 The Preface to Our Village Volume 1 by Mary Russell Mitford, read by Anne Fletcher Hobart 2020. The following pages contain an attempt to delineate country scenery and country manners, as they exist in a small village in the south of England. The writer may at least claim the merit of a hearty love of her subject, and of that local and personal familiarity, which only a long residence in one neighbourhood could have enabled her to attain. Her descriptions have always been written on the spot and at the moment, and in nearly every instance with the closest and most resolute fidelity to the place and the people. If she be accused of having given a brighter aspect to her villages than is usually met within books, she cannot help it, and would not if she could. She has painted as they appear to her their little frailties and their many virtues, under an intense and thankful conviction that in every condition of life, goodness and happiness may be found by those who seek them, and never more surely than in the fresh air, the shade, and the sunshine of nature. End of the Preface Of all situations for a constant residence, that which appears to me the most delightful is a little village far in the country. A small neighbourhood, not of fine mansions finely peopled, but of cottages and cottage-like houses, messages or tenements, as a friend of mine calls such ignoble and nondescript dwellings, with inhabitants whose faces are as familiar to us as the flowers in our garden. A little world of our own, close-packed and insulated, like ants in an ant-hill, or bees in a hive, or sheep in a fold or nuns in a convent or sailors in a ship, where we know everyone, are known to everyone, interested in everyone, and authorised to hope that everyone feels an interest in us. How pleasant it is to slide into these true-hearted feelings from the kindly and unconscious influence of habit, and to learn to know and to love the people about us, with all their peculiarities, just as we learn to know and to love the nooks and turns of the shady lanes and sunny commons that we pass every day. Even in books I like a confined locality, and so do the critics when they talk of the unities. Nothing is so tiresome as to be whirled half over Europe at the chariot-wheels of a hero, to go to sleep at Vienna and waken at Madrid. It produces a real fatigue, a weariness of spirit. On the other hand, nothing is so delightful as to sit down in a country village in one of Miss Austen's delicious novels, quite sure before we leave it, to become intimate with every spot and every person it contains, or to ramble with Mr. White over his own parish of Selbourne, and form a friendship with the fields and coppices, as well as with the birds, mice and squirrels who inhabit them, or to sail with Robinson Crusoe to his island, and live there with him and his goats and his man Friday. And the footnote to Mr. White. White's natural history and antiquities of Selbourne, one of the most fascinating books ever written, I wonder that no naturalist has adopted the same plan. End of footnote. How much we dread any newcomers, any fresh importation of savage or sailor! We never sympathise for a moment in our hero's want of company, and are quite grieved when he gets away, or to be shipwrecked with Ferdinand on that other lovely island, the island of Prospero and Miranda and Caliban and Ariel, and nobody else, none of Dryden's exotic inventions. That is the best of all. And a small neighbourhood is as good in sober waking reality as in poetry or prose. A village neighbourhood, such as this Berkshire Hamlet in which I write, a long, straggling, winding street at the bottom of a fine eminence, with a road through it, always abounding in carts, horsemen and carriages, and lately enlivened by a stagecoach from town B to S, which passed through about ten days ago, and will I suppose return some time or other. There are coaches of all varieties nowadays, perhaps this may be intended for a monthly diligence or a fortnight fly. Will you walk with me through our village, courteous reader? The journey is not long. We will begin at the lower end and proceed up the hill. The tidy square red cottage on the right hand, with the long, well-stocked garden by the side of the road, belongs to a retired publican from a neighbouring town, a substantial person with a comely wife, one who peaks himself on independence and idleness, talks politics, reads newspapers, hates the minister and cries out for reform. He introduced into our peaceful viscinaage the rebellious innovation of an illumination on the Queen's acquittal. Remonstrance and persuasion were in vain. He talked of liberty and broken windows, so we all lighted up. Oh, how he shone that night with candles and laurel and white bows and gold paper, and a transparency, originally designed for a pocket handkerchief, with a flaming portrait of Her Majesty, hatted and feathered in red ochre. He had no rival in the village that we all acknowledged. The very bonfire was less splendid. The little boys reserved their best crackers to be expended in his honour, and he gave them full sixpence more than any one else. He would like an illumination once a month, for it must not be concealed, that in spite of gardening, of newspaper reading, of jaunting about in his little cart, and frequenting both church and meeting, our worthy neighbour begins to feel the weariness of idleness. He hangs over his gate, and tries to entice passengers to stop and chat. He volunteers little jobs all round, smokes cherry trees to cure the blight, and traces and blows up all the waspinests in the parish. I have seen a great many wasps in our garden today, and shall enchant him with the intelligence. He even assists his wife in her sweepings and dustings. Poor man, he is a very respectable person, and would be a very happy one if he would add a little employment to his dignity. It would be the salt of life to him. Next to his house, though parted from it by another long garden with a ewe arbour at the end, is the pretty dwelling of the shoemaker, a pale, sickly-looking black-haired man, the very model of sober industry. There he sits in his little shop, from early morning till late at night. An earthquake would hardly stir him. The illumination did not. He stuck immovably to his last, from the first lighting up, through the long blaze and the slow decay, till his large solitary candle was the only light in the place. One cannot conceive anything more perfect than the contempt which the man of transparencies and the man of shoes must have felt for each other on that evening. There was at least as much vanity in the sturdy industry as in the strenuous idleness, for our shoemaker is a man of substance. He employs three journeymen, two lame and one adwarf, so that his shop looks like a hospital. He has purchased the lease of his commodious dwelling. Some even say he has bought it out and out. And he has only one pretty daughter, a light, delicate, fair-haired girl of fourteen, the champion, protectress and play-fellow of every brat under three years old, whom she jumps, dances, dandals and feeds all day long. A very attractive person is that child-loving girl. I have never seen any one in her station who possessed so thoroughly that undefinable charm the lady-look. See her on a Sunday in her simplicity and her white frock, and she might pass for an earl's-daughter. She likes flowers, too, and has a profusion of white stocks under her window, as pure and delicate as herself. The first house on the opposite side of the way is the blacksmith's, a gloomy dwelling where the sun never seems to shine, dark and smoky within and without, like a forge. The blacksmith is a high-officer in our little state, nothing less than a constable. But alas, alas, when two malts arise and the constable is called for, he will commonly be found in the thickest of the fray. Lucky would it be for his wife and her eight children, if there were no public house in the land. An inveterate inclination to enter those bewitching doors is Mr. Constable's only fault. Next to this official dwelling is a spruce brick tenement, red, high and narrow, boasting, one above the other, three sash windows, the only sash windows in the village, with a clematis on one side and a rose on the other, tall and narrow like itself. That slender mansion has a fine, genteel look. The little parlour seems made for Hogarth's old maid and her stunted foot-boy, for tea and card parties. It would just hold one table, for the rustle of faded silks and the splendour of old China, for the delight of four bionnas and a little snug, quiet scandal between the deals, for affected gentility and real starvation. This should have been its destiny, but fate has been unpropitious. It belongs to a plump, merry bustling dame with four fat, rosy, noisy children, the very essence of vulgarity and plenty. Then comes the village shop, like other village shops, multifarious as a bazaar, a repository for bread, shoes, tea, cheese, tape, ribbons and bacon, for everything in short except the one particular thing which you happen to want at the moment and will be sure not to find. The people are civil and thriving and frugal with all. They have let the upper part of their house to two young women. One of them is a pretty blue-eyed girl who teach little children their A, B, C and make caps and gowns for their memars, parcel schoolmistress, parcel mantua-maker. I believe they find adorning the body a more profitable vocation than adorning the mind. Divided from the shop by a narrow yard and opposite the shoemakers is a habitation of whose inmates I shall say nothing. A cottage, no, a miniature house, with many additions, little odds and ends of places, pantries and what-nots, all angles and of a charming inn and outness, a little bricked court before one half and a little flower-yard before the other. The walls, old and weather-stained, covered with hollyhocks, roses, honeysuckles, and a great apricot tree, the casements full of geraniums. Oh, there is our superb white cat peeping out from amongst them. The closets, our landlord has the assurance to call them rooms, full of contrivances and corner cupboards, and the little garden behind, full of common flowers, tulips, pinks, laksburs, peonies, stocks and carnations, with an harbour of privet, not unlike a sentry box, where one lives in a delicious green light and looks out on the gayest of all gay flower beds. That house was built on purpose to show in what an exceeding small compass, comfort may be packed. Well, I will loiter there no longer. The next tenement is a place of importance, the Rose Inn, a white-washed building retired from the road behind its fine-swinging sign, with a little bow-window room coming out on one side, and forming, with our stable on the other, a sort of open square, which is the constant resort of carts, wagons, and return chases. There are two carts there now, and my host is serving them with beer in his eternal red waistcoat. He is a thriving man, and a portly, as his waistcoat attests, which has been twice let out within this twelve-month. Our landlord has a stirring wife, a hopeful son, and a daughter, the belle of the village, not so pretty as the fair nymph of the shoe-shop and far less elegant, but ten times as fine. All curl-papers in the morning, like a porcupine, all curls in the afternoon, like a poodle, with more flounces than curl-papers and more lovers than curls. Miss Phoebe is fitter for town than country, and to do her justice she has a consciousness of that fitness, and turns her steps townward as often as she can. She has gone to town B today with her last and principal lover, a recruiting sergeant, a man as tall as Sergeant Kite, and as impudent. Someday or other he will carry off Miss Phoebe. In a line with the bow-window room is a low garden-wall belonging to a house under repair, the White House opposite the Collermaker's shop, with four lime-trees before it, and a wagon-load of bricks at the door. That house is the plaything of a wealthy, well-meaning whimsical person who lives about a mile off. He has a passion for brick and mortar, and being too wise to meddle with his own residence, diverts himself with altering and re-altering, improving and re-improving, doing and undoing, here. It is a perfect Penelope's web. Carpenters and bricklayers have been at work for these eighteen months, and yet I sometimes stand and wonder whether anything has really been done. One exploit in last June was, however, by no means equivocal. Our good neighbour fancied that the limes shaded the rooms and made them dark. There was not a creature in the house but the workman, so he had all the leaves stripped from every tree. There they stood, poor, miserable skeletons, as bare as Christmas under the glowing Midsummer Sun. Nature revenged itself in her own sweet and gracious manner. Fresh leaves sprang out, and at nearly Christmas the foliage was as brilliant as when the outrage was committed. Next door lives a carpenter, famed for ten miles round and worthy all his fame. Few cabinet-makers surpass him, with his excellent wife and their daughter Lizzie, the plaything and queen of the village, a child three years old according to the register, but six in size and strength and intellect, in power and in self-will. She manages everybody in the place, her schoolmistress included, turns the wheel as children out of their own little cart, and makes them draw her, seduces cakes and lollipops from the very shop window, makes the lazy carry her, the silent talk to her, the grave romp with her. Does anything she pleases is absolutely irresistible. Her chief attraction lies in her exceeding power of loving, and her firm reliance on the love and indulgences of others. How impossible it would be to disappoint the dear little girl when she runs to meet you, slides her pretty hand into yours, looks up gladly in your face and says, come. You must go, you cannot help it. Another part of her charm is her singular beauty. Together with a good deal of the character of Napoleon, she has something of his square, sturdy upright form, with the finest limbs in the world, a complexion purely English, a round laughing face, sunburnt and rosy, large merry blue eyes, curling brown hair, and a wonderful play of countenance. She has the imperial attitudes too, and loves to stand with her hands behind her or fold it over her bosom, and sometimes when she has a little touch of shyness, she clasps them together on the top of her head, pressing down her shining curls and looking so exquisitely pretty. Yes, Lizzie is queen of the village. She has but one rival in her dominions, a certain white greyhound called Mayflower, much her friend, and resembles her in beauty and strength, in playfulness and almost in sagacity, and reigns over the animal world as she over the human. They are both coming with me, Lizzie, and Lizzie's pretty May. We are now at the end of the street, across lane, a rope walk shaded with limes and oaks, and a cool clear pond over hung with elms, leaders to the bottom of the hill. There is still one house round the corner, ending in a picturesque wheeler's shop. The dwelling-house is more ambitious. Look at the fine-flowered window-blinds, the green door with the brass knocker, and the somewhat prim but very civil person, who is sending off a laboring man with sers and curses enough for a prince of the blood. Those are the curate's lodgings, apartments, his landlady would call them. He lives with his own family four miles off, but once or twice a week he comes to his neat little parlor to write sermons, to marry or to bury, as the case may require. Never were better or kinder people than his host and hostess, and there is a reflection of clerical importance about them since their connection with the church, which is quite edifying. A decorum, a gravity, a solemn politeness. Oh, to see the worthy wheeler carry the gown after his lodger on a Sunday, nicely pinned up in his wife's best handkerchief, or to hear him rebuke a squalling child or a squabbling woman. The curate is nothing to him. He is fit to be perpetual churchwarden. We must now cross the lane into the shady rope-walk. That pretty white cottage opposite, which stands straggling at the end of the village in a garden full of flowers, belongs to our mason, the shortest of men, and his handsome, tall wife. He adwarf with the voice of a giant. One starts when he begins to talk, as if he was shouting through a speaking trumpet. She, the sister, daughter, and granddaughter of a long line of gardeners, and no contemptible one herself. It is very magnanimous in me not to hate her, for she beats me in my own way in chrysanthemums and dailiers and the like-gords. Her plants are sure to live. I have a sad trick of dying, perhaps because I love them, not wisely, but too well, and kill them with overkindness. Halfway up the hill is another detached cottage, the residence of an officer and his beautiful family. That eldest boy, who is hanging over the gate and looking with such intense childish admiration at my Lizzie, might be a model for a cupid. How pleasantly the road winds up the hill, with its broad green borders and hedgerows so thickly timbered. How finally the evening sun falls on that sandy excavated bank, and touches the farmhouse on the top of the eminence. And how clearly defined and relieved is the figure of the man who is just coming down. It is poor John Evans, the gardener. An excellent gardener till about ten years ago, when he lost his wife and became insane. He was sent to St. Luke's, and dismissed as cured, but his power was gone and his strength. He could no longer manage a garden, nor submit to the restraint nor encounter the fatigue of regular employment. So he retreated to the work-house, the pensioner and factotum of the village, amongst whom he divides his services. His mind often wanders, intent on some fantastic and impracticable plan, and lost to present objects. But he is perfectly harmless, and full of a childlike simplicity, a smiling contentedness, a most touching gratitude. Everyone is kind to John Evans, for there is that about him which must be loved, and his unprotectedness, his utter defenselessness, have an irresistible claim on every better feeling. I know nobody who inspires so deep and tender a pity. He improves all around him. He is useful too, to the extent of his little power, will do anything, but loves gardening best, and still peaks himself on his old arts of pruning fruit trees and raising cucumbers. He is the happiest of men just now, for he has the management of a melon-bed—a melon-bed—fie. What a grand-pomper's name was that for three melon-plants under a hand-light! John Evans is sure that they will succeed. We shall see, as the Chancellor said, I doubt. We are now on the very brow of the Eminence, close to Hill House and its beautiful garden. On the outer edge of the pailing, hanging over the bank that skirts the road, is an old thorn—such a thorn! The long sprays covered with snowy blossoms, so graceful, so elegant, so lightsome, and yet so rich! There only wants a pool under the thorn, to give a still, lovely a reflection, quivering and trembling like a tuft of feathers, whiter and greener than the life, and more prettily mixed with the bright blue sky. There should indeed be a pool, but on the dark grass-plat under the high bank, which is crowned by that magnificent plume, there is something that does almost as well. Lizzie and Mayflower in the midst of a game at Romps, making a sunshine in the shady place. Lizzie rolling, laughing, clapping her hands and glowing like a rose. Mayflower playing about her like summer lightning, dazzling the eyes with her sudden turns, her leaps, her bounds, her attacks and her escapes. She darts round the lovely little girl with the same momentary touch that the swallow skims over the water, and has exactly the same power of flight, the same matchless ease and strength and grace. What a pretty picture they would make, what a pretty foreground they do make to the real landscape. The road winding down the hill with a slight bend, like that in the high street at Oxford, a wagon slowly ascending, and a horseman passing it at a full trot. Oh, Lizzie, Mayflower will certainly desert you to have a gamble with that blood horse. Halfway down, just at the turn, the red cottage of the lieutenant, covered with vines, the very image of comfort and content. Farther down, on the opposite side, the small white dwelling of the little mason, then the limes and the rope-walk, then the village street, peeping through the trees, whose clustering tops hide all but the chimneys and various roofs of the houses, and here and there some angle of a wall. Farther on, the elegant town of Bee, with its fine old church towers and spires, the whole view shut in by a range of chalky hills, and over every part of the picture, trees so profusely scattered that it appears like a woodland scene with glades and villages intermixed. The trees are of all kinds and all hues, chiefly the finely shaped elm, of so bright and deeper green, the tips of whose high outer branches drop down with such a crisp and garland-like richness, and the oak, whose stately form is just now so splendidly adorned by the sunny colouring of the young leaves. Turning again up the hill, we find ourselves on that peculiar charm of English scenery, a green common, divided by the road, the right side fringed by hedged rows and trees with cottages and farmhouses irregularly placed and terminated by a double avenue of noble oaks. The left, prettier still, dappled by bright pools of water and islands of cottages and cottage gardens, and sinking gradually down to cornfields and meadows and an old farmhouse with pointed roofs and clustered chimneys, looking out from its blooming orchard and backed by woody hills. The common is itself the prettiest part of the prospect, half covered with low furs, whose golden blossoms reflect so intensely the last beams of the setting sun, and alive with cows and sheep, and two sets of cricketers, one of young men surrounded by spectators, some standing, some sitting, some stretched on the grass, all taking a delighted interest in the game, the other a merry group of little boys at a humble distance, for whom even cricket is scarcely lively enough, shouting, leaping, and enjoying themselves to their heart's content. But cricketers and country boys are two important persons in our village to be talked of merely as figures in the landscape. They deserve an individual introduction, an essay to themselves, and they shall have it. No fear of forgetting the good, humid faces that meet us in our walks every day. End of Chapter 1. Chapter 2, Part 1 of Our Village, Volume 1 by Mary Russell Mitford, read by Anne Fletcher, Hobart, 2020. This lipovoct recording is in the public domain. Our Village, Volume 1. Walks in the Country, Part 1. Frost and Thor. January 23rd. At noon today, I and my white greyhound Mayflower set out for a walk into a very beautiful world, a sort of silent fairyland, a creation of that matchless magician, the Hawfrost. There had been just snow enough to cover the earth and all its colours, with one sheet of pure and uniform white, and just time enough since the snow had fallen to allow the hedges to be freed of their fleecy load and clothed with the delicate coating of rhyme. The atmosphere was deliciously calm, soft, even mild, in spite of the thermometer. No perceptible air, but a stillness that might almost be felt. The sky, rather grey than blue, throwing out in bold relief the snow-covered roofs of our village, and the rimy trees that rise above them, and the sun shining dimly as through a veil, giving a pale, fair light like the moon, only brighter. There was a silence, too, that might become the moon, as we stood at our little gate, looking up the quiet street. A Sabbath-like pause of work and play, rare on a workday. Nothing was audible but the pleasant hum of frost, that loam and not in a sound, which is perhaps the nearest approach that life and nature can make to absolute silence. The very wagons as they come down the hill along the beaten track of crisp yellowish frost-dust, glide along like shadows. Even May's bounding footsteps, at her height of glee and of speed, fall like snow upon snow. But we shall have noise enough presently. May has stopped at Lizzie's door, and Lizzie, as she sat on the windowsill with her bright rosy face laughing through the casement, has seen her and disappeared. She's coming. Oh, no! The key is turning in the door, and sounds of evil omen issue through the keyhole. Sturdy, let me out, and I will goes! Mixed with shrill cries on May and me from Lizzie, piercing through a low, continuous harangue, of which the prominent parts are, apologies, chill-blanes, sliding and broken bones, lollipops, rods and gingerbread, from Lizzie's careful mother. Don't scratch the door, May. Oh, don't roar so, my Lizzie. We'll call for you as we come back. I'll go now. Let me out. I will go, are the last words of Miss Lizzie. Uh, memo to self. Not to spoil that child if I can help it. But I do think her mother might have let the poor little soul walk with us today. Nothing worse for children than coddling, and nothing better for chill-blanes than exercise. Besides, I don't believe she has any. And as to breaking her bones in sliding, I don't suppose there's a slide on the common. These murmuring cogitations have brought us up the hill, and half-way across the light and airy common, with its bright expanse of snow and its cluster of cottages, whose turf fires send such wreaths of smoke sailing up the air, and diffuse such aromatic fragrance around. And now comes the delightful sound of childish voices, ringing with glee and merriment almost from beneath our feet. Ah, Lizzie, your mother was right. They are shouting from that deep, irregular pool, all glass now, where on two long, smooth, liney slides, half a dozen ragged urchins are slipping along in tottering triumph. Half a dozen steps bring us to the bank right above them. May can hardly resist the temptation of joining her friends, for most of the violets are of her acquaintance, especially the rogue who leads the slide. He with the brimless hat, whose bronzed complexion and white flaxen hair, reversing the usual lights and shadows of the human countenance, give so strange and foreign a look to his flat and comic features. This hobgoblin, Jack Rappley by name, is May's great crony, and she stands on the brink of the steep, irregular descent. Her black eyes fixed full upon him, as if she intended him the favour of jumping on his head. She does. She's down and upon him. But Jack Rappley is not easily to be knocked off his feet. He saw her coming, and in the moments of her leap, sprung dexterously off the slide on the rough ice, steadying himself by the shoulder of the next in the file, which, unlucky follower, thus unexpectedly checked in his career, fell plump backwards, knocking down the rest of the line like a nest of card houses. There's no harm done, but there they lie, roaring, kicking and sprawling, in every attitude of comic distress, while Jack Rappley and Mayflower, sole authors of this calamity, stand apart from the throng, fondling and coquettting and complimenting each other, and very visibly laughing, May in her black eyes, and Jack in his wide, closed shut mouth, and his whole monkey face at their comrade's mischances. I think, Miss May, you may as well come up again and leave Master Rappley to fight your battles. He'll get out of the scrape. He's a rustic wit, a sort of Robin Goodfellow, the sauciest, idlest, cleverest, best-natured boy in the parish, always foremost in mischief, and always ready to do a good turn. The sages of our village predict sad things of Jack Rappley, so that I am sometimes a little ashamed to confess, before wise people, that I have a lurking predilection for him, in common with other naughty ones, and that I like to hear him talk to May almost as well as she does. Come, May, and up she springs, as light as a bird. The road is gay now, carts and post-shays, and girls in red cloaks, and a far-off looking almost like a toy, the coach. It meets us fast and soon. How much happier the walkers look than the riders, especially the frost-bitten gentlemen, and the shivering lady with the invisible face, sole passengers of that commodious machine. Hooded, veiled, and bonneted as she is, one sees from her attitude how miserable she would look uncovered. Another pond, and another noise of children. More sliding? Oh, no! This is a sport of higher pretension. Our good neighbour, the lieutenant, skating, and his own pretty little boys, and two or three other four-year-old elves, standing on the brink in an ecstasy of joy and wonder. Oh, what happy spectators! And what a happy performer! They admiring, and he admired, with an ardour and sincerity never excited by all the quadrills and the spread eagles of the Sane and the Serpentine. He really skates well, though, and I am glad I came this way, for with all the father's feelings sitting gaily at his heart it must still gratify the pride of skill to have one spectator at that solitary pond who has seen skating before. Now we've reached the trees, the beautiful trees, never so beautiful as today. Imagine the effect of a straight and regular double avenue of oaks nearly a mile long, arching overhead and closing into perspective like the roof and columns of a cathedral. Every tree and branch encrusted with the bright and delicate conglulation of hoarfrost, white and pure as snow, delicate and defined as carved ivory. How beautiful it is, how uniform, how various, how filling and how satiating to the eye and to the mind. Above all, how melancholy. There is a thrilling awfulness, an intense feeling of simple power in that naked and colourless beauty which falls on the earth like the thoughts of death, death pure and glorious and smiling, but still death. Sculpture has always had the same effect on my imagination and painting never. Color is life. We are now at the end of this magnificent avenue and at the top of a steep eminence commanding a wide view over four counties, a landscape of snow. A deep lane leads abruptly down the hill, a mere narrow cart track, sinking between high banks clothed with fern and furs and low broom, crowned with luxuriant hedgerows and famous for their summer smell of time. How lovely these banks are now, the tall weeds and the gorse fixed and stiffened in the whorefrost which fringes round the bright prickly holly, the pendant foliage of the bramble, and the deep orange leaves of the pollard oaks. Oh, this is rhyme in its loveliest form. And there is still a berry here and there on the holly, blushing in its natural coral through the delicate tracery, still a stray hip or whore for the birds who abound here always. The poor birds, how tame they are, how sadly tame. There is the beautiful and rare crested wren, that shadow of a bird as white of cell-borne calls it, perched in the middle of the hedge, nestling as it were amongst the cold bare boughs, seeking poor pretty thing for the warmth it will not find. And there, farther on, just under the bank by the slender runlet, which still trickles between its transparent fantastic margin of thin ice, as if it were a thing of life. There, with a swift scudding motion, flits in short low flights the gorgeous kingfisher, its magnificent plumage of scarlet and blue flashing in the sun, like the glories of some tropical bird. He has come for water to this little spring by the hillside, water which even his long bill and slender head can hardly reach, so nearly do the fantastic forms of those garland-like ice imagines meet over the tiny stream beneath. It is rarely that one sees the shy beauty so close or so long, and it is pleasant to see him in the grace and beauty of his natural liberty, the only way to look at a bird. We used, before we lived in a street, to fix a little board outside the parlour window and cover it with breadcrumbs in the hard weather. It was quite delightful to see the pretty things come and feed, to conquer their shyness and do away their mistrust. First came the more social tribes, the robin red breast and the wren, cautiously suspiciously picking up a crumb on the wing with a little keen bright eye fixed on the window. Then they would stop for two pecs, and then stayed till they were satisfied. The shy birds, tamed by their example, came next, and at last one saucy fellow of a black bird, a sad glutton, he would clear the board in two minutes. He used to tap his yellow bill against the window for more. How we loved the fearless confidence of that fine, frank-hearted creature, and surely he loved us, I wonder the practice is not more general. May, or may not he may, as she's frightened away the kingfisher, and now in her coaxing penitence she's covering me with snow. Come, pretty May, it's time to go home. The Thor January 28th We have had rain and snow and frost and rain again for four days of absolute confinement. Now it is a Thor and a flood, but our light gravelly soil and country boots and country hardy-hood will carry us through. What a dripping, comfortless day it is, just like the last days of November. No sun, no sky, grey or blue, one low, overhanging, dark, dismal cloud like London smoke. Mayflower is out coursing, too, and Lizzie has gone to school. Never mind. Up the hill again, walk we must. Oh, what a watery world to look back upon. Thames, Kennet, Lodden, all overflowed. Our famous town inland once turned into a sort of Venice. Sea park covered into an island, and the long range of meadows from town B to W won huge, unnatural lake, with trees growing out of it. Oh, what a watery world. I'll look at it no longer. I'll walk on. The road is alive again, noise is reborn. Wagons creak, horses splash, carts rattle, and patterns paddle through the dirt with more than their usual clink. The common has its old fine tints of green and brown, and its old variety of inhabitants, horses, cows, sheep, pigs and donkeys. The ponds are unfrozen, except where some melancholy piece of melting ice floats sunnily on the water, and cackling geese and gabbling ducks have replaced the Lieutenant and Jack Rappley. The avenue is chill and dark, the hedges are dripping, the lanes knee deep, and all nature is in a state of disillusion and thaw. All together the day is tempting, very tempting. It will not do for the dear common, that windmill of a walk, but the close, sheltered lanes at the bottom of the hill, which keep out just enough of the stormy air and let in all the sun, will be delightful. Past our old house and round by the winding lanes and the workhouse, and across the lee, and so into the turnpike road again, that is our route for today. Fourth we set, Mayflower and I, rejoicing in the sunshine, and still more in the wind, which gives such an intense feeling of existence, and cooperating with brisk motion, sets our blood and our spirits in a glow. For mere physical pleasure, there is nothing perhaps equal to the enjoyment of being drawn in a light carriage against such a wind as this, by a blood horse at the height of his speed. Walking comes next to it, but walking is not quite so luxurious or so spiritual, not quite so much what one fancies of flying or being carried above the clouds in a balloon. Nevertheless, a walk is a good thing, especially under this southern hedgerow, where nature is just beginning to live again. The periwinkles with their starry blue flowers and their shining myrtle-like leaves garlanding the bushes, woodbines and elder trees pushing out their small swelling buds, and grasses and mosses springing forth in every variety of brown and green. Here we are at the corner where four lanes meet, or rather where a passable road of stones and gravel crosses an impassable one of beautiful but treacherous turf, and where the small white farmhouse, scarcely larger than a cottage and the well-stocked rickyard behind, tell of comfort and order, but leave all unguessed the great riches of the master. How he became so rich is almost a puzzle. For though the farm be his own, it is not large, and though prudent and frugal on ordinary occasions, Farmer Barnard is no miser. His horses, dogs and pigs are the best kept in the parish. May herself, although her beauty be injured by her fatness, half envy's the plight of his bitch fly. His wife's gowns and shawls cost as much again as any shawls or gowns in the village. His dinner parties, to be sure they are not frequent, display twice the ordinary quantity of good things—two couples of ducks, two dishes of green peas, two turkey-pots, two gammons of bacon and two plum puddings. Moreover, he keeps a single horse sheaths, and has built and endowed a Methodist chapel, and yet is he the richest man in these parts. Everything prospers with him. Money drifts about him like snow. He looks like a rich man. There is a sturdy squareness of face and figure, a good-humoured obstinacy, a civil importance. He never boasts of his wealth or gives himself on due airs, but nobody can meet him at market or vestry without finding out immediately that he is the richest man there. They have no child to all this money, but there is an adopted nephew, a fine-spirited lad, who may perhaps some day or other play the part of a fountain to the reservoir. Now turn up the wide road till we come to the open common, with its park-like trees, its beautiful stream wandering and twisting along, and its rural bridge. Here we turn again, past that other white farmhouse, half hidden by the magnificent elms which stand before it. Ah, riches dwell not there, but there is found the next best thing, an industrious and light-hearted poverty. Twenty years ago Rachel Hilton was the prettiest and merriest lass in the country. Her father, an old game-keeper, had retired to a village ale-house, where his good beer, his social humour, and his black-eyed daughter brought much custom. She had lovers by the score, but Joseph White, the dashing and lively son of an opulent farmer, carried off the fair Rachel. They married and settled here, and here they live still, as merrily as ever, with fourteen children of all ages and sizes, from nineteen years to nineteen months, working harder than any people in the parish and enjoying themselves more. I would match them for labour and laughter against any family in England. She is a blithe jolly dame whose beauty has amplified into comeliness. He is tall and thin and bony, with sinews like whip-cord, a strong, lively voice, a sharp, weather-beaten face, and eyes and lips that smile and brighten when he speaks into a most contagious hilarity. They are very poor, and I often wish them richer, but I don't know. Perhaps it might put them out. Quite close to Farmer White's is a little ruinous cottage, white-washed once, and now in a sad state of betweenity, where dangling stockings and shirts, swelled by the wind, drying in a neglected garden, give signal of a washerwoman. There dwells at present in single blessedness Betty Adams, the wife of our sometimes gardener. I never saw anyone who so much reminded me in person of that lady whom everybody knows, Mistress Meg Merrily's. As tall, as grizzled, as stately, as dark, as gypsy-looking, bonneted and gowned like her prototype, and almost as oracular. Here the resemblance ceases. Mrs. Adams is a perfectly honest, industrious, painstaking person who earns a good deal of money by washing and charring, and spends it in other luxuries than tidiness, in green tea and gin and snuff. Her husband lives in a great family ten miles off. He's a capital gardener, or rather he would be so, if he were not too ambitious. He undertakes all things and finishes none, but a smooth tong, a knowing look, and a great capacity of labour carry him through. Let him but like his ale and his master, and he will do work enough for four. Give him his own way, and his full quantum, and nothing comes amiss to him. May is bounding forward. Her silly heart leaps at the sight of the old place, and so in good truth does mine. What a pretty place it was, or rather how pretty I thought it. I suppose I should have thought any place so, where I had spent eighteen happy years. But it was really pretty. A large, heavy white house, in the simplest style, surrounded by fine oaks and elms, and tall, massy plantations, shaded down into a beautiful lawn by wild, overgrown shrubs, bowery, acacia, ragged, sweet briars, promontries of dogwood, and Portugal laurel, and bays, overhung by laburnum and bird cherry, a long piece of water letting light into the picture, and looking just like a natural stream. The banks as rude and wild as the shrubbery, interspersed with broom and furs and bramble, and pollard oaks covered with ivy and honeysuckle. The whole enclosed by an old mossy park pailing, and terminating in a series of rich meadows, richly planted. This is an exact description of the home which three years ago it nearly broke my heart to leave. Oh, what a tearing up by the root it was! I have pitted cabbage plants and celery, and all transplantable things ever since, though in common with them and with other vegetables, the first agony of the transportation being over, I have taken such firm and tenacious hold of my new soil, that I would not for the world be pulled up again, even to be restored to the old beloved ground, not even if its beauty were undiminished, which is by no means the case. For in those three years it has thrice changed masters, and every successive possessor has brought the curse of improvement upon the place, so that between filling up the water to cure dampness, cutting down trees to let in prospects, planting to keep them out, shutting up windows to darken the inside of the house, by which means one end looks precisely as an ate of spades would do, should that have the misfortune to lose one of his corner-pips, and building colonnades to lighten the outside, added to a general clearance of pollards and brambles and ivy and honeysuckles, and park palings and irregular shrubs, the poor place is so transmogrified, that if it had its old-looking glass, the water, back again, it wouldn't know its own face. And yet I love to haunt around it, so does may. Her particular attraction is a certain broken bank full of rabbit burrows, into which she insinuates her long, pliant head and neck, and tears her pretty feet by vain scratchings. Mine is a warm, sunny hedgerow, in the same remote field, famous for early flowers. Never was a spot more variously flowery, primroses yellow, lilac white, violets of either hue, cow slips, ox slips, arums, orcheses, wild hyacinths, ground ivy, pansies and strawberries, heart's ease, or formed a small part of the flora of that wild hedgerow. How profusely they covered the sunny open slope under the weeping birch, the lady of the woods, and how often have I started to see the early innocent brown snake, who loved the spot as well as I did, winding among the young blossoms, or rustling amongst the fallen leaves. There are primrose leaves already, and short green buds, but no flowers, not even in that furs cradle so full of roots, where they used to blow as in a basket. No, my may, no rabbits, no primroses. We may as well get over the gate into the woody winding lane, which will bring us home again. Here we are, making the best of our way between the old elms that arch so solemnly overhead, dark and sheltered even now. They say that a spirit haunts this deep pool, a white lady without a head. I cannot say that I have seen her, often as I have paced this lane at deep midnight to hear the nightingales and look at the glowworms. But there, better and rarer than a thousand ghosts, dearer even than nightingales or glowworms, there is a primrose, the first of the year. A tuft of primroses, springing in yonder sheltered nook from the mossy roots of an old willow, and living again in the clear bright pool. Oh, how beautiful they are! Three fully blown, and two bursting buds. How glad I am I came this way. They're not to be reached. Even Jack Rappley's love of the difficult and the unattainable would fail him here. May herself couldn't stand on that steep bank. So much the better. Who would wish to disturb them? There they live in their innocent and fragrant beauty, sheltered from the storms, and rejoicing in the sunshine, and looking as if they could feel their happiness. Who would disturb them? Oh, how glad I am I came this way home. End of chapter 2 part 2. Chapter 2 part 3 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 walks in the country part 3, violating March 27. It is a dull gray morning with a dewy feeling in the air, fresh but not windy, cool but not cold, the very day for a person newly arrived from the heat, the glare, the noise, and the fever of London to plunge into the remotest labyrinth of the country, and regain the repose of mind, the calmness of heart, which has been lost in that great babel. I must go violating. It's a necessity, and I must go alone. The sound of a voice, even my Lizzie's, the touch of Mayflower's head, even the bounding of her elastic foot, would disturb the serenity of feeling which I am trying to recover. I shall go quite alone, with my little basket twisted like a beehive, which I love so well, because she gave it to me, and kept sacred to violets and to those whom I love, and I shall get out of the high road the moment I can. I would not meet anyone just now, even of those whom I best like to meet. Oh! it is not that group, a gentleman on the blood horse, a lady keeping pace with him so gracefully and easily—see how prettily her veil waves in the wind created by her own rapid motion—and that gay gallant boy, on the gallant white Arabian, cavetting at their side, but ready to spring before them at every instant, is not that chivalrous-looking party, Mr. and Mrs. M. and Dear B. Oh! no, the servant is in a different livery. It's some of the Jugal family, and one of their young Etonians. I may go on. I shall meet no one now, for I have fairly left the road, and am crossing the lee by one of those wandering paths amidst the gorse and the heath and the lobe-room which the sheeps and lambs have made, a path, turfy, elastic, timey and sweet, even at this season. We have the good fortune to live in an unenclosed parish, and may thank the wise obstinacy of two or three sturdy farmers, and the lucky unpopularity of a ranting madcap lord of the manor, for preserving the delicious green patches, the islets of wilderness amidst cultivation, which form perhaps the peculiar beauty of English scenery. The common that I am passing now, the lee, as it is called, is one of the loveliest of these favoured spots. It is a little sheltered scene, retiring as it were from the village, sunk amidst higher lands, hills would be almost too grand a word, edged on one side by one gay high road, and intersected by another, and surrounded by a most picturesque confusion of meadows, cottages, farms and orchards, with a great pond in one corner, unusually bright and clear, giving a delightful cheerfulness and daylight to the picture. The swallows haunt that pond, so do the children. There's a merry group around it now, I've seldom seen it without one. Children love water, clear, bright, sparkling water. It excites and feeds their curiosity. It is motion and life. The path that I am treading leads to a less lively spot, to that large heavy building on one side of the common, whose solid wings, jutting out far beyond the main body, occupy three sides of a square, and give a cold, shadowy look to the court. On one side is a gloomy garden, with an old man digging in it, laid out in straight dark beds of vegetables, potatoes, cabbages, onions, and beans, all earthy and mouldy as a newly dug grave, not a flower or flowering shrub, not a rose-tree or current bush, nothing but for sober melancholy use. Oh, how different from the long, irregular slips of the cottage gardens, with their gay bunches of polyanthoses and crocuses, their wallflowers sending sweet odours through the narrow casement, and their gooseberry trees bursting into a brilliancy of leaf, whose vivid greenness has the effect of a blossom on the eye. Oh, how different! On the other side of this gloomy abode is a meadow of that deep, intense emerald hue, which denotes the presence of stagnant water, surrounded by willows at regular distances, and like the garden, separated from the common by a wide, moat-like ditch. That is the parish work-house. All about it is solid, substantial, useful, but so dreary, so cold, so dark. There are children in the court, and yet all is silent. I always hurry past that place as if it were a prison. Restraint, sickness, age, extreme poverty, misery, which I have no power to remove or alleviate. These are the ideas, the feelings, which the sight of those walls excites. Yet perhaps, if not certainly, they contain less of that extreme desolation than the morbid fancy is apt to paint. There will be found order, cleanliness, food and clothing, warmth, refuge for the homeless, medicine and attendance for the sick, rest and sufficiency for old age, and sympathy, the true and active sympathy which the poor show to the poor for the unhappy. There may be worse places than a parish work-house, and yet I hurry past it. The feeling, the prejudice, will not be controlled. The end of the dreary garden edges off into a close, sheltered lane, wandering and winding like a rivulet, in gentle sinuosities, to use a word once applied by Mr. Wilberforce to the Thames at Henley, amidst green meadows all alive with cattle, sheep and beautiful lambs, in the very spring and pride of their tottering prettiness, or fields of arable land, more lively still with troops of stooping bean-setters, women and children, in all varieties of costume and colour, and plows and harrows, with their whistling boys and steady carters, going through with a slow and plodding industry the main business of this busy season. What work bean-setting is! What a reverse of the position assigned to man to distinguish him from the beasts of the field! Only think of stooping for six, eight, ten hours a day, drilling holes in the earth with a little stick, and then dropping in the beans one by one. They are paid according to the quantity they plant, and some of the poor women used to be accused of clumping them, that is to say, of dropping more than one bean into a hole. It seems to me, considering the temptation, that not to clump is to be at the very pinnacle of human virtue. Another turn in the lane, and we come to the old house standing amongst the high elms, the old farmhouse, which always, I don't know why, carries back my imagination to Shakespeare's days. It is a long, low, irregular building, with one room at an angle from the house covered with ivy—fine, white veined ivy—the first floor of the main building, projecting and supported by oaken beams, and one of the windows below, with its old casement and long narrow panes, forming the half of a shallow hexagon. A porch with seats in it, surmounted by a pinnacle, pointed roofs and clustered chimneys, complete the picture. Alas! it is little else but a picture. The very walls are crumbling to decay under a careless landlord and a ruined tenant. Now a few yards farther, and I reach the bank. I smell them all ready. Their exquisite perfume steams and lingers in this moist heavy air. Through this little gate and along the green south bank of this green wheat field, and they burst upon me, the lovely violets in tenfold loveliness. The ground is covered with them, white and purple, enamelling the short, dewy grass, looking but the more vividly coloured under the dull, leaden sky. There they lie by hundreds—by thousands. In former years I have been used to watch them from the tiny green bud till one or two stole into bloom. They never came only before in such sudden and luxuriant glory of simple beauty, and I do really owe one pure and genuine pleasure to feverish London. How beautifully they have placed two on this sloping bank, with the palm branches waving over them, full of early bees, and mixing their honeyed scent with the more delicate violet odour. How transparent and smooth and lusty are the branches, full of sap and life. And there, just by the old mossy root, is a superb tuft of prim roses, with a yellow butterfly hovering over them, like a flower floating on the air. What happiness to sit on this tufty knoll and fill my basket with the blossoms. What a renewal of heart and mind. To inhabit such a scene of peace and sweetness is again to be fearless, gay, and gentle as a child. Then it is that thought becomes poetry and feeling religion. Then it is that we are happy and good. That my whole life could pass so, floating on blissful and innocent sensation, enjoying in peace and gratitude the common blessings of nature, thankful above all for the simple habits, the healthful temperament which render them so dear. Alas, who may dare expect a life of such happiness. But I can at least snatch and prolong the fleeting pleasure, can fill my basket with pure flowers and my heart with pure thoughts, can gladden my little home with their sweetness, can divide my treasures with one, a dear one, who cannot seek them, can see them when I shut my eyes, and dream of them when I fall asleep. Our Village Volume 1 Walks in the Country Part 4 The Cow Slip Ball May 16th There are moments in life, when without any visible or immediate cause, the spirit sink and fail as it were, under the mere pressure of existence. Moments of unaccountable depression, when one is weary of one's very thoughts, haunted by images that will not depart, images many and various but all painful, friends lost or changed or dead, hopes disappointed even in their accomplishment, fruitless regrets, powerless wishes, doubt and fear and self-distrust and self-disapprobation. They who have known these feelings, and who is there so happy as not to have known some of them, will understand why Alfieri became powerless, and Foisart dull, and why even needlework the most effectual sedative, that grand soother and composer of woman's distress, fails to comfort me today. I will go out into the air this cool, pleasant afternoon, and try what that will do. I fancy that exercise or exertion of any kind is the true specific for nervousness. Fling but a stone, the giant dies. I will go to the meadows, all the beautiful meadows, and I will have my materials of happiness, Lizzie and May, and a basket for flowers, and we'll make a cow-slip ball. Did you ever see a cow-slip ball, my Lizzie? No? Oh, come away then, make haste, run, Lizzie! And on we go, fast, fast down the road, across the lee, past the work-house, along by the great pond, till we slide into the deep narrow lane, whose hedges seem to meet over the water, and win our way to the little farmhouse at the end. Through the farm-yard, Lizzie, over the gate, never mind the cows, they're quiet enough. I don't mind them, says Miss Lizzie boldly and truly, and with a proud affronted air, displeased at being thought to mind anything, and showing by her attitude and manner some design of proving her courage by an attack on the largest of the herd in the shape of a pool by the tail. I don't mind them. I know you don't, Lizzie, but let them alone, and don't chase the turkey-cock, but come to me, my dear, and for a wonder Lizzie came. In the meantime, my other pet, Mayflower, had also gotten into a scrape. She had driven about a huge unwieldy sow, till the animals grunting had disturbed the repose of a still more enormous newfoundland dog, the guardian of the yard. Out he salid, growling, from the depth of his kennel, erecting his tail and shaking his long chain. May's attention was instantly diverted from the sow to this new playmate, friend or foe, she cared not which, and he of the kennel, seeing his charge unhurt, and out of danger, was at leisure to observe the charms of his fair enemy, as she frolicked round him, always beyond the reach of his chain, yet always with the natural instinctive cockatry of her sex, alluring him to the pursuit which she knew to be in vain. I never saw a prettier flirtation. At last the noble animal, wearied out, retired to the inmost recesses of his habitation, and would not even approach her when she stood right before the entrance. You're properly served, May. Come along, Lizzie. Across this wheat field, and now over the gate, of stop, let me lift you down, no jumping, no breaking of necks, Lizzie. And here we are in the meadows and out of the world. Robinson Crusoe in his lonely island had scarcely a more complete or a more beautiful solitude. These meadows consist of a double row of small enclosures of rich grassland, a mile or two in length, sloping down from high arable grounds on either side, to a little nameless brook that winds between them, with a course which, in its infinite variety, clearness and rapidity, seems to emulate the bold rivers of the north, of whom, far more than of our lazy southern streams, our rivulet presents a miniature likeness. Never was water more exquisitely trixy, now darting over the bright pebbles, sparkling and flashing in the light with the bubbling music, as sweet and as wild as the song of the woodlark, now stretching quietly along, giving back the rich tufts of the golden marsh marigold, which grow on its margin. Now sweeping round a fine reach of green grass, rising steeply into a high mound, a mimic promontory, whilst the other side sinks softly away, like some tiny bay, and the water flows between, so clear, so wide and so shallow, that Lizzie, longing for adventure, is sure she could cross unwetted. Now dashing through two sandbanks, a torrent deep and narrow, which may clears at a bound. Now sleeping, half hidden beneath the olders and hawthorns and wild roses, with which the banks are so profusely and variously fringed, while flags, lilies and other aquatic plants almost cover the surface of the stream. A footnote. Walking along these meadows, one bright sunny afternoon, a year or two back, and rather late in the season, I had an opportunity of noticing a curious circumstance in natural history. Standing close to the edge of the stream, I remarked a singular appearance on a large tuft of flags. It looked like bunches of flowers, the leaves of which seemed dark, yet transparent, intermingled with brilliant tubes of bright blue or shining green. On examining this phenomenon more closely, it turned out to be several clusters of dragonflies just emerged from their deformed chrysalis state and still torpid and motionless from the wetness of their filmy wings. Half an hour later we returned to the spot and they were gone. We had seen them at the very moment when beauty was complete and animation dormant. I have since found nearly a similar account of this curious process in Mr Bingley's very entertaining work called Animal Biography. End of footnote. And so back to the brook. In good truth it is a beautiful brook, and one that Walton himself might have sitting by and loved, for trout are there. We see them as they dart up the stream, and hear and start at the sudden plunge when they spring to the surface for the summer flies. Isaac Walton would have loved our brook and our quiet meadows. They breathe the very spirit of his own peacefulness, the soothing quietude that sinks into the soul. There is no path through them, not one. We might wander a whole spring day and not see a trace of human habitation. They belong to a number of small proprietors who allow each other access through their respective grounds from pure kindness and neighborly feeling, a privilege never abused, and the fields on the other side of the water are reached by a rough plank or a tree thrown across or some such homely bridge. We ourselves possess one of the most beautiful, so that the strange pleasure of property, that instinct which makes Lizzie delight in her broken doll, and may in the bare bone which she has pilfered from the kennel of her recreational admirer of Newfoundland, is added to the other charms of this enchanting scenery. A strange pleasure it is when one so poor as I can feel it. Perhaps it is felt most by the poor. With the rich it may be less intense, too much diffused and spread out, becoming thin by expansion like leaf gold. The little of the poor may be not only more precious, but more pleasant to them. Certain that bit of grassy and blossomy earth, with its green knolls and tufted bushes, its old pollards wreathed with ivy, and its bright and babbling waters, is very dear to me. But I must always have loved these meadows so fresh and cool and delicious to the eye and to the tread, full of cow slips and of all vernal flowers. Shakespeare's song of spring burst irrepressibly from our lips as we step on them. When daisies pied and violets blue, and lady smocks all silver white, and cuckoo buds of yellow hue do paint the meadows with delight, the cuckoo then, on every tree, cuckoo, cuckoo, cried Lizzie, breaking in with her clear childish voice, and immediately, as if at her call, the real bird from a neighbouring tree, for these meadows are dotted with timber like a park, began to echo my lovely little girl, cuckoo, cuckoo. I have a prejudice very impastoral and unpoetical, but I cannot help it, I have many such, against this harbinger of spring. His note is so monotonous, so melancholy, and then the boys mimic him. One hears, cuckoo, cuckoo, in dirty streets, amongst smoky houses, and the bird is hated for fault not his own. But prejudices of taste, likings and dislikings, are not always vanquishable by reason. So, to escape the serenade from the tree, which promised to be of considerable duration, when once that eternal song begins, on it goes, ticking like a clock, to escape that noise, I determine to excite another, and challenge Lizzie to a cow slip-gathering, a trial of skill and speed, to see which should soonest fill her basket. My stratagem succeeded completely. What scrambling, what shouting, what glee from Lizzie, twenty cuckoos might have sung unheard, while she was pulling her own flowers and stealing mine, and laughing, screaming, and talking through all. At last the baskets were filled, and Lizzie declared victor, and down we sat on the brink of the stream, under a spreading hawthorn, just disclosing its own pearly buds, and surrounded with the rich and enameled flowers of the wild hyacinth, blue and white, to make our cow slip-ball. Everyone knows the process, to nip off the tuft of flowers just below the top of the stalk, and hang each cluster nicely balanced across a ribbon, till you have a long string like a garland, then to press them closely together, and tie them tightly up. We went on very prosperously considering, as people say of a young lady's drawing, or a Frenchman's English, or a woman's tragedy, or of the poor little dwarf who works without fingers, or the ingenious sailor who writes with his toes, or generally of any performance, which is accomplished by means seemingly inadequate to its production. To be sure we met with a few accidents. First, Lizzie spoiled nearly all her cow slips by snapping them off too short, so there was a fresh gathering. In the next place, May overset my full basket, and sent the blossoms floating like so many fairy favours down the brook. Then, when we were going on pretty steadily, just as we had made a superb wreath, and were thinking of tying it together, Lizzie, who held the ribbon, caught a glimpse of a gorgeous butterfly, all brown and red and purple, and skipping off to pursue the new object, let go her hold, so all our treasures were abroad again. At last, however, by dint of taking a branch of alder as a substitute for Lizzie, and hanging the basket in a polar dash out of sight of May, the cow slip-ball was finished. What a concentration of fragrance and beauty it was! Golden and sweet to satiety, rich to sight and touch and smell. Lizzie was enchanted, and ran off with her prize, hiding amongst the trees in the very coiness of ecstasy, as if any human eye, even mine, would be a restraint on her innocent raptures. In the meantime, I sat listening, not to my enemy the cuckoo, but to a whole concert of nightingales, scarcely interrupted by any meaner bird, answering and vying with each other in those short delicious strains which are to the ear as roses to the eye, those snatches of lovely sound which come across us as airs from heaven. Pleasant thoughts, delightful associations awoke as I listened, and almost unconsciously I repeated to myself the beautiful story of the lootist and the nightingale from Ford's Lovers' melancholy. Here it is. Is there in English poetry anything finer? Passing from Italy to Greece, the tales which poets of an elder time have feigned to glorify their temp, bred in me desire of visiting paradise. To Thessaly I came, and living private without acquaintance of more sweet companions than the old inmates to my love, my thoughts, I day by day frequented silent groves and solitary walks. One morning early this accident encountered me. I heard the sweetest and most ravishing contention that art and nature ever were at strife in. A sound of music touched my nears, or rather indeed entranced my soul. As I stole nearer, invited by the melody, I saw this youth, this fair-faced youth, upon his loot with strains of strange variety and harmony proclaiming, as it seemed, so bold a challenge to the clear choristers of the woods, the birds, that as they flocked about him, all stood silent, wondering at what they heard. I wondered too. A nightingale, nature's best skilled musician, undertakes the challenge, and for every several strain the well-shaped youth could touch, she sang him down. He could not run divisions with more art upon his quaking instrument, than she, the nightingale, did with her various notes reply to. Sometime thus spent, the young man grew at last into a pretty anger, that a bird, whom art had never taught cliffs, moods, or notes, should vie with him for mastery, whose study had busied many hours to perfect practice. To end the controversy, in a rapture upon his instrument he plays so swiftly, so many volunteers, and so quick, that there was curiosity and cunning, concord in discord, lines of differing method, meeting in one full centre of delight. The bird, ordained to be music's first martyr, strove to imitate these several sounds, which when her wobbling throat failed in, for grief down dropped she on his lute, and break her heart. It was the quaintest sadness to see the conqueror upon her hearse, to weep a funeral allergy of tears. He looked upon the trophies of his art, then sighed, then wiped his eyes, then sighed, and cried, Alas, poor creature, I will soon revenge this cruelty upon the author of it. Henceforth, this lute, guilty of innocent blood, shall nevermore betray a harmless peace to an untimely end. And in that sorrow, as he was pashing it against a tree, I suddenly stepped in. End of poem. When I had finished the recitation of this exquisite passage, the sky, which had been all the afternoon dull and heavy, began to look more and more threatening. Darker clouds, like wreaths of black smoke, flew across the dead leaden tint. A cooler damper air blew over the meadows, and a few large heavy drops splashed in the water. We shall have a storm, Lizzie. May, where are ye? Quick, quick, my Lizzie! Run! Run! Faster! Faster! And off we ran. Lizzie not at all displeased at the thoughts of a wetting, to which indeed she is almost as familiar as a duck. May, on the other hand, peering up at the weather, and shaking her pretty ears with manifest dismay. Of all animals next to a cat, a greyhound dreads rain. She might have escaped it. Her light feet would have borne her home long before the shower. But May is too faithful for that. Too true a comrade understands too well the laws of good fellowship. So she waited for us. She did, to be sure, gallop on before, and then stop and look back, and beckon as it were with some scorn in her black eyes at the slowness of our progress. We, in the meanwhile, got on as fast as we could, encouraging and reproaching each other. Faster, my Lizzie! Oh, what a bad runner! Faster! Faster! Oh, what a bad runner! echoed my sauce-box. You're so fat, Lizzie, you make no way! Oh, and who else is fat? retorted the darling. Certainly her mother is right. I do spoil that child. By this time we were thoroughly soaked, all three. It was a pelting shower that drove through our thin summer clothing and poor May's short glossy coat in a moment. And then, when we were wet to the skin, the sun came out. Actually, the sun, as if to laugh at our plight. And then, more provoking still, when the sun was shining and the shower over, came a maid and a boy to look after us, loaded with cloaks and umbrellas enough to fence us against a whole day's rain. Never mind. On we go, faster and faster. Lizzie obliged to be most ignobly carried, having had the misfortune to lose a shoe in the mud, which we left the boy to look after. Here we are at home, dripping, but glowing and laughing and bearing our calamity most manfully. May, a dog of excellent sense, went instantly to bed in the stable, and is at this moment overhead and ears in straw. Lizzie is gone to bed too, coaxed into that wise measure by a promise of tea and toast, and of not going home till to-morrow, and the story of little red riding-hood. And I am enjoying the luxury of dry clothing by a good fire. Really getting wet through now and then is no bad thing, finery apart, for one should not like spoiling a new police or a handsome plume. But when there is nothing in question but a white gown and a straw bonnet, as was the case today, it is rather pleasant than not. The little chill refreshes, and our enjoyment of the subsequent warmth and dryness is positive and absolute. Besides, the stimulus and exertion do good to the mind as well as to the body. How melancholy I was all the morning! How cheerful I am now! Nothing like a shower-bath, a real shower-bath, such as Lizzie and May and I have undergone, to cure low spirits. Try it, my dear readers, if ever you be nervous. I will answer for its success. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Here we are in the midst of the dog-days, clustering merrily round the warm hearth like so many crickets, instead of chirping in the green fields like that other merry insect, the grasshopper shivering under the Jupiter-pluvius of England the watery Saint Switham, peering at that scarce personage the sun when he happens to make his appearance, as intently as astronomers look after a comet or the common people stare at a balloon, exclaiming against the cold weather just as we used to exclaim against the warm. What a change from last year is the first sentence you hear. Go where you may. Everybody remarks it, and everybody complains of it. And yet in my mind it has its advantages, or at least its compensations, as everything in nature has, if we would only take the trouble to seek for them. Last year, in spite of the love which we are now pleased to profess towards that ardent luminary, not one of the sun's numerous admirers had courage to look him in the face. There was no bearing the world till he had said good night to it. Then we might stir, then we began to wake and to live. All day long we languished under his influence in a strange dreaminess. Too hot to work, too hot to read, too hot to write, too hot even to talk. Sitting hour after hour in a green arbor, empowered in leafiness, letting thought and fancy float as they would. Those daydreams were pretty things in their way, there's no denying that. But then, if one half of the world were to dream through a whole summer, like the sleeping beauty in the wood, what would become of the other? The only office requiring the slightest exertion, which I performed in that warm weather, was watering my flowers. Common sympathy called for that labour. The poor things withered and faded and pined away. They almost, so to say, panted for draught. Moreover, if I had not watered them myself, I suspect that no one else would. For water last year was nearly as precious here about as wine. Our land springs were dried up, our wells were exhausted, our deep ponds were dwindling into mud, and geese and ducks and pigs and laundresses used to look with a jealous and suspicious eye on the few and scanty half-buckets of that impure element, which my trusty lackey was feigned to filch for my poor geraniums and campanulas and tuber-roses. We were forced to smuggle them in through my faithful adherents' territories, the stable, to avoid lectures within doors, and at last even that resource failed. My garden, my blooming garden, the joy of my eyes, was forced to go waterless like its neighbours, and became shriveled, scorched and sunburnt like them. It really went to my heart to look at it. On the other side of the house matters were still worse. What a dusty world it was when about sunset we became cool enough to creep into it. Flowers in the court, looking fit for a haughta sickus, mummies of plants dried as in an oven, hollyhocks once pink turned into quakers, cloves smelling of dust. Oh, dusty world! May herself looked of that complexion, so did Lizzie, so did all the houses, windows, chickens, children, trees, and pigs in the village. So above all did the shoes. No foot could make three plunges into that abyss of pulverised gravel, which had the impudence to call itself a hard road, without being clothed with a coat a quarter of an inch thick. Woe to white gowns, and woe to black! Drab was your only wear. And then, when we were out of the street, what a toil it was to mount the hill, climbing with weary steps and slow upon the brown turf by the wayside, slippery, hot, and hard as a rock. And then, if we happened to meet a carriage coming along the middle of the road, the bottomless middle, what a sandy whirlwind it was! What choking, what suffocation! No state could be more pitiable, except indeed that of the travellers who carried this misery about with them. I shall never forget the plight in which we met the coach one evening in last August, full an hour after its time, steeds and driver, carriage and passengers, all one dust. The outsides and the horses and the coachmen seemed reduced to a torpid quietness, the resignation of despair. They had left off trying to better their condition, and taken refuge in a wise and patient hopelessness, bent to endure in silence the extremity of ill. The six insides, on the contrary, were still fighting against their fate, vainly struggling to ameliorate their hapless destiny. They were visibly grumbling at the weather, scolding at the dust, and heating themselves like a furnace by striving against the heat. How well I remember the fat gentleman without his coat, who was wiping his forehead and heaving up his wig, and certainly uttering that English ejaculation, which to our national reproach, is the phrase of our language best known on the continent. And that poor boy, red hot, all in a flame, whose mama, having divested her own person of all superfluous apparel, was trying to relieve his sufferings by the removal of his neckerchief, an operation which he resisted with all his might. How perfectly I remember him, as well as the pale girl who sat opposite, fanning herself with her bonnet into an absolute fever. They vanished after a while into their own dust. But I have them all before my eyes at this moment. A companion picture to Hogarth's afternoon, a standing lesson to the grumblers at cold summers. For my part, I really like this wet season. It keeps us within, to be sure, rather more than is agreeable. But then we are at least awake and alive there, and the world out of doors is so much the pleasanter when we can get abroad. Everything does well, except those for studious bipeds men and women. Corn ripens, grass grows, fruit is plentiful. There's no lack of birds to eat it, and there's not been such a wasp season these dozen years. My garden wants no watering, and is more beautiful than ever, beating my old rival in that primitive art, the pretty wife of the little mason, out and out. Measured with mine her flowers are nought. Look at those holly-hocks like pyramids of roses, those garlands of the convolvulus major of all colours hanging about that tall pole, like the wreath-y hot vine, those magnificent dusky cloves, breathing of the spice islands, those flaunting double dailies, those splendid scarlet geraniums, and the fierce and warlike flowers, the tiger lilies. Oh, how beautiful they are! Besides, the weather clears sometimes. It has cleared this evening, and here are we, after a merry walk up the hill, almost as quick as in the winter, bounding lightly along the bright green turf of the pleasant common, enticed by the gay shouts of a dozen clear young voices to linger a while, and see the boys play at cricket. I plead guilty to a strong partiality towards that unpopular class of being, country boys. I have a large acquaintance amongst them, and I can almost say that I know good of many and harm of none. In general, they're an open, spirited, good-humoured race, with the proneness to embrace the pleasures and eschew the evils of their condition. A capacity for happiness quite unmatched in man or woman or a girl. They are patient, too, and bear their fate as scapegoats, for all sins whatsoever are laid as a matter of course at their door, whether at home or abroad, with amazing resignation and considering the many lies of which they are the objects they tell wonderfully few in return. The worst that can be said of them is that they seldom, when grown to man's estate, keep the promise of their boyhood. But that is a fault to come. A fault that may not come and ought not to be anticipated. It is astonishing how sensible they are to notice from their betters, or those whom they think such. I do not speak of money or gifts or praise, or the more coarse and common bribery's. They are more delicate courteous. A word, a nod, a smile, or the mere calling of them by their names, is enough to ensure their hearts and their services. Half a dozen of them, poor urchins, have run away now to bring us chairs from their several homes. Thank you, joker, but you're always first. Yes, that's just the place. I'll see everything there. Have you been in yet, Joe? Oh, no, ma'am, I go in next. I'm glad of that. And now's the time. Oh, really, that was a pretty ball of gem-usings. I was sure it would go to the wicket. Run, Joe, they're waiting for you. There was small need to bid Joe Kirby make haste. I think he is next to a racehorse, or a greyhound, or a deer, the fastest creature that runs, the most completely alert and active. Joe is mine a special friend, and leader of the tender juveniles, as Joel Brent is of the adults. In both instances this post of honour was gained by Merritt, even more remarkably so in Joe's case, than in Joel's. For Joe is a less boy than many of his companions, some of whom are fifteen-ers and sixteen-ers, quite as tall and nearly as old as Tom Copper, and poorer than all, as may be conjectured, from the lamentable state of that patched round frock, the ragged condition of those unpatched shoes, which would encumber, if anything could, the light feet that wear them. But why should I lament the poverty that never troubles him? Joe is the merriest and happiest creature that ever lived twelve years in this wicked world. Care cannot come near him. He hath a perpetual smile on his round, ruddy face, and a laugh in his hazel eye that drives the witch away. He works at Yonder Farm on the top of the hill, where he is in such repute for intelligence and good humour, that he has the honour of performing all the errands of the house, of helping the maid, the mistress, and the master, in addition to his own stated office of Carter's boy. There he works hard from five till seven, and then he comes here, to work still harder under the name of play, batting, bowling, and fielding as if for life, filling the place of four boys, being at a pinch a whole eleven. The late Mr. Knivert, the king's organist, who used in his own person to sing twenty parts at once of the Hallelujah Chorus, so that you would have thought he had a nest of nightingales in his throat, was but a type of Joe Kirby. There is a sort of ubiquity about him. He thinks nothing of being in two places at once, and for pitching a ball William Gray himself is nothing to him. It goes straight to the mark like a bullet. He is king of the cricketers from eight to sixteen, both inclusive, and an excellent ruler he makes. Nevertheless, in the best-ordered states, there will be grumblers, and we have an opposition here in the shape of Gem Euston. Gem Euston is a stunted lad of thirteen, or, there about, lean, small, and short, yet strong, and active. His face is of an extraordinary ugliness, colourless, withered, and haggard, with a look of extreme age, much increased by hair so light that it might pass for white than flaxen. He is constantly arrayed in the blue cap and old-fashioned coat, the costume of an endowed school to which he belongs, where he sits still all day, and rushes into the field at night fresh, untired, and ripe for action, to scold and brawl, and storm and bluster. He hates Joe Kirby, whose immovable good humour, broad smiles, and knowing nods must certainly be very provoking, to sow fierce and turbulent spirit, and he has himself, being except by rare accident no great player, the preposterous ambition of wishing to be manager of the sports. In short, he is a demagogue in embryo, with every quality necessary to a splendid success in that vocation, a strong voice, a fluent utterance, an incessant iteration, and a frontless impudence. He is a great scholar, too, to use the country phrase. His peace, as our village schoolmaster terms a fine sheet of flourishing writing, something between a valentine and a sampler enclosed within a border of little prints. His last, I remember, was encircled by an engraved history of Moses, beginning at the finding in the bullrushes, with Pharaoh's daughter dressed in a rose-coloured gown and blue feathers. His peace is not only the admiration of the school, but of the parish, and is sent triumphantly round from house to house at Christmas to extort halfpence and sixpences from all encourages of learning, montum in miniature. The mosaic history was so successful that the produce enabled Jem to purchase a bat and a ball, which, besides adding to his natural arrogance, for the little pedant actually began to mutter against being eclipsed by a dunce, and went so far as to challenge Joe Kirby to a trial impractice or the rule of three. So the bat and ball gave him, when compared with the general poverty, a most unnatural preponderance in the cricket state. He had the ways and means in his hands, before alas the hard winter had made sad havoc among the bats, and the best ball was a bad one. He had the ways and means could withhold the supplies, and his party was beginning to wax strong, when Joe received a present of two bats under ball, for the youngsters in general, and himself in particular, and Jem's adherents left him on the spot, they ratted to a man that very evening. Notwithstanding this desertion, their forsaken leader has in nothing relaxed from his pretensions, or his ill humour. He still quarrels and brawls as if he had a faction to back him, and thinks nothing of contending with both sides, the ins and the outs, secure of out-talking the whole field. He has been squabbling these ten minutes, and is just marching off now with his own bat, he never deigned to use one of Joe's, in his hand. Oh, what an ill-conditioned hobgoblin it is! And yet there is something bold and sturdy about him, too. I should miss, Jem, used, and— Ah, there is another deserter from the party, my friend the little huzzah! I do not know his name, and call him after his cap and jacket. He is a very remarkable person, about the age of eight years, the youngest piece of gravity and dignity I ever encountered, short and square and upright and slow, with a fine, bronzed, flat visage, resembling those convertible signs at the broad face and the Saracen's head, which, happening to be next-door neighbours in the town of B, I never knew apart, resembling indeed any face that is open-eyed and immovable, the very sign of a boy. He stalks about with his hands in his britch's pockets like a piece of machinery, sits leisurely down when he ought to field, and never gets farther in batting than to stop the ball. His is the only voice never heard in the melee. I doubt indeed if he have one, which may be partly the reason of a circumstance that I record to his honour, his fidelity to Gem Euston, to whom he has adhered through every change of fortune, with a tenacity proceeding perhaps from an instinctive consciousness that the loquacious leader talks enough for two. He is the only thing resembling a follower that our demagogue possesses, and is cherished by him accordingly. Gem quarrels for him, scolds for him, pushes for him, and but for Joe Kirby's invincible good humour, and a just discrimination of the innocent from the guilty, the activity of Gem's friendship would get the poor Hazard ten drubbings a day. Oh, but it's growing late! The sun has set a long time. Only see what a gorgeous colouring has spread itself over those parting masses of clouds in the west. What a train of rosy light! We shall have a fine sunshiny day tomorrow, a blessing not to be undervalued in spite of my late vituporation of heat. Shall we go home now? And shall we take the longest but prettiest road, that by the green lane? This way to the left, round the corner of the common, past Mr Wells' cottage, and our path lies straight before us. How snug and comfortable that cottage looks, its little yard all alive with the cow and the mare, and the colt almost as large as the mare, and the young foal, and the great yard-dog all so fat, fenced in with hay-rick and wheat-rick and bean-stack, and backed by the long garden, the spacious drying-ground and the fine orchard, and that large field quartered into four different crops. How comfortable this cottage looks, and how well the owners earn their comforts! They're the most prosperous pair in the parish. She, a lawn-dress, with twenty times more work than she can do, unrivaled in flounces and shirt frills and such delicacies of the craft. He, partly a farmer, partly a farmer's man, tilling his own ground, and then tilling other people's, affording a proof, even in this declining age, when the circumstances of so many worthy members of the community seem to have an alacrity in sinking, that it is possible to amend them by sheer industry. He, who was born in the work-house, and bred up as a parish boy, has now, by mere manual labour, risen to the rank of a land-owner, pays rates and taxes, grumbles at the times, and is called Master Wells, the title next to Mr, that by which Shakespeare was called, What Would Man Have More? His wife, besides being the best lawn-dress in the county, is a comely woman still. There she stands at the spring, dipping up water for tomorrow, the clear, deep, silent spring, which sleeps so peacefully under its high flowery bank, red with the tall spiral stalks of the fox-glove and their rich pendant bells, blue with the beautiful Forget-Me-Not, that gem-like blossom, which looks like a living jewel of turquoise and topas. It is almost too late to see its beauty, and here is the pleasant shady lane, where the high elms will shut out the little twilight that remains. Ah, but we shall have the fairy's lamps to guide us, the stars of the earth, the glowworms. Here they are, three almost together. Do not see them? One seems tremulous, vibrating as if on the extremity of a leaf of grass. The others are deeper in the hedge, in some green cell on which their light falls with an emerald luster. Well, I hope my friends the cricketers will not come this way home. I would not have the pretty creatures removed from more than I care to say, and in this matter I would hardly trust Joe Kirby. Boys so love to stick them in their hats. But this lane is quite deserted. It's only a road from field to field. No one comes here at this hour. They are quite safe, and I shall walk here to-morrow and visit them again. And now, good night, beautiful insects, lamps of the fairies, good night.