 Chapter 2 Part 12 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 12, The Shore. September 9th, a bright, sun-shiny afternoon. What a comfort it is to get out again, to see once more that rarity of rarities a fine day. We English people are accused of talking over much of the weather, but the weather this summer has forced people to talk of it. Summer, did I say? Oh, season most unworthy of that sweet sunny name! Season of coldness and cloudiness, of gloom and rain! A worse November! For in November the days are short, and shut up in a warm room, lighted by that household sun, a lamp, one feels through the long evenings, comfortably independent of the out-of-doors tempests. But though we may have, and did have, fires all through the dog-days, there is no shutting out daylight, and sixteen hours of rain, pattering against the windows and dripping from the eaves, sixteen hours of rain not merely audible but visible for seven days in the week, would be enough to exhaust the patience of Job or Grisel, especially if Job were a farmer, and Grisel a country-gentlewoman. Never was known such a season, hay-swimming, cattle-drowning, and fruit-rotting, corn-spoiling, and that naughty river, the Lodden, who never can take Poth's advice and keep between its banks, running about the country, fields, roads, gardens, and houses, like mad, the weather would be talked of. Indeed, it was not easy to talk of anything else. A friend of mine, having occasion to write me a letter, thought it worth abusing in rhyme, and bepommelled it through three pages of Bathguide verse, of which I subjoin a specimen. This surely rains over the world, and of late his water-pot strangely has twirled, or he's taken a colander up by mistake, and unceasingly dips it in some mighty lake, though it is not inlethi, for who can forget the annoyance of getting most thoroughly wet? It must be in the river called Styx, I declare, for the moment it drizzles it makes the men swear. It did rain, to-morrow, is growing good grammar. Voxhall and campstools have been brought to the hammer. A pony gondola is all I can keep, and I use my umbrella and patterns in sleep, row out of my window, when it is my whim to visit a friend and just ask, Can you swim? This friend of mine is a person of great quickness and talent, who, if she were not a beauty and a woman of fortune, that is to say, if she were prompted by either of those two powerful stimuli, want of money or want of admiration, to take due pains, would inevitably become a clever writer. As it is, her notes and je d'esprit, struck off trait de plume, have great point and neatness. Take the following belay, which forms the label to a closed basket, containing the ponderous present alluded to, last Mickelness Day. To miss M. When this you see, remember me, was long a phrase in use, and so I sent to you, dear friend, my proxy, what, a goose? So far, my friend. In short, whether in prose or in verse, every body railed at the weather. But this is over now, the sun has come to dry the world, mud is turned into dust, rivers have retreated to their proper limits, farmers have left off grumbling, and we are about to take a walk, as usual, as far as the shore, a pretty wood about a mile off. But one of our companions, being a stranger to the gentle reader, we must do him the honour of an introduction. Folks, when they are sure of having their own way, have sometimes ways as odd as those of the unfurred, unfethered animals, who walk on two legs and talk, and are called rational. My beautiful white greyhound Mayflower, for instance, dead alas, since this was written, is as whimsical as the finest lady in the land. Amongst her other fancies she has taken a violent affection for a most hideous stray dog, who made his appearance here about six months ago, and contrived to pick up a living in the village, one can hardly tell how. Now appealing to the charity of old Rachel Strong, the Laundress, a dog-lover by profession, now winning a meal from the light-footed and open-hearted lasses at the rose. Now standing on his hind legs, to extort by sheer beggary a scanty morsel from some pair of drowthy cronies or solitary drovers discussing his dinner or supper on the ale-house bench, now catching a mouthful, flung to him in puke and tempt by some scornful gentleman of the shoulder-knot, mounted on his throne the coach-box, whose notice he had attracted by dint of ugliness, now sharing the commons of master-keep a shoemaker's pigs, now succeeding to the reversion of the well-nored bone of master-brown the shopkeeper's fierce house-dog, now fulching the skim milk of Dame Wheeler's cat, spit at by the cat, worried by the mastiff, chased by the pigs, screamed at by the dame, and stormed at by the shoemaker, flogged by the shopkeeper, teased by all the children, and scouted by all the animals of the parish, but yet living through his griefs and bearing them patiently, for sufferance is the badge of all his tribe, and even seeming to find in an occasional full meal, or a gleam of sunshine, or a wisp of dry straw on which to repose his sorry carcass, some comfort in his disconsolate condition. In this plight was he found by May, the most high-blooded and aristocratic of grey hounds, and from this plight did May rescue him, invited him into her territory the stable, resisted all attempts to turn him out, reinstated him there in spite of maid and boy, and mistress and master, wore out everybody's opposition by the activity of her protection and the pertinacity of her self-will, made him sharer of her bed and of her mess, and finally established him as one of the family as firmly as herself. Dash, for he has even won himself a name amongst us before he was anonymous, Dash is a sort of kind of spaniel, at least there is in his mongrel composition some sign of that beautiful race. Besides his ugliness, which is of the worst sort, that is to say the shabbiest, he has a limp on one leg that gives a peculiar one-sided awkwardness to his gait, but independently of his great merit in being May's pet, he has other merits which serve to account for that phenomenon, being beyond all comparison the most faithful, attached and affectionate animal I have ever known, and that is saying much. He seems to think it necessary to atone for his ugliness by extra good conduct, and does so dance on his lame leg and so wag his scrubby tail, that it does anyone who has a taste for happiness good to look at him, so that he may now be said to stand on his own footing. We are all rather ashamed of him when strangers come in the way, and think it necessary to explain that he is May's pet, but amongst ourselves, and those who are used to his appearance, he has reached the point of favouritism in his own person. I have in common with wiser women the feminine weakness of loving whatever loves me, and therefore I like Dash. His master has found out that he is a capital finder, and in spite of his lameness will hunt a field or beat a cover with any spaniel in England, and therefore he likes Dash. The boy has fought a battle in defence of his beauty with another boy, bigger than himself, and beat his opponent most handsomely, and therefore he likes Dash, and the maids like him, or pretend to like him because we do, as is the fashion of that pliant and imitative class. And now Dash and May follow us everywhere, and are going with us to the shore, as I said before, or rather to the cottage by the shore, to bespeak milk and butter of our little dairywoman Hannah Bint, a house-wifely occupation to which we owe some of our pleasantest rambles. And now we pass the sunny, dusty village street, who would have thought a month ago that we should complain of sun and dust again, and turn the corner where the two great oaks hang so beautifully over the clear deep pond, mixing their cool green shadows with the bright blue sky and the white clouds that flit over it, and loiter at the wheeler's shop, always picturesque, with its tools and its work, and its materials also various in form, and so harmonious in colour, and its noise, merry workmen, hammering and singing, and making a various harmony also. The shop is rather empty today, for its usual inmates are busy on the green beyond the pond, one set building a cart, another painting a wagon, and then we leave the village quite behind, and proceed slowly up the cool, quiet lane, between tall hedgerows of the darkest verger, overshadowing banks green and fresh as an emerald. Not so quick as I expected, though, for they are shooting here today, as Dash and I have both discovered, he with great delight, for a gun to him is as a trumpet to a war-horse, I with no less annoyance, for I don't think that a partridge itself, barring the accident of being killed, can be more startled than I at that abominable explosion. Dash has certainly better blood in his veins than anyone would guess to look at him, he even shows some inclination to a lope into the fields in pursuit of those noisy iniquities, but he is an orderly person after all, and a word has checked him. Ah, here is a shriller din mingling with the small artillery, a shriller and more continuous. We are not yet arrived within sight of Master Weston's cottage, snugly hidden behind a clump of elms, but we are in full hearing of Dame Weston's tong, raised as usual to scolding pitch. The Weston's are new arrivals in our neighbourhood, and the first thing heard of them was a complaint from the wife to our magistrate of her husband's beating her. It was a regular charge of assault, an information in full form. A most piteous case did Dame Weston make of it, softening her voice for the nonce into a shrill tremulous wine, and exciting the mingled pity and anger, a pity toward herself and anger toward her husband, of the whole female world, pitiful and indignant as the female world is wont to be on such occasions. Every woman in the parish railed at Master Weston, and poor Master Weston was summoned to attend the bench on the ensuing Saturday and answer the charge. And such was the clamour abroad and at home that the unlucky culprit, terrified at the sound of a warrant and a constable, ran away, and was not heard of for a fortnight. At the end of that time he was discovered and brought to the bench, and Dame Weston again told her story, and as before on the full cry. She had no witnesses, and the bruises of which she made complaint had disappeared, and there were no women present to make common cause with the sex. Still, however, the general feeling was against Master Weston, and it would have gone hard with him when he was called in if a most unexpected witness had not risen up in his favour. His wife had brought in her arms a little girl about eighteen months old, partly perhaps to move compassion in her favour, for a woman with a child in her arms is always an object that excites kind feelings. The little girl had looked shy and frightened, and had been as quiet as a lamb during her mother's examination. But she no sooner saw her father, from whom she had been a fortnight separated, than she clapped her hands and laughed and cried, Daddy, Daddy, and sprang into his arms and hung round his neck and covered him with kisses, again shouting, Daddy, come home, Daddy, Daddy, and finally nestled her little head in his bosom with a fullness of contentment, an assurance of tenderness and protection, such as no wife-beating tyrant ever did inspire, or ever could inspire, since the days of King Solomon. Our magistrates acted in the very spirit of the Jewish monarch. They accepted the evidence of nature and dismissed the complaint. And subsequent events have fully justified their decision, Mistress Weston proving not only renowned for the feminine accomplishment of scolding, the tong-banging it is called in our parts, a compound word which deserves to be Greek, but is actually herself addicted to administering the conjugal discipline, the infliction of which she was pleased to impute to her luckless husband. Now we cross the style, and walk up the fields to the shore. How beautifully green this pasture looks, and how finally the evening sun glances between the bowls of that clump of trees, beach and ash and aspen, and how sweet the hedgerows are with woodbind and wild scabies, or as the country people call it the gypsy rose. Here is little Dolly Weston, the unconscious witness, with cheeks as red as a real rose, tottering up the path to meet her father, and here is the charity-polled urchin George Copa returning from work and singing Home Sweet Home at the top of his voice, and then when the notes proved too high for him, continuing the air in a whistle, until he has turned the impassable corner, and then taking up again the song and the words Home Sweet Home, and looking as if he felt their full import, plough-boy though he be. And so he does, for he is one of a large and honest, a kind and an industrious family, where all goes well, and where the poor plough-boy is sure of finding cheerful faces and coarse comforts, all that he has learned to desire. Oh, to be as cheaply and as thoroughly contented as George Copa, all his luxury's a cricket-match, all his wants satisfied in Home Sweet Home. Nothing but noises to-day. They are clearing Farmer Brook's great beanfield, and crying the harvest home in a chorus, before which all other sounds, the song, the scolding, the gunnery, fade away and become faint echoes. A pleasant noise is that, though for one's ears' sake one makes some haste to get away from it. And here in happy time is that pretty wood the shore, with its broad pathway, its tangled dingles, its nuts and its honeysuckles, and carrying away a faggot of those sweetest flowers, we reach Hannah Bintz, of whom and of whose doings we shall say more another time. And a footnote. Poor Dash is also dead. We didn't keep him long. Indeed, I believe that he died of the transition from starvation to good feed, as dangerous to a dog's stomach and to most stomachs as the less agreeable change from good feed to starvation. He has been succeeded in place and favour by another Dash, not less amiable in demeanour, and far more creditable in appearance, bearing no small resemblance to the pet spaniel of my friend Master Dinley, he who stole the bone from the magpies, and who figures as the first Dash of this volume. Let not the unwary reader opine that in assigning the same name to three several individuals, I am acting as a humble imitator of the inimitable writer who has given immortality to the peppers and the mustards, on the one hand, or showing a poverty of invention or a want of acquaintance with the bead-roll of canine appellations on the other. I merely, with my usual scrupulous fidelity, take the names as I find them. The fact is that half the handsome spaniels in England are called Dash, just as half the tall footmen are called Thomas. The name belongs to the species. Sitting in an open carriage one day last summer at the door of a farmhouse where my father had some business, I saw a noble and beautiful animal of this kind lying in great state and laziness on the steps, and felt an immediate desire to make acquaintance with him. My father, who had had the same fancy, had patted him and called him poor fellow in passing, without eliciting the smallest notice in return. Dash cried I at a venture. Good Dash! Noble Dash! And up he started in a moment, making but one spring from the door to the gig. Of course I was right in my guess. The gentleman's name was Dash. End of Chapter 2, Part 12. Chapter 2, Part 13 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 13, Hannah Bint. The shore, leading to Hannah Bint's habitation, is, as I perhaps have said before, a very pretty mixture of wood and coppice. That is to say, a tract of thirty or forty acres covered with fine growing timber, ash and oak and elm, very regularly planted, and interspersed here and there with large patches of underwood, hazel, maple, birch, holly and hawthorn, woven into almost impenetrable thickets by long wreaths of the bramble, the briny and the briar rose, or by the pliant and twisting garlands of the wild honeysuckle. In other parts the shore is quite clear of its bosky undergrowth and clothed only with large beds of feathery fern or carpets of flowers, prim roses, orchises, cow slips, ground ivy, cranesbill, cottongrass, Solomon's seal, and forget-me-not, crowded together with the profusion and brilliancy of colour such as I have rarely seen equaled even in a garden. Here the wild hyacinth really enamels the ground with its fresh and lovely purple, and there, on aged roots with bright green mosses clad, dwells the wood sorrel with its bright thin leaves, heart-shaped and triply folded, and its root creeping like beaded coral, whilst a round flourished the copse's pride and amenities with rays like golden studs on ivory laid, most delicate, but touched with purple clouds fit crown for April's fair but changeful brow. The variety is much greater than I have enumerated, for the ground is so unequal, now swelling in gentler scents, now dimpling into dells and hollows, and the soil so different in different parts, that the silven flora is unusually extensive and complete. The season is, however, now too late for this flouriness, and except the tufted woodbines which have continued in bloom during the whole of this lovely autumn, and some lingering garlands of the purple wild vetch breathing round the thickets and uniting with the ruddy leaves of the bramble and the pale fastoons of the briny, there is little to call one's attention from the grander beauties of the trees, the sycamore, its broad leaves already spotted, the oak heavy with acorns, and the delicate shining rind of the weeping birch, the lady of the woods, thrown out in strong relief from a background of holly and hawthorn, each studded with coral berries and backed with old beaches, beginning to assume the rich tawny hue which makes them perhaps the most picturesque of autumnal trees, as the transparent freshness of their young foliage is undoubtedly the choicest ornament of the forest in spring. A sudden turn round one of these magnificent beaches brings us to the boundary of the shore, and leaning upon a rude gate we look over an open space of about ten acres of ground, still more varied and broken than that which we have passed, and surrounded on all sides by thick woodland. As a piece of colour nothing can be well finer, the ruddy glow of the heath-flower contrasting on the one hand with the gold and blossomed furs, on the other with the patch of buckwheat, of which the bloom is not past, although the grain be ripening, the beautiful buckwheat, whose transparent leaves and stalks are so brightly tinged with vermilion, while the delicate pink white of the flower, a paler persicaria, has a feathery fall, at once so rich and so graceful, and a fresh and reviving odour, like that of the birch trees in the dew of a May evening. The bank that surmounts this attempt at cultivation is crowned with the late fox-glove and the stately mullain. The pasture of which so great a part of the waste consists looks as green as an emerald, a clear pond with the bright sky reflected in it lets light into the picture. The white cottage of the keeper peeps from the opposite coppice, and the vine covered dwelling of Hannah Bint rises from amidst the pretty garden, which lies bathed in the sunshine around it. The living and moving accessories are all in keeping with the cheerfulness and repose of the landscape. Hannah's cow greys in quietly beside the keeper's pony, a brace of fat pointer-puppies holding amicable intercourse with a litter of young pigs. Ducks, geese, cocks, hens, and chickens scattered over the turf. Hannah herself sallying forth from the cottage-door, with her milk-bucket in her hand, and her little brother following with the milking-stool. My friend Hannah Bint is by no means an ordinary person. Her father, Jack Bint, for in all his life he never arrived at the dignity of being called John. Indeed, in our parts he was commonly known by the cognomen of London Jack. He was a drover of high repute in his profession. No man between Salisbury Plain and Smithfield was thought to conduct a flock of sheep so skillfully through all the difficulties of lanes and commons, streets and high roads as Jack Bint. Aided by Jack Bint's famous dog, Watch, for Watch's rough, honest face, black with a little white about the muzzle and one white ear, was as well known at fairs and markets as his master's equally honest and weather-beaten visage. Lucky was the dealer that could secure their services, Watch being renowned for keeping a flock together better than any shepherd's dog on the road, and Jack for delivering them more punctually and in better condition. No man had a more thorough knowledge of the proper night-stations, where good feed might be procured for his charge and good liquor for Watch and himself, Watch like other sheep-dogs being accustomed to live chiefly on bread and beer. His master, though not averse to a pot of good double-x, preferred gin, and they who plod slowly along through wet and weary ways in frost and in fog, have undoubtedly a stronger temptation to indulge in that cordial and reviving stimulus than we water-drinkers sitting in warm and comfortable rooms can readily imagine. For certain our drover could never resist the gentle seduction of the gin-bottle, and being of a free merry jovial temperament, one of those persons commonly called good fellows, who like to see others happy in the same way with themselves, he was apt to circulate it at his own expense to the great improvement of his popularity and the great detriment of his finances. All this did vastly well whilst his earnings continued proportionate to his spendings, and the little family at home were comfortably supported by his industry. But when a rheumatic fever came on one hard winter and finally settled in his limbs, reducing the most active and hardy man in the parish to the state of a confirmed cripple, then his reckless improvidence stared him in the face, and poor Jack, a thoughtless but kind creature and a most affectionate father, looked at his three motherless children with the acute misery of a parent who has brought those whom he loves best in the world to abject destitution. He found help, where he probably least expected it, in the sense and spirit of his young daughter, a girl of twelve years old. Hannah was the eldest of the family, and had ever since her mother's death, which event had occurred two or three years before, been accustomed to take the direction of their domestic concerns, to manage her two brothers, to feed the pigs and the poultry, and to keep house during the almost constant absence of her father. She was a quick clever lass, of a high spirit, a firm temper, some pride, and a horror of accepting parochial relief, which is every day becoming rarer amongst the peasantry, but which forms the surest safeguard to the sturdy independence of the English character. Our little damsel possessed this quality imperfection, and when her father talked of giving up their comfortable cottage and removing to the work-house, while she and her brothers must go to service, Hannah formed a bold resolution, and without disturbing the sick man by any participation of her hopes and fears, proceeded after settling their trifling affairs, to act at once on her own plans and designs. Careless of the future as the poor drover had seemed, he had yet kept clear of debt, and by subscribing constantly to a benefit-club, had secured a pittance that might at least assist in supporting him during the long years of sickness and helplessness to which he was doomed to look forward. This his daughter knew. She knew also that the employer in whose service his health had suffered so severely was a rich and liberal cattle-dealer in the neighbourhood, who would willingly aid an old and faithful servant, and had indeed come forward with offers of money. To assistance from such a quarter Hannah saw no objection. Farmer Oakley and the parish were quite distinct things. Of him accordingly she asked not money, but something much more in his own way. A cow. Any cow, old or lame or what not, so that it were a cow. She would be bound to keep it well. If she did not, he might take it back again. She even hoped to pay for it by and by, by instalments, but that she would not promise. And partly amused, partly interested by the child's earnestness, the wealthy yeoman gave her, not as a purchase, but as a present, a very fine young oldenie. She then went to the Lord of the Manor, and with equal knowledge of character, begged his permission to keep her cow on the shore common. Farmer Oakley had given her a fine oldenie, and she would be bound to pay the rent and keep her father off the parish, if he would only let it graze on the waist. And he too, half from real good nature, and half not to be outdone in liberality by his tenant, not only granted the requested permission, but reduced the rent so much that the produce of the vine seldom fails to satisfy their kind landlord. Now Hannah showed great judgment in setting up as a dairywoman. She couldn't have chosen an occupation more completely unoccupied or more loudly called for. One of the most provoking of the petty difficulties which beset people with a small establishment in this neighbourhood is the trouble, almost the impossibility, of procuring the pastoral luxuries of milk, eggs, and butter, which rank, unfortunately, amongst the indispensable necessaries of housekeeping. To your thoroughbred Londoner, who, whilst grumbling over his own breakfast, is apt to fancy that thick cream and fresh butter and new-laid eggs grow, so to say, in the country, form an actual part of its natural produce, it may be some comfort to learn that in this great grazing district, however the calves and the farmers may be the better for cows, nobody else is, that farmers' wives have ceased to keep poultry, and that we unlucky villagers sit down often to our first meal in a state of destitution which may well make him content with his thin milk and his Cambridge butter when compared to our imputed pastoralities. Hannah's Alderney restored us to one rural privilege, never was so cleanly a little milkmaid. She changed away some of the cottage finery, which in his prosperous days poor Jack had pleased himself with bringing home the china tea service, the gilded mugs, and the painted waiters for the useful utensils of the dairy, and speedily established a regular and gainful trade in milk, eggs, butter, honey, and poultry, for poultry they had always kept. Her domestic management prospered equally. Her father, who retained the perfect use of his hands, began a manufacture of mats and baskets which he constructed with great nicety and adroitness. The eldest boy, a sharp and clever lad, cut for him his rushes and osiers, erected under his sister's direction a shed for the cow, and enlarged and cultivated the garden, always with the good leave of her kind patron the lord of the manor, until it became so ample that the produce not only kept the pig and half kept the family, but afforded another branch of merchandise to the indefatigable directories of the establishment. For the younger boy, less quick and active, Hannah contrived to obtain an admission to the charity school, where he made great progress. Retaining him at home, however, in the haymaking and leasing season, or whenever his services could be made available, to the great annoyance of the schoolmaster, whose favourite he is, and who peaks himself so much on George's scholarship, your heavy sluggish boy at country work often turns out quick at his books, that it is the general opinion that this much-vaunted pupil will in the process of time be promoted to the post of assistant, and may possibly in the course of years rise to the dignity of a parish pedagogue in his own person, so that his sister, although still making him useful at odd times, now considers George as pretty well off her hands, while his eldest brother, Tom, could take an under-gardener's place directly, if he were not too important at home to be spared even for a day. In short, during the five years that she has ruled at the shore cottage, the world has gone well with Hannah Bint. Her cows, her calves, her peaks, her bees, her poultry, have each in their several ways thriven and prospered. She has even brought watch to like buttermilk as well as strong beer, and has nearly persuaded her father, to whose wants and wishes she is most anxiously attentive, to accept of milk as a substitute for gin. Not but Hannah hath had her enemies as well as her betters. Why should she not? The old woman at the lodge, who always peaked herself on being spiteful and crying down new ways, foretold from the first that she would come to no good, and couldn't forgive her for falsifying her prediction, and Betty Barnes, the slattenly widow of a tippling farmer who rented a field and set up a cow herself, and was universally discarded for insufferable dirt, said all that the wits of an envious woman could devise against Hannah and her oldenie. Nay, even Ned Miles, the keeper, her next neighbour, who had Willam held entire sway over the shore common as well as its copices, grumbled as much as so good-natured and genial a person could grumble, when he found a little girl sharing his dominion, a cow grazing beside his pony, and vulgar cocks and hens hovering around the buckwheat destined to feed his noble pheasants. Nobody that had been accustomed to see that paragon of keepers so tall and manly and pleasant-looking with his merry eye and his knowing smile, striding gaily along in his green coat and his gold-laced hat, with Neptune his noble newfoundland dog, a retriever is the sporting word, and his beautiful spaniel flirt at his heels could conceive how askew he looked when he first found Hannah and Watch holding equal reign over his old territory, the shore common. Yes, Hannah hath had her enemies, but they are passing away. The old woman at the lodge is dead, poor creature, and Betty Barnes, having herself taken to Tippling, has lost the few friends she once possessed, and looks, luckless wretch, as if she would soon die too. And the keeper? Why, he is not dead or like to die, but the change that has taken place there is the most astonishing of all, except perhaps the change in Hannah herself. Few damsels of twelve years old, generally a very pretty age, were less pretty than Hannah Bint. Short and stunted in her figure, thin in face, sharp in feature, with a muddled complexion, while sun-burnt hair, and eyes whose very brightness had in them something startling, over-informed, super-subtle, too clever for her age. At twelve years old she had quite the air of a little old fairy. Now, at seventeen, matters are mended. Her complexion has cleared, her countenance has developed itself, her figure has shot up into height and likeness, and a sort of rustic grace. Her bright acute eye is softened and sweetened by the womanly wish to please, her hair is trimmed and curled and brushed with exquisite neatness, and her whole dress arranged with that nice attention to the becoming, the suitable, both in form and texture, which would be called the highest degree of coquetry, if it did not deserve the better name of propriety. Never was such a transmoblification beheld. The lass is really pretty, and Ned Miles has discovered that she is so. There he stands, the rogue, close at her side, for he hath joined her whilst we have been telling her little story, and the milking is over. There he stands, holding her milk-pale in one hand, and stroking watch with the other, while she is returning the compliment by patting Neptune's magnificent head. There they stand, as much like lovers as may be, he smiling and she blushing, he never looking so handsome, nor she so pretty in all their lives. There they stand, in blessed forgetfulness of all except each other, as happy a couple as ever trod the earth. There they stand, and one would not disturb them for all the milk and butter in Christendom. I shouldn't wonder if they were fixing the wedding day. End of Chapter 2 Part 13, Chapter 2 Part 14 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 14, The Fall of the Leaf November 6. The weather is as peaceful today, as calm and as mild as in early April, and perhaps an autumn afternoon and a spring morning do resemble each other more in feeling, and even in appearance, than any two periods of the year. There is in both the same freshness and dewiness of the herbage the same barmy softness in the air, and the same pure and lovely blue sky, with white fleecy clouds floating across it. The chief difference lies in the absence of flowers and the presence of leaves. But then the foliage of November is so rich and glowing and varied that it may well supply the place of the gay blossoms of the spring, whilst all the flowers of the field or garden could never make amends for the want of leaves, that beautiful and graceful attire in which nature has clothed the rugged forms of trees, the verdant drapery to which the landscape owes its loveliness and the forests their glory. If choice must be between two seasons, each so full of charm, it is at least no bad philosophy to prefer the present good, even whilst looking gratefully back and hopefully forward to the past and the future. And of assurity, no fairer specimen of a November day could well be found than this, a day made to wander by yellow commons and birch-shaded hollows and hedgerows bordering unfrequented lanes. Nor could a prettier country be found for our walk than this shady and yet sunny barkshire, where the scenery, without rising into grandeur or breaking into wildness, is so peaceful, so cheeryed, so varied, and so thoroughly English. We must bend our steps towards the water-side, for I have a message to leave at Farmer Riley's, and sooth to say it is no unpleasant necessity, for the road thither is smooth and dry, retired as one likes a country walk to be, but not too lonely, which women never like. Leading past the Lodden, the bright, brimming, transparent Lodden, a fitting mirror for this bright blue sky, and terminating at one of the prettiest and most comfortable farmhouses in the neighbourhood. How beautiful the lane is today, decorated with a thousand colours. The brown road and the rich verger that borders it, strewed with the pale yellow leaves of the elm, just beginning to fall, hedgerows glowing with long reeds of the bramble in every variety of purplish red, and overhead the unchanged green of the fir, contrasting with the spotted sycamore, the tawny beach, and the dry, sear leaves of the oak, which rustle as the light wind passes through them. A few common hardy yellow flowers, for yellow is the common colour of flowers, whether wild or cultivated, as blue is the rare one. Flowers of many sorts, but almost of one tint, still blowing in spite of the season, and ruddy berries glowing through all. How very beautiful is the lane! And how pleasant is this hill, where the road widens, with the group of cattle by the wayside, and George Hearn, the little post boy, trundling his hoop at full speed, making all the better haste in his work, because he cheats himself into thinking it play. And how beautiful again is this patch of common at the hilltop, with the clear pool, where Martha Pitha's children, elves of three and four and five years old, without any distinction of sex in their sunburnt faces and tattered drapery, are dipping up water in their little homely cups shining with cleanliness, and a small brown picture with the lip broken, to fill that great kettle, which when it is filled, their united strength will never be able to lift. They're quite a group for a painter, with their rosy cheeks and chubby hands, and round merry faces, and the low cottage in the background peeping out of its fine leaves and china roses, with Martha at the door, tidy and comely and smiling, preparing potatoes for the pot, and watching the process of dipping and filling that useful utensil, completes the picture. But we must go on. No time for more sketches in these short days. It is getting cold, too. We must proceed in our walk. Dash is showing us the way, and beating the thick double hedgerow that runs along the side of the meadows at a rate that indicates gay muster, and causes the leaves to fly as fast as an east wind after a hard frost. Ah! a pheasant! a superb cock pheasant! Nothing is more certain than Dash's questing, whether in a hedgerow or a covert, for a better spaniel never went into the field. But I fancied that it was a hair-foot, and was almost as much startled to hear the whirring of those splendid wings as the princely bird himself would have been at the report of a gun. Indeed, I believe that the way in which a pheasant goes off does sometimes make young sportsmen a little nervous. They don't own it very readily, but the observation may be relied on nevertheless, until they get as it were broken in to the sound, and then that grand and sudden burst of wing becomes as pleasant to them as it seems to be to Dash, who is beating the hedgerow with might and main, and giving Tong louder and sending the leaves about faster than ever, very proud of finding the pheasant, and perhaps a little angry with me for not shooting it, at least looking as if he would be angry if I were a man, for Dash is a dog of great sagacity, and has doubtless not lived four years in the sporting world without making the discovery that although gentlemen do shoot, ladies do not. The Lodden at last, the beautiful Lodden, and the bridge where everyone stops as by instinct to lean over the rails and gaze a moment on a landscape of surpassing loveliness, the fine grounds of the great house with their magnificent groups of limes and furs and poplars grander than ever poplars were, the green meadows opposite studied with oaks and elms, the clear winding river, the mill with its picturesque old buildings bounding the scene, all glowing with the rich colouring of autumn, and harmonised by the soft beauty of the clear blue sky and the delicious calmness of the hour. The very peasant whose daily path it is cannot cross that bridge without a pause, but the day is wearing fast, and it grows colder and colder. I really think there will be a frost. After all, spring is the pleasantest season, beautiful as this scenery is. We must get on. Down that broad yet shadowy lane between the park dark with evergreens and dappled with deer, and the meadows where sheep and cows and horses are grazing under the tall elms. That lane where the wild bank clothed with fern and tufted with furs, and crowned by rich buried thorn and thick shining holly on the one side, seems to vie in beauty with the picturesque gold pailing, the bright laurels and the plumy cedars on the other. Down that shady lane, until the sudden turn brings us to an opening where four roads meet, where a noble avenue turns down to the great house, where the village church rears its modest spire from amidst its venerable yew trees, and where embosomed in orchards and gardens, and backed by barns and ricks, and all the wealth of the farmyard stands the spacious and comfortable abode of good farmer Riley, the end object of our walk. And in happy time the message is said and the answer given, for this beautiful mild day is edging off into a dense frosty evening. The leaves of the elm and the linden in the old avenue are quivering and vibrating and fluttering in the air, and at length falling crisply on the earth as if dash were beating for pheasants in the treetops. The sun gleams dimly through the fog, giving little more of light and heat than his fair sister, the Lady Moon. I don't know a more disappointing person than a cold sun, and I'm beginning to wrap my cloak closely around me and to calculate the distance to my own fireside, recanting all the way my praises of November, and longing for the showery, flowery April, as much as if I were a half-chilled butterfly or a dailier knocked down by the frost. How dear me! what a climate this is, that one cannot keep in the same mind about it for half an hour together! I wonder, by the way, whether the fault is in the weather, which Dash does not seem to care for, or in me. If I should happen to be wet through in a shower next spring, and should catch myself longing for autumn, that would settle the question. Volume 1 Chapter 3 Hannah The prettiest cottage on our village green is a little dwelling of Dame Wilson's. It stands in a corner of the common where the hedgerows go curving off into a sort of bay round a clear bright pond, the earliest haunt of the swallow. A deep, woody green lane, such as Hobbimer or Rysdale may have painted, a lane that hints of Nightingales forms one boundary of the garden, and a sloping meadow on the other, whilst the cottage itself, a low, thatched, irregular building, backed by a blooming orchard, and covered with honeysuckle and jessamine, looks like the chosen abode of snugness and comfort, and so it is. Dame Wilson was a respected servant in a most respectable family where she passed all the early part of her life, and which she quitted only on her marriage with a man of character and industry, and of that peculiar universality of genius which forms what is called in country phrase a handy fellow. He could do any sort of work, was thatcher, carpenter, bricklayer, painter, gardener, gamekeeper, everything by turns and nothing long. No job came amiss to him. He killed pigs, mended shoes, cleaned clocks, doctored cows, dogs and horses, and even went as far as bleeding and drawing teeth in his experiments on the human subject. In addition to these multifarious talents, he was ready, obliging and unfearing, jovial with all and fond of good fellowship, and endowed with a promptness of resource which made him the general advisor of the stupid, the puzzled and the timid. He was universally admitted to be the cleverest man in the parish, and his death, which happened about ten years ago, in consequence of standing in the water, drawing a pond for one neighbour, at a time when he was overheated by loading hay for another, made quite a gap in our village commonwealth. John Wilson had no rival, and has had no successor, for the Robert Ellis whom certain youngsters would feign exalt to a co-partnery of fame, is simply nobody. A bell-ringer, a ballad-singer, a troller of profane catches, a fiddler, a bruiser, a luller on ale-house benches, a teller of good stories, a mimic, a poet. What is all this to compare with the solid parts of John Wilson? Whose clock hath Robert Ellis cleaned? Whose windows hath he mended? Whose dog hath he broken? Whose pigs hath he ringed? Whose pond hath he fished? Whose hay hath he saved? Whose cow hath he cured? Whose calf hath he killed? Whose teeth hath he drawn? And whom hath he bled? Tell me that, irreverent whipsters! No, John Wilson is not to be replaced. He was missed by the whole parish, and most of all he was missed at home. His excellent wife was left the sole guardian and protector of two fatherless girls, one an infant at her knee, the other a pretty handy lass about nine years old. Cast thus upon the world there must have been much to endure, much to suffer, but it was born with a smiling patience, a hopeful cheeriness of spirit, and a decent pride, which seemed to command success as well as respect in their struggle for independence, without assistance of any sort by needlework, by washing and mending lace and fine linen, and other skillful and profitable labours, and by the produce of her orchard and poultry, Dame Wilson contrived to maintain herself and her children in their old comfortable home. There was no visible change. She and the little girls were as neat as ever. The house had still within and without the same sunshiney cleanliness, and the garden was still famous over all other gardens, for its cloves and stocks and double wall-flowers. But the sweetest flower of the garden, the joy and pride of her mother's heart, was her daughter Hannah. Well, might she be proud of her? At sixteen Hannah Wilson was beyond a doubt the prettiest girl in the village and the best. Her beauty was quite in a different style from the common country rosebud, far more choice and rare. Its chief characteristic was modesty, a light youthful figure exquisitely graceful and rapid in all its movements, springy, elastic and buoyant as a bird, and almost a shy, a fair innocent face with downcast blue eyes, and smiles and blushes coming and going almost with her thoughts. A low, soft voice, sweet even in its monosyllables, a dress remarkable for neatness and propriety, and borrowing from her delicate beauty and air of superiority not its own. Such was the outward woman of Hannah, modest, graceful, gentle and affectionate, grateful and generous above all. The generosity of the poor is always a very real and fine thing. They give what they want, and Hannah was of all poor people the most generous. She loved to give. It was her pleasure, her luxury. Rosie-cheeked apples, plums with the bloom on them, nosegays of cloves and blossomed myrtle. These were offerings which Hannah delighted to bring to those whom she loved, or those who had shown her kindness, whilst to such of her neighbours as needed other attentions than fruit and flowers, she would give her time, her assistance, her skill. For Hannah inherited her mother's dexterity in feminine employments, and something of her father's versatile power. Besides being an excellent lawn dress, she was accomplished in all the arts of the needle, millinery, dressmaking and plain work, a capital cutter out, an incomparable mender, and endowed with a gift of altering which made old things better than new. She had no rival at rifacimento, as half the turned gowns on the common can witness. As a dairywoman and her rearer of pigs and poultry, she was equally successful. None of her ducks and turkeys ever died of neglect or carelessness, or, to use the phrase of the poultry-yard on such occasions, of ill luck. Hannah's fowls never dreamed of sliding out of the world in such an ignoble way. They all lived to be killed, to make a noise at their deaths as chickens should do. She was also a famous scholar, kept accounts, wrote bills, read letters and answered them, was a trusty accountant and a safe confidante. There was no end to Hannah's usefulness or Hannah's kindness, and her prudence was equal to either. Except to be kind or useful, she never left her home, attended no fairs or revels or maings, went nowhere but to church, and seldom made a nearer approach to rustic revelry than by standing at her own garden gate on a Sunday evening with her little sister in her hand to look at the lads and lasses on the green. In short, our village beauty had fairly reached her twentieth year without a sweetheart, without the slightest suspicion of her ever having written a love letter on her own account, when all of a sudden appearances changed. She was missing at the accustomed gate, and one had seen a young man go into Dame Wilson's, and another had described a trimelastic figure walking not unaccompanied down the shady lane. Matters were quite clear. Hannah had gotten a lover, and when poor little Susan, who deserted by her sister, ventured to peep rather nearer to the gay group, was laughingly questioned on the subject, the hesitating no and the half yes of the smiling child were equally conclusive. Since the new marriage act, and it is almost unnecessary to observe that this little story was written during the short life of that whimsical experiment in legislation, well, since the new marriage act, we who belong to country magistrates have gained a priority over the rest of the parish in matrimonial news. We, the privileged, see on a work day the names which the Sabbath announces to the generality. Many a blushing, awkward pair hath our little lame clerk, a sorry cupid, ushered in between dark and light, to stammer and hacker, to bow and curtsy, to sign or make a mark, as it pleases heaven. One Saturday at the usual hour, the limping clerk made his appearance, and walking through our little hall, I saw a fine athletic young man, the very image of health and vigor, mental and bodily, holding the hand of a young woman, who with her head half buried in a geranium in the window, was turning bashfully away, listening, and yet not seeming to listen, to his tender whispers. The shrinking grace of that bending figure was not to be mistaken. Hannah! And she went aside with me, and a rapid series of questions and answers conveyed the story of the courtship. William was, said Hannah, a German hatter in B-town. He had walked over one Sunday evening to see the cricketing, and then he came again. Her mother liked him, everybody liked her William, and she had promised—oh, she was going. Was it wrong? Oh, no! And where are you to live? Oh, William has got a room in B-town. He works for Mr. Smith, the rich hatter in the marketplace, and Mr. Smith speaks of him oh so well. But William will not tell me where our room is. I suppose in some narrow street or lane, which he is afraid I shall not like, as how a common is so pleasant, he little thinks anywhere. She stopped suddenly, but her blush and clasped hands finished the sentence, anywhere with him. And when is the happy day? On Monday, fortnight, madam, said the bridegroom-elect, advancing with the little clerk to summon Hannah to the parlour, the earliest day possible. He drew her arm through his and we parted. The Monday fortnight was a glorious morning, one of those rare November days when the sky and the air are soft and bright as in April. What a beautiful day for Hannah was the first exclamation of the breakfast table. Did she tell you where they should dine? No, ma'am, I forgot to ask. I can tell you, said the master of the house, with somewhat of good importance in his air, somewhat the look of a man who, having kept a secret as long as was necessary, is not sorry to get rid of the burden. I can tell you, in London. In London? Yes, your little favourite has been in high luck. She has married the only son of one of the best and richest men in Beetown, Mr. Smith, the great Hatter. It's quite a romance, continued he. William Smith walked over one Sunday evening to see a match at Cricket. He saw our pretty Hannah and forgot to look at the Cricketers. After having gazed his fill, he approached to address her, and the little damsel was off like a bird. William did not like her the less for that, and thought of her the more. He came again and again, and at last contrived to tame this wild dove, and even to get the entree of the cottage. Hearing Hannah talk is not the way to fall out of love with her. So William, at last, finding his case serious, laid the matter before his father, and requested his consent to the marriage. Mr. Smith was at first a little startled, but William is an only son and an excellent son. And after talking with me and looking at Hannah—I believe her sweet face was the more eloquent advocate of the two—he relented, and having a spice of his son's romance, finding that he had not mentioned his situation in life, he made a point of it being kept secret till the wedding day. We have managed the business of settlements, and William, having discovered that his fair bride has some curiosity to see London—a curiosity by the by which I suspect she owes to you or poor Lucy—intends taking her thither for a fortnight. He will then bring her home to one of the best houses in B-town—a fine garden, fine furniture, fine clothes and fine servants, and more money than she will know what to do with. Really the surprise of Lord E's farmer's daughter, when thinking she had married his steward, he brought her to Burley and installed her as its mistress could hardly have been greater. I hope the shock will not kill Hannah, though, as he is said to have been the case with that poor lady. Oh, no! Hannah loves her husband too well—anywhere with him. And I was right. Hannah has survived the shock. She is returned to B-town, and I have been to call on her. I never saw anything so delicate and bright like as she looked in her white gown and her lace mob, in a room light and simple and tasteful and elegant, with nothing fine except some beautiful greenhouse plants. Her reception was a charming mixture of sweetness and modesty, a little more respectful than usual, and far more shame-faced. Poor thing! Her cheeks must have pained her. But this was the only difference. In everything else she is still the same Hannah, and has lost none of her old habits of kindness and gratitude. She was making a handsome matronly cap, evidently for her mother, and spoke even with tears of her new father's goodness to her and to Susan. She would fetch the cake and wine herself, and would gather in spite of all remonstrance some of her choicest flowers as a parting nose-gay. She did indeed just hint at her troubles with visitors and servants, how strange and sad it was, seemed distressed at ringing the bell and visibly shrank from the sound of a double knock. But in spite of these calamities Hannah is a happy woman. The double-wrapped was her husband's, and the glow on her cheek and the smile of her lips and eyes when he appeared spoke more plainly than ever anywhere with him. Two complete and remarkable specimens of the ladies of eighty years ago, ladies cased inwardly and outwardly in Addison and Whalebone. How they had been preserved in this entireness amidst the collision and ridicule of a country town seemed as puzzling a question as the preservation of bees in amber or mummies in pyramids or any other riddle that serves to amuse the naturalist or the antiquarian. But so it was. They were old maids and sisters, and so are like in their difference from all other women that they may best be described together. Any little non-resemblance may be noted afterwards. It was no more than nature prodigal of variety would make in two leaves from the same oak tree. Both, then, were as short as women well could be without being entitled to the name of Dwarf or carried about to fares for a show. Both were made considerably shorter by the highest of all high heels and the tallest of all tall caps, each of which artificial elevations was as ostentatiously conspicuous as the legs and cover of a pipkin, and served equally to add to the squatness of the real machine. Both were lean, wrinkled, withered, and old. Both enveloped their aged persons in the richer silks, displayed over large hoops, and stazed the tightest and stiffest that pinched in a beauty of George II's reign. The gown was of that make, formerly I believed called a sack, and of a pattern so enormous that one flower with its stalks and leaves would nearly cover the three quarters of a yard in length of which the tail might at a modrous computation consist. Over this they wore a gorgeously-figured apron whose flourishing white embroidery vied in size with the plants on the robe, a snowy muslin neckerchief rigidly pinned down, and over that a black lace tippet of the same shape parting at the middle to display a gay breast knot. The ribbon of which this last decoration was composed was generally of the same hue with that which adorned the towering lapeted cap, a sort of poppy colour which they called pompadour. The sleeves were cut off below the elbows with triple ruffles of potentous length. Brown leather mittens with peaks turned back and lined with blue satin and a variety of rings in an odd out of fashion variety of enamelling and figures of hair completed the decoration of their hands and arms. The carriage of these useful members was at least equally singular. They had adapted themselves in a remarkable manner to the little taper wasp-like point in which the waist ended, to which elbows, ruffles and all, adhered as closely as if they had been glued, while the ringed and mitten hands, when not employed in knitting, were crossed saltier wise in front of the apron. The other termination of their figure was adorned with black stuffed shoes, very peaked with points upwards and massive silver buckles. Their walking costume was, in winter, a black silk cloak lined with rabbit skins with holes for the arms. In summer another tipped and a collage, no bonnet could hold the turreted cap. Their motion out of doors was indescribable. It most nearly resembled sailing. They seemed influenced by the wind in a way incidental to no moving thing except a ship or a shuttlecock, and indeed one boisterous blowing night about the equinox when standing on some high stone steps, waiting for a carriage to take her home from a party. The wind did catch one of them, and but for the intervention of a tall footman, who seized her as one would seize a flyaway umbrella and held her down by main force, the poor little lady would have been carried up like an air balloon. Her feelings must have been pretty much similar to those of Gulliver in Brobdygnag when flown away with by the eagle. Half a minute later and she was gone. So far they were exact counterparts. The chief variation lay in the face. The midst the general hue of age and wrinkles you could just distinguish that Mrs. Theodosia had been brown and Mrs. Francis fair. There was a yellow shine here and there amongst the white hairs curiously rolled over a cushion high above the forehead that told of Fanny's golden locks, whilst the purely grey Ruloh of Mrs. Theodosia showed its mixture of black and white still plainer. Mrs. Francis too had the blue eye with a laughing light which so often retains its flash to extreme age, while Mrs. Theodosia's orbs bright no longer had once been hazel. Mrs. Theodosia's aquiline nose and long sociable chin evinced that disposition to meet which is commonly known by the name of a pair of nutcrackers. Mrs. Francis's features on the other hand were rather terse and sharp. Still there was in spite of these material differences that look of kindred, that inexplicable and indefinable family likeness which is so frequently found in sisters greatly increased in the present case by a similarity in the voice that was quite startling. Both tongs were quick and clear and high and rattling to a degree that seemed rather to belong to machinery and to human articulation, and when welcomes and how-do-do's were pouring both at once on either side, a stranger was apt to gaze in ludicrous perplexity as if beset by a ventriloquist or haunted by strange echoes. When the immediate cackle subsided, they were easily distinguished. Mrs. Theodosia was good and kind and hospitable and social. Mrs. Francis was all that, and was besides shrewd and clever and literary, to a degree not very common in her day, though not approaching to the pitch of a blue-stocking lady of the present. Accident was partly the cause of this unusual love of letters. They had known Richardson, had been admitted amongst his flower garden of young ladies, and still talked familiarly of Miss Hymore, Miss Fielding, Miss Collier, and Miss Molso, they had never learned to call her Mrs. Chappone. Laterally the taste had been renewed and quickened, by their having the honour of a distant relationship to one of the most amiable and unfortunate of modern poets. So Mrs. Francis studied novels and poetry in addition to her sister's sermons and cookery books, though as she used to post, without doing a stitch the less of knitting or playing a pool the fewer in the course of the year. Their usual occupations were those of other useful old ladies, superintending the endowed girls' school of the town with a vigilance and a jealousy of abuses that might have done honour to Mr. Hume, taking an active part in the more private charities, donations of flannel petticoats or the loan of baby things, visiting in a quiet way, and going to church whenever the church door was open. Their abode was a dwelling ancient and respectable like themselves that looked as if it had never undergone the slightest variation inside and out since they had been born in it. The rooms were many, low and small, full of little windows with little panes and chimneys stuck perversely in the corners. The furniture was exactly to correspond. Little patches of carpets in the middle of the slippery dry rubbed floors, tables and chairs of mahogany, black with age but exceedingly neat and bright, and Japan cabinets and old China, which Mr. Beckford might have envied, treasures which have either never gone out of fashion or have come back in again. The garden was beautiful and beautifully placed, a series of terraces descending to rich and finely timbered meadows through which the slow magnificent Thames rolled under the chalky hills of the pretty village of sea. It was bounded on one side by the remains of an old friary, the end wall of a chapel with a gothic window of open tracery in high preservation, as rich as point lace. It was full too of old fashioned durable flowers, jessamine, honeysuckle and the high-scented Fraxinella. I never saw that delicious plant in such profusion. The garden walks were almost as smooth as the floors, thanks to the two assiduous-serving maidens. Nothing like a man-servant ever entered this maidenly abode who attended it. One, the under-damsel, was a stout strapping country wench, changed from time to time as it happened. The other was as much a fixture as her mistresses. She had lived with them for forty years, and except being twice as big and twice as tall, might have passed for another sister. She wore their gowns, the two just made her one, caps, ruffles and aprons, talked with their voices and their phrases, followed them to church and school and market, scolded the schoolmistress, heard the children their catechism, cut out flannel petticoats and knit stockings to give away. Never was so complete an instance of assimilation. She had even become like them in face. Having a brother who resided at a beautiful seat in the neighborhood and being to all intents and purposes of the patrician order, their visitors were very select and rather more from the country than the town. Six formed the general number, one table, a rubber or a pool, seldom more. As the only child of a very favorite friend, I used during the holidays to be admitted as a super-numerary. At first out of compliment to mama, latterly I stood on my own merits. I was found to be a quiet little girl, an excellent hander of muffins and cake, a connoisseur in green tea, an amateur of quadril, the most entertaining of all games to a looker on, and lastly and chiefly, a great lover and admirer of certain books, which filled two little shelves at cross-corners with the chimney, namely that volume of Cooper's poems which contained John Gilpin, and the whole seven volumes of Sir Charles Grandison. With what delight I used to take down those dear books? It was an old edition, perhaps that very first edition which, as Mrs. Barbole says, the fine ladies used to hold up to one another at Ranala, and adorned with prints, oh, not certainly of the highest merit as works of art, but which served exceedingly to realize the story and to make us as it were personally acquainted with the characters. The costume was pretty much that of my worthy hostesses, especially that of the two Miss Selby's. There was even in Miss Nancy's face a certain likeness to Mrs. Francis. I remember I used to wonder whether she carried her elbows in the same way. How I read and believed and believed and read, and liked Lady G, though I thought her naughty, and gave all my wishes to Harriet, though I thought her silly, and loved Emily with my whole heart. Clementina I did not quite understand, nor I am half afraid to say so do I now. And Sir Charles I positively disliked. He was the only thing in the book that I disbelieved. Those bowings seemed incredible. At last, however, I extended my faith even to him, partly influenced by the irresistibility of the author, and partly by the appearance of a real living bow, who in the matter of bowing might almost have competed with Sir Charles himself. This bow was no other than the town member, who with his brother was, when in the country, the constant attendant at these chosen parties. Our member was a man of seventy, or there about, but wonderfully young-looking and well-preserved. It was said indeed that no fading bell was better versed in cosmetic secrets, or more devoted to the duties of the toilette. Fresh, upright, unwrinkled, pearly-teased, and point device in his accoutrements, he might have passed for fifty. And Douglas often did pass for such, when apart from his old-looking younger brother, who tall, lanky, and shambling, long-visit, and loosely dressed, gave a very vivid idea of Don Quixote when stripped of his armour. Never was so consumable to courtier as our member. Of good family and small fortune, he had early in life been seized with the desire of representing the town in which he resided. And canvassing, sheer canvassing, without eloquence, without talent, without bribery, had brought him in, and kept him in. There his ambition stopped. To be a member of Parliament was with him not the means, but the end of advancement. For forty years he represented an independent borough, and though regularly voting with every successive ministry, was at the end of his career, as poor as when he began. He never sold himself, or stood suspected of selling himself. Perhaps he might sometimes give himself away. But that he could not help. It was almost impossible for him to say no to anybody, quite so to a minister, or a constituent, or a constituent's wife or daughter. So he passed bowing and smiling through the world, the most disinterested of courtiers, the most subservient of upright men, with little other annoyance than a septennial alarm, for sometimes an opposition was threatened, and sometimes it came. But then he went through a double course of smirks and handshakeings, and all was well again. The great grievance of his life must have been the limitation in the number of francs. His apologies, when he happened to be full, were such as a man would make for a great fault. His lamentations such as might become a great misfortune. Of course there was something ludicrous in his courtliness, but it was not contemptible. It only wanted to be obviously disinterested to become respectable. The expression might be exaggerated, but the feeling was real. He was always ready to show kindness to the utmost of his power to any human being. He would have been just as civil and supple if he had not been an MP. It was his vocation. He could not help it. This excellent person was an old bachelor, and there was a rumour some forty or fifty years old that in the days of their bloom there had been a little love affair, an attachment, some even said an engagement, how broken none could tell, between him and Mrs. Francis. Certain it is that there were symptoms of flirtation still. His courtesy, always gallant to every female, had something more real and more tender towards Fanny, as he was won't to call her. And Fanny, on her side, was as conscious as heart could desire. She blushed and bridled, fidgeted with her mittens on her apron, flirted a fan nearly as tall as herself, and held her head on one side with that peculiar air which I have noted in the Shire Birds and Ladies in Love. She manoeuvred to get him next to her at the tea table, like to be his partner at Wist, loved to talk of him in his absence, and knew to an hour the time of his return, and did not dislike a little gentle railery on the subject, even I—oh, but traitorous to my sex! How can I jest with such feelings? Rather let me sigh over the world of woe, that in fifty years of hopeless constancy it must have passed through that maiden heart. The timid hope, the sickening suspense, the slow, slow fear, the bitter disappointment, the powerless anger, the relenting, the forgiveness, and then again that interest, kinder, truer, and more unchanging than friendship, that lingering woman's love—oh, how can I jest over such feelings? They're passed away, for she is gone and he. But they clung to her to the last, and ceased only in death. End of Chapter 4 Chapter 5 of Our Village Volume 1 by Mary Russell Midford Read by Anne Fletcher Hobart 2020 This Librivox recording is in the public domain. Our Village Volume 1 Chapter 5 A Great Farmhouse These are bad times for farmers. I am sorry for it. Independently of all questions of policy, as a mere matter of taste and of old association, it was a fine thing to witness the hearty hospitality, and to think of the social happiness of a great farmhouse. No situation in life seemed so richly privileged. None had so much power for good, and so little for evil. It seemed a place where pride could not live, and poverty could not enter. These thoughts pressed on my mind the other day, in passing the green-sheltered lane overhung with trees like an avenue, that leads to the Great Farm at M, where, ten or twelve years ago, I used to spend so many pleasant days. I could not help advancing a few paces up the lane, and then turning to lean over the gate, seemingly gazing on the rich, undulating valley, crowned with woody hills, which as I stood under the dark and shady arch, lay bathed in the sunshine before me, but really absorbed in thoughts of other times, in recollections of the old delights of that delightful place, and of the admirable qualities of its owners, how often I had opened the gate, and how gaily, certain of meeting a smiling welcome, and what a picture of comfort it was. Passing up the lane, we used first to encounter a thick, solid suburb of ricks of all sorts, shapes and dimensions. Then came the farm, like a town, a magnificent series of buildings, stables, card houses, cow houses, granaries and barns that might hold half the corn of the parish, placed at all angles towards each other, and mixed with smaller habitations for pigs, dogs and poultry. They formed, together with the old substantial farmhouse, a sort of amphitheatre looking over a beautiful meadow, which swept greenly and abruptly down into fertile enclosures, richly set with hedge-row timber, oak and ash and elm. Both the meadow and the farmyard swarmed with inhabitants of the earth and of the air, horses, oxen, cows, calves, heifers, sheep and pigs, beautiful greyhounds, all manner of poultry, a tame goat and a pet donkey. The master of this land of plenty was well fitted to preside over it, a thick stout man of middle height and middle-aged, with a healthy, ruddy square face, all alive with intelligence and good humour. There was a lurking jest in his eye and a smile about the corners of his firmly closed lips that gave assurance of good fellowship. His voice was loud enough to have hailed a ship at sea without the assistance of a speaking trumpet, wonderfully rich and round in its tones and harmonising admirably with his bluff jovial visage. He wore his dark shining hair, combed straight over his forehead, and had a trick when particularly merry of stroking it down with his hand. The moment his hand approached his head, out flew a jest. Besides his own great farm, the business of which seemed to go on like machinery, always regular, prosperous and unfailing, besides this and two or three constant stewardship and a perpetual succession of arbitrations, in which such was the influence of his acuteness, his temper and his sturdy justice that he was often named by both parties and left to decide alone, in addition to these occupations, he was a sort of standing overseer and church warden. He ruled his own hamlet like a despotic monarch and took a prime minister's share in the government of the large parish to which it was attached, and one of the gentlemen whose estates he managed, being the independent member for an independent borough, he had every now and then a contested election on his shoulders. Even that did not discompose him. He had always leisure to receive his friends at home or to visit them abroad, to take journeys to London or make excursions to the seaside, was as punctual in pleasure as in business, and thought being happy and making happy as much the purpose of his life as getting rich. His great amusement was coursing. He kept several brace of capital greyhounds, so high-blooded that I remember when five of them were confined in five different kennels on account of their ferocity. The greatest of living painters once called a greyhound the line of beauty in perpetual motion. Our friends' large dogs were a fine illustration of this remark. His old dog Hector, for instance, for whom he refused a hundred guineas, what a superb dog was Hector! A model of grace and symmetry, necked and crested like an Arabian, and bearing himself with a stakliness and gallantry which showed some conscience of his worth. He was the largest dog I ever saw, but so finely proportioned that the most determined fault finder could call him neither too long nor too heavy. There was not an inch too much of him. His colour was the purest white, entirely unspotted, except that his head was very regularly and richly marked with black. Hector was certainly a perfect beauty. But the little bitches on which the master peaked himself still more were not in my poor judgment so admirable. They were pretty little round graceful things, sleek and glossy and, for the most part, milk-white, with the smallest heads and the most dove-like eyes that were ever seen. There was a peculiar sort of innocent beauty about them, like that of a roly-poly child. They were as gentle as lambs, too. All the evil spirit of the family evaporated in the gentleman. But to my thinking these pretty creatures were fitter for the parlour than the field. They were strong, certainly. Excellently loined, cat-footed, and chested like a war-horse. But there was a want of length about them. A want of room, as the courses say. Something a little—a very little, inclining to the clumsy. A dumpiness. A pointer look. They went off like an arrow from a bow. For their first hundred yards nothing could stand against them. Then they began to flag, to find their weight too much for their speed, and to lose ground from the shortness of the stroke. Uphill, however, they were capital. There, their compactness told. They turned with the hair, and lost neither wind nor way in the sharpest ascent. I shall never forget one single-handed course of our good friend's favourite little bitch, Helen, on W. Hill. All the courses were in the valley below, looking up to the hillside as on a moving picture. I suppose she turned the hair twenty times on a piece of green sward not much bigger than an acre, and as steep as the roof of a house. It was an old hair, a famous hair, one that had baffled half the dogs in the country. But she killed him. Then, though almost as large as herself, took it up in her mouth, brought it to her master, and laid it down at his feet. Oh, how pleased he was! And what a pleasure it was to see his triumph! He did not always find W. Hill so fortunate. It is a high, steep hill of a conical shape, and circled by a mountain road winding up to the summit like a corkscrew. A deep road dug out of the chalk, and fenced by high mounds on either side. The hares always make for this hollow way, as it is called, because it's too wide for a leap, and the dogs lose so much time in mounting and descending the sharper clivities. Very eager dogs, however, will sometimes dare the leap, and two of our good friends' favourite greyhounds perished in the attempt in two following years. They were found dead in the hollow way. After this, he took a dislike to distant-coursing meetings, and sported chiefly on his own beautiful farm. His wife was, like her husband, with a difference, as they say in heraldry. Like him in looks, only thinner and paler. Like him in voice and phrase, only not so loud. Like him in merriment and good humour. Like him in her talent of welcoming and making happy and being kind. Like him in cherishing an abundance of pets, and in getting through with marvellous facility, an astounding quantity of business and pleasure. Perhaps the quality in which they resembled each other most completely was the happy ease and serenity of behaviour, so seldom found amongst people of the middle rank, who have usually a best manner and a worst, and whose best, that is, the studied, the company manner, is so very much the worst. She was frankness itself, entirely free from prickly defiance or bristling self-love. She never took offence or gave it, never thought of herself or of what others would think of her, had never been afflicted with the besetting sins of her station, a dread of the vulgar, or an aspiration after the gentile. Those words of fear had never disturbed her delightful heartiness. Her pets were her cows, her poultry, her bees and her flowers, chiefly her poultry, almost as numerous as the bees, and as various as the flowers. The farmyard swarmed with peacocks, turkeys, geese, tame and wild ducks, fowls, guinea hens and pigeons, besides a brood or two of favourite bantams in the green court before the door, with a little ridiculous strutter of a cock at their head, who imitated the magnificent demeanour of the great Tom of the barnyard, just as Tom in his turn copied the fierce bearing of that warlike and terrible biped, the he-turkey. I am the least in the world afraid of a turkey-cock, and used to steer clear of the turkey as often as I could, commend me to the peaceable vanity of that jewel of a bird the peacock, sweeping his gorgeous tail along the grass, or dropping it gracefully from some low-bowed tree, whilst he turns round his crested head with the air of a birthday bell to see who admires him. What a glorious creature it is, how thoroughly content with himself and with all the world. Next to her poultry our good farmer's wife loved her flower garden, and indeed it was of the very first water the only thing about the place that was fine. She was a real genuine florist, valued pinks, tulips and auriculars for certain qualities of shape and colour, with which beauty has nothing to do, preferred black renunculuses, and gave into all those obliquities of a triple-refined taste by which the professed florist contrives to keep pace with the vagaries of the bibliomaniac. Of all odd fashions that of dark, gloomy, dingy flowers appears to me the oddest. Your true connoisseurs now shall prefer a deep, puse hollyhock to the gay pink blossoms which cluster round that splendid plant like a pyramid of roses. So did she. The nomenclature of her garden was more distressing still. One is never thoroughly sociable with flowers till they are naturalised as it were, christened, provided with decent, homely, well-wearing English names. Now her plants had all sorts of heathenish appellations which no offence to her learning always sounded wrong. I liked the bee's garden best, the plot of ground immediately round their hives, filled with common flowers for their use, and literally redolent of sweets. Bees are insects of great taste in every way, and seem often to select for beauty as much as for flavour. They have a better eye for colour than the florist. The butterfly is also a dilettante. Rover though he be, he generally prefers the blossoms that become him best. What a pretty picture it is in a sunshiny autumn day, to see a bright spotted butterfly made up of gold and purple and splendid brown, swinging on the rich flower of the China Aster. To come back to our farm. With indoors everything went as well as without. There were no fine misses sitting before the piano and mixing the alloy of their new fangled tinsel with the old sterling metal. Nothing but an only son excellently brought up, a fair slim youth whose extraordinary and somewhat pensive elegance of mind and manner was thrown into fine relief by his father's loud hilarity, and harmonised delightfully with the smiling kindness of his mother. His spencers and tomsons too looked well amongst the hyacinths and geraniums that filled the windows of the little snug room in which they usually sat. A sort of afterthought built at an angle from the house and looking into the farmyard. It was closely packed with favourite armchairs, favourite sofas, favourite tables, and a sideboard decorated with the prize cups and colours of the Greyhounds, and generally loaded with substantial work baskets, jars of flowers, great pyramids of homemade cakes, and sparkling bottles of gooseberry wine, famous all over the country. The walls were covered with portraits of half a dozen Greyhounds, a brace of Spaniels as large as life, an old pony, and the master and mistress of the house in half length. She, as unlike as possible, prim, mincing, and delicate in lace and satin, he so staring and ridiculously like that when the picture fixed its good-humoured eyes upon you as you entered the room, you were almost tempted to say, ah, how do you do? Alas, the portraits are now gone and the originals. Death and distance have despoiled that pleasant home. The garden has lost its smiling mistress, the Greyhounds their kind master, and new people, new manners, and new cares have taken possession of the old abode of peace and plenty, the great farmhouse.