening to the tall carpenter just as complacently as she was wont to do to himself. He passed on without speaking, turned down the little lane that leads to Dame Wheeler's cottage, and in less than two minutes Harriet heard the love-call sounded at Sally's gate. The effect was instantaneous. She discarded the tall carpenter at once and for ever, locked and bolted the door, and sat down to work or to cry in the kitchen. She did not cry long. The next night we heard again the note of the Skylark, louder and more brilliant than ever echoing across our court, and the lovers, the better friends for their little quarrel, have been as constant as turtle doves ever since. Do them justice, tenacious enough of their distinctive and peculiar faculties and powers, have yet, by common consent, made over to the females the single gift of locustity. Every man thinks and says that every woman talks more than he. It is the creed of the whole sex, the debates and law reports notwithstanding. And every masculine eye that has scanned my title has already, I doubt not, looked to the errata, suspecting a mistake in the gender. But it is their misconception, not my mistake. I do not heaven forbid intend to impune or abrogate our female privilege. I do not dispute that we do excel, generally speaking, in the use of the tongue. I only mean to assert that one gentleman does exist, whom I have the pleasure of knowing intimately, who stands preeminent and unrivaled in the art of talking, unmatched and unapproached by man, woman or child. Since the decease of my poor friend, the talking lady, who dropped down speechless in the midst of a long story about nine weeks ago, and was immediately known to be dead by her silence, I should be at a loss where to seek a competitor to contend with him in a race of words. And I should be still more puzzled to find one that can match him in wit, pleasantry or good humour. My friend is usually called Harry L. For though a man of substance, a lord of land, a magistrate, a field officer of militia, nobody ever dreamed of calling him mister or major, or by any such derogatory title. He is and will be all his life plain Harry, the name of universal good will. He is indeed the pleasantest fellow that lives. His talk, one can hardly call it conversation, as that would seem to imply another interlocutor, something like reciprocity, is an incessant flow of good things, like Congreve's comedies without a replying speaker, or Joe Miller laid into one, and its perpetual stream is not lost and dispersed by diffusion, but runs in one constant channel, playing and sparkling like a fountain, the delight and ornament of our good town of B. Harry L. is a perfect example of provincial reputation, of local fame. There is not an urchin in the town that hasn't heard of him, nor an old woman that doesn't chuckle by anticipation at his approach. The citizens of B. are as proud of him as the citizens of Antwerp were of the Chapeau de Paix, and they have the advantage of the luckless Flemings in the certainty that their boast is not to be purchased. Harry, like the Flemish beauty, is native to the spot, for he was born at B., educated at B., and married at B. Though as his beautiful wife brought him a good estate in a distant part of the country, there seemed at that epoch of his history some danger of his being lost to our ancient borough. But he is a social and gregarious animal, so he leaves his pretty place in Devonshire to take care of itself, and lives here in the midst of a hive. His tastes are not at all rural. He's no sportsman, no farmer, no lover of strong exercise. When at B., his walks are quite regular, from his own house, on one side of the town, to a gossip shop called Literary, on the other, where he talks and reads newspapers, and others read newspapers, and listen. Then he proceeds to another house of news similar in kind, though differing in name, in an opposite quarter, where he and his hearers undergo the same process, and then he returns home, forming a pretty exact triangle of about half a mile. This is his daily exercise, or rather his daily walk, of exercise he takes abundance, not only in talking, though that is nearly as good to open the chest as the dumbbells, but in a general restlessness and fidgetedness of person, the result of his ardent and nervous temperament which can hardly endure repose of mind or body. He neither gives rest nor takes it. His company is indeed, in one sense, only one, fatiguing. Listening to him tires you like a journey. You laugh till you're forced to lie down. The medical gentlemen of the place are aware of this, and are accustomed to exhort delicate persons to abstain from Harry's society, just as they caution them against temptations in point of amusement or of diet. Pleasant, but dangerous. Choloric gentlemen should also avoid him, and such as love to have the last word, for though never provoked himself, I cannot deny that he is occasionally tolerably provoking, in politics especially, and he is an ultra-liberal, quotes Cobbett and goes rather too far. In politics he loves to put his antagonist in a fume, and generally succeeds, though it's nearly the only subject on which he ever listens to an answer, chiefly I believe for the sake of a reply, which is commonly some trenchant repartee that cuts off the poor answer's head like a razor. Very determined speakers would also do well to eschew his company, though in general I never met with any talker to whom other talkers were so ready to give way, perhaps because he keeps them in such incessant laughter that they're not conscious of their silence. To himself the number of his listeners is altogether unimportant. His speech flows not from vanity or lust of praise, but from sheer necessity. The reservoir is full and runs over. When he has no one else to talk to, he can be content with his own company, and talks to himself, being beyond a doubt greater in a soliloquy than any man off the stage. Where he is not known, this habit sometimes occasions considerable consternation and very ridiculous mistakes. He has been taken alternately for an actor, a poet, a man in love, and a man beside himself. Once in particular, at Windsor, he greatly alarmed a philanthropic sentinel by holding forth at his usual rate while pacing the terrace alone, and but for the opportune arrival of his party and their assurances that it was only the gentleman's way, there was some danger that the benevolent soldier might have been tempted to desert his post to take care of him. Even after this explanation he gazed with a doubtful eye at our friend, who was haranguing himself in great style, sighed and shook his head and finally implored us to look well after him till he should be safe off the terrace. You see, ma'am, observe the philanthropist in Scarlet, it is an awkward place for anybody troubled with vagaries. Suppose the poor soul should take a fancy to jump over the wall. In his externals he is a well-looking gentleman of forty or, thereabouts, rather thin and rather pale, but with no appearance of ill-health, nor any other peculiarity, except the remarkable circumstances of the lashes of one eye being white, which gives a singular non-resemblance to his organs of vision. Everyone perceives the want of uniformity and few can detect the cause. Some suspect him of what farriers call a wall-eye, some think he squints. He himself talks familiarly of his two eyes, the black and the white, and used to liken them to those of our fine Persian cat, now alas, no more, who had in common with his feline countrymen one eye blue as a sapphire and the other as yellow as a topaz. The dissimilarity certainly rather spoils his beauty, but greatly improves his wit, I mean the sense of his wit in others. It arrests attention and predisposes to laughter, is an outward and visible sign of the comical. No common man has two such eyes. They're made for fun. In his occupations and pleasures Harry is pretty much like other provincial gentlemen. Loves a robber and jests all through at aces, kings, queens and knaves, bad cards and good, at winning and losing, scolding and praise. Loves a play, at which he out-talks the actors whilst on the stage, to say nothing of the advantage he has over them in the intervals between the acts. Loves music as a good accompaniment to his grand solo. Loves a contested election above all. That is his real element, that din and uproar and riot and confusion. To ride that whirlwind and direct that storm is his triumph of triumphs. He would make a great sensation in Parliament himself and a pleasant one. By the way he was once in danger of being turned out of the gallery for setting all around him in a roar. Think what a fine thing it would be for the members to have mirth introduced into the body of the house, to be sure of an honest, hearty and good humoured laugh every night during the session. Besides, Harry is an admirable speaker in every sense of the word. Jesting is indeed his forte because he wills it to be so, and therefore because he chooses to play jigs and country dances on a noble organ even some of his staunchest admirers think he can play nothing else. There is no quality of which men so much grudge the reputation as versatility of talent. Because he is so humorous they will hardly allow him to be eloquent, and because he is so very witty, find it difficult to account him wise. But let him go where he has not that mischievous fame, or let him bridle his jests and rein in his humour only for one short hour, and he will pass for a most reverent orator, logical, pathetic and vigorous above all. But how can I wish him to cease jesting even for an hour? Who would exchange the genial fame of good, humoured wit for the stern reputation of wisdom? Who would choose to be Socrates if with a wish he could be Harry L? End of Chapter 28