TALK WITH AN OLD MAN ON THE WAY—OLD HOUSES IN ENGLAND—THEIR AMERICAN RELATIONSHIPS—ENGLISH HEDGES AND HEDGE-ROW TREES—THEIR PROBABLE FATE—CHANGE OF RURAL SCENERY WITHOUT THEM.
From Tiptree I had a pleasant walk to Coggeshall, a unique and antique town, marked by the quaint and picturesque architecture of the Elizabethanregime. On the way I met an old man, eighty-three years of age, busily at work with his wheel-barrow, shovel, and bush-broom, gathering up the droppings of manure on the road. I stopped and had a long talk with him, and learned much of those ingenious and minute industries by which thousands of poor men house, feed, and clothe themselves and their families in a country super-abounding with labor. He had nearly filled his barrow, after trundling it for four miles. He could sell his little load for 4d. to a neighboring farmer; but he intended to keep it for a small garden patch allotted to him by his son, with whom he lived. These few square yards of land constituted the microscopic point of his attachment to that great globe still holding in reserve unmeasured territories of productive soil, on which nor plough, nor spade, nor human foot, nor life has ever left a lasting mark. These made his little farm, as large to him and to his octogenarian sinews and ambitions as was the Tiptree Estate to Alderman Mechi. It filled his mind with as busy occupation and as healthy a stimulus. That rude barrow, with its clumsy wheel, thinly rimmed with an iron hoop, was to him what the steam engine, and two miles of iron tubing, and all its hose-power were to that eminent agriculturist, of whom he spoke in terms of high esteem as a neighbor, and even as a competitor. Proportionately they were on the same footing; the one with his 170 square acres, the other with his 170 square feet. It was pleasant and instructive to hear him speak with such sunny and cheery hope of his earthly lot and doings. His son was kind and good to him. He could read, and get many good books. He ate and slept well. He was poor but comfortable. He went to church on Sunday, and thought much of heaven on week days. His cabbages were a wonder; some with heads as large as a half-bushel measure. He did something very respectable in the potato and turnip line. He had grown beans and beets which would show well in any market. He always left a strip or corner for flowers. He loved to grow them; they did him good, and stirred up young-man feelings in him. He went on in this way with increased animation, following the lead of a few questions I put in occasionally to give direction to the narrative of his experience. How much I wished I could have photographed him as he stood leaning on his shovel, his wrinkled face and gray, thin hair, moistened with perspiration, while his coat lay inside out on one of the handles of his barrow! The July sun, that warmed him at his work, would have made an interesting picture of him, if some one could have held a camera to its eye at the moment. I added a few pennies to his stock-in-trade, and continued my walk, thinking much of that wonderful arrangement of Providence by which the infinite alternations and gradations of human life and condition are adjusted; fitting a separate being, experience, and attachment to every individual heart; training its tendrils to cling all its life long to one slightly individualised locality, which another could never call home; giving itself and all its earthly hopes to an occupation which another would esteem a prison discipline; sucking the honey of contentment out of a condition which would be wormwood to another person on the same social level.
On reaching Coggeshall, I became again the guest of a Friend, who gave me the same old welcome and hospitality which I have so often received from the members of that society. After tea, he took me about the town, and showed me those buildings so interesting to an American—low, one-story houses, with thatched roofs, clay-colored, wavy walls, rudely-carved lintels, and iron-sash windows opening outward on hinges like doors, with squares of glass 3 inches by 4;—houses which were built before the keel of the Mayflower was laid, which conveyed the Pilgrims to Plymouth Rock. Here, now! see that one on the other side of the street, looking out upon a modern and strange generation through two ivy-browed eyes just lighted up to visible speculation by a single candle on the mantel-piece! A very animated and respectable baby was carried out of that door in its mother’s arms, and baptised in the parish church, before William Shakespeare was weaned. There is a younger house near by, which was a century old when Washington was born. These unique, old dwellings of town, village, and hamlet in England, must ever possess an interest to the American traveller which the grand and majestic cathedrals, that fill him with so much admiration, cannot inspire. We link the life of our nation more directly to these humbler buildings. Our forefathers went out of these houses to the New World. The log huts they first erected served them and their families as homes for a few years; then were given to their horses and cattle for stabling; then were swept away, as too poor for either man or beast. The second generation of houses made greater pretensions to comfort, and had their day, then passed away. They were nearly all one-story, wooden buildings, with a small apartment on each side of a great chimney, and a little bed-roomage in the garret for children. Then followed the large, red, New England mansion, broadside to the road, two stories high in front, with nearly a rood of back roof declining to within five or six feet of the ground, and covering a great, dark kitchen, flanked on one side by a bed-room, and on the other by the buttery. A ponderous chimney arose out of the middle of the building, giving a fire-place of eight feet back to the kitchen, and one of half the dimensions to each of the other two large rooms—thenorthandsouth. For, like the republic they founded, its forefathers and ours divided their dwellings by a kind of Mason and Dixon’s Line, into two parts, giving them these sectional appellations which have represented such antagonisms and made us such trouble. Every one of these old-fashioned houses had its “North” and “South” rooms on the ground-floor, and duplicates, of the same size and name, above, divided by the massive, hollow tower, called a chimney. A double front door, with panels, scrolled with rude carving, opened right and left into the portly building, which, in thetout ensemble, looked like a New England gentleman of the olden time, in his cocked hat, and hair done up in aqueue. These were the houses built “when George the Third was King.” In these were born the men of the American Revolution. They are the oldest left in the land; and, like the Revolutionary pensioners, they are fast disappearing. In a few years, it will be said the last of them has been levelled to the ground, just as the paragraph will circulate through the newspapers that the last soldier of the War of Independence is dead.
Thus, the young generation in America, now reciting in our schools the rudimental facts of the common history of the English-speaking race, will come to the meridian of manhood at a time when the three first generations of American houses shall have been swept away. But, travelling over a space of three centuries’ breadth, they will see, in these old English dwellings, where the New World broke off from the Old—the houses in which the first settlers of New England were born; the churches and chapels in which they were baptised, and the school-houses in which they learned the alphabet of the great language that is to fill the earth with the speech of man’s rights and God’s glory. One hundred millions, speaking the tongue of Shakespeare and Milton on the American continent, and as many millions more on continents more recently settled by the same race, across the ocean, and across century-seas of time, shall moor their memories to these humble dwellings of England’s hamlets, and feel how many taut and twisted liens attach them to the motherland of mighty nations.
On reckoning up the log of my first day’s walk, I found I had made full twelve miles by road and field; and was more than satisfied with such a trial of country air and exercise, and with the enjoyment of its scenery and occupations. The next day I made a longer distance still, from Coggeshall to Great Bardfield, or about eighteen miles; and felt at the end that I had established a reasonable claim to convalescence. The country on the way was marked by the quiet and happy features of diversified plenty. The green and gold of pastures, meadows, and wheat-fields; the picturesque interspersion of cottages, gardens, stately mansions, parks and lawns, all enlivened by a well-proportioned number of mottled cows feeding or lying along the brook-banks, and sheep grazing on the uplands,—all these elements of rural life and scenery were blended with that fortuitous felicity which makes the charm of Nature’s country pictures.
At Bardfield I was again homed for the night by a Friend; and after tea made an evening walk with him about the farm of a member of the same society, living in the outskirts of the town, who cultivates about 400 acres of excellent land, and is considered one of the most practical and successful agriculturists of Essex. His fields were larger and fewer than I had noticed on my walk in a farm of equal size. This feature indicates the modern improvements in English farming more prominently to the cursory observer than any other that attracts his eye. It is a rigidly utilitarian innovation on the old system, that does not at all promise to improve the picturesque aspect of the country. To “reconstruct the map” of a county, by wire-fencing it into squares of 100 acres each, after grubbing up all the hedges and hedge-trees, would doubtless add seven and a quarter per cent. to the agricultural production of the shire, and gratify many a Gradgrind of materialistic economy; but who would know England after such a transformation? One would be prone to reiterate Patrick’s exclamation of surprise, when he first shouldered a gun and tested the freedom of the forest in America. Seeing a small bird in the top of a tree, he pointed the fowling-piece in that direction, turned away his face, and fired. A tree-toad fell to the ground from an agitated branch. The exulting Irishman ran and picked it up in triumph, and held it out at arm’s length by one of its hind legs, exclaiming, “And how it alters a bird to shoot its feathers off, to be sure!” It would alter England nearly as much in aspect, if the unsparing despotism of £ s. d. should root out the hedge-row trees, and substitute invisible lines of wire for the flowering hawthorn as a fencing for those fields which now look so much like framed portraits of Nature’s best painting.
The tendency of these utilitarian times may well occasion an unpleasant concern in the lovers of English rural scenery. What changes may come in the wake of the farmer’s steam-engine, steam-plough, or under the smoke-shadows from his factory-like chimney, these recent “improvements” may suggest and induce. One can see in any direction he may travel these changes going on silently. Those little, unique fields, defined by lines and shapes unknown to geometry, are going out of the rural landscape. And when they are gone, they will be missed more than the amateurs of agricultural artistry imagine at the present moment. What some one has said of the peasantry, may be said, with almost equal deprecation, of these picturesque tit-bits of land, which,—
“Once destroyed, never can be supplied.”
And destroyed they will be, as sure as science. As large farms are swallowing up the little ones between them, so large fields are swallowing these interesting patches, the broad-bottomed hedging of which sometimes measures as many square yards as the space it encloses.
There is much reason to fear that the hedge-trees will, in the end, meet with a worse fate still. Practical farmers are beginning to look upon them with an evil eye—an eye sharp and severe with pecuniary speculation; that looks at an oak or elm with no artist’s reverence; that darts a hard, dry, timber-estimating glance at the trunk and branches; that looks at the circumference of its cold shadow on the earth beneath, not at the grand contour and glorious leafage of its boughs above. The farmer who was taking us over his large and highly-cultivated fields, was a man of wide intelligence, of excellent tastes, and the means wherewithal to give them free scope and play. His library would have satisfied the ambition of a student of history or belles-lettres. His gardens, lawn, shrubbery, and flowers would grace the mansion of an independent gentleman. He had an eye to the picturesque as well as practical. But I could not but notice, as significant of the tendency to which I have referred, that, on passing a large, outbranching oak standing in the boundary of two fields, he remarked that the detriment of its shadow could not have been less than ten shillings a year for half a century. As we proceeded from field to field, he recurred to the same subject by calling our attention to the circumference of the shadow cast on the best land of the farm by a thrifty, luxuriant ash, not more than a foot in diameter at the butt. Up to the broad rim of its shade, the wheat on each side of the hedge was thick, heavyheaded and tall, but within the cool and sunless circle the grain and grass were so pale and sickly that the bare earth would have been relief to a farmer’s eye.
The three great, distinctive graces of an English landscape are the hawthorn hedges, the hedge-row trees, and the everlasting and unapproachable greenness of the grass-fields they surround and embellish. In these beautiful features, England surpasses all other countries in the world. These make the peculiar charm of her rural scenery to a traveller from abroad. These are the salient lineaments of Motherland’s face which the memories of myriads she has sent to people countries beyond the sea cling to with such fondness; memories that are transmitted from generation to generation; which no political revolutions nor severances affect; which are handed down in the unwritten legends of family life in the New World, as well as in the warp and woof of American literature and history. Will the utilitarian and unsparing science of these latter days, or of the days to come, shear away these beautiful tresses, and leave the brow and temples of the Old Country they have graced bare and brown under the bald and burning sun of material economy? It is not an idle question, nor too early to ask it. It is a question which will interest more millions of the English race on the American continent than these home-islands will ever contain. There are influences at work which tend to this unhappy issue. Some of these have been already indicated, and others more powerful still may be mentioned.
Agriculture in England has to run the gauntlet of many pressing competitions, and carry a heavy burden of taxation as it runs. These will be noticed, hereafter, in their proper connection. Farming, therefore, is being reduced to a rigid science. Every acre of land must be put up to its last ounce of production. Every square foot of it must be utilised to the growth of something for man and beast. Manures for different soils are tested with as much chemical precision as ever was quinine for human constitutions. Dynameters are applied to prove the power of working machinery. Labor is scrutinised and economised, and measured closely up to the value of a farthing’s-worth of capacity. A shilling’s difference per acre in the cost of ploughing by horse-flesh or steam brings the latter into the field. The sound of the flail is dying out of the land, and soon will be heard no more. Even threshing machines worked by horses are being discarded, as too slow and old-fashioned. Locomotive steam-engines, on broad-rimmed wheels, may be met on the turnpike road, travelling on their own legs from farm to farm to thresh out wheat, barley, oats, and beans, for a few pence per bushel. They make nothing of ascending a hill without help, or of walking across a ploughed field to a rick-yard. Iron post and rail fencing, in lengths of twenty feet on wheels, drawn about by a donkey, bids fair to supersede the old wooden hurdles for sheep fed on turnips or clover. It is an iron age, and wire fencing is creeping into use, especially in the most scientifically cultivated districts of Scotland, where the elements and issues of the farmer’s balance-sheet are looked to with the most eager concern. Iron wire grows faster than hawthorn or buckthorn. It doubtless costs less. It needs no yearly trimming, like shrubs with sap and leaves. It does not occupy a furrow’s width as a boundary between two fields. It may be easily transposed to vary enclosures. It is not a nesting place for destructive birds or vermin. These and other arguments, of the same utilitarian genus, are making perceptible headway. Will they ever carry the day against the green hedges? I think they would, very soon, if the English farmer owned the land he cultivates. But such is rarely the case. Still, this fact may not prevent the final consummation of this policy of material interest. In a great many instances, the tenant might compromise with the landlord in such a way as to bring about this “modern improvement.” And a comparatively few instances, showing a certain per centage of increased production per acre to the former, and a little additional rentage to the latter, would suffice to give the innovation an impulse that would sweep away half the hedges of the country, and deface that picture which so many generations have loved to such enthusiasm of admiration.
Will the trees of the hedge-row be exposed to the same end? I think they will. Though trees are the most sacred things the earth begets in England, as has already been said, the farmer here looks at them with an evil eye, as horse-leeches that bleed to death long stretches of the land he pays £2 per acre for annually to his landlord. The hedge, however wide-bottomed, is his fence; and fencing he must have. But these trees, arising at narrow intervals from the hedge, and spreading out their deadening shades upon his wheatfields on either side, are not useful nor ornamental to him. They may look prettily, and make a nice picture in the eyes of the sentimental tourist or traveller, but he grudges the ground they cover. He could well afford to pay the landlord an additional rentage per annum more than equal to the money value of the yearly growth of these trees. Besides, the landlord has, in all probability, a large park of trees around his mansion, and perhaps compact plantations on land unsuited to agriculture. Thus the high value of these hedge-row trees around the fields of his tenant, which he will realise on the spot, together with some additional pounds in rent annually to himself and heirs, would probably facilitate this levelling arrangement in face of all the restrictions that the law of entail might seem to throw in the way.
If, therefore, the hedges of England disappear before the noiseless and furtive progress of utilitarian science, the trees that rise above them in such picturesque ranks will be almost certain to go with them. Then, indeed, a change will come over the face of the country, which will make it difficult for one to recognise it who daguerreotyped its most beautiful features upon his memory before they were obliterated by these latter-day “improvements.”
A FOOTPATH WALK AND ITS INCIDENTS—HARVEST ASPECTS—ENGLISH AND AMERICAN SKIES—HUMBLER OBJECTS OF CONTEMPLATION—THE DONKEY: ITS USES AND ABUSES.
Immediately after breakfast the following morning, my kind host accompanied me for a mile on my walk, and put me on a footpath across the fields, by which I might save a considerable distance on the way to Saffron Walden, where I proposed to spend the Sabbath. After giving me minute directions as to the course I was to follow, he bade me good-bye, and I proceeded on at a brisk pace through fields of wheat and clover, greatly enjoying the scenery, the air, and exercise. Soon I came to a large field quite recently ploughed upclean, footpath and all. Seeing a gate at each of the opposite corners, I made my way across the furrows to the one at the left, as it seemed to be more in the direction indicated by my host. There the path was again broad and well-trodden, and I followed it through many fields of grain yellowing to the harvest, until it opened into the main road. This bore a little more to the left than I expected, but, as I had never travelled it before, I believed it was all right. Thaxted was half way to Saffron Walden, and there I had intended to stop an hour or two for dinner and rest, then push on to the end of the day’s walk as speedily as possible. At about noon, I came suddenly down upon the town, which seemed remarkably similar to the one I had left, in size, situation, and general features. The parish church, also, bore a strong resemblance to the one I had noticed the previous evening. These old Essex towns are “as much alike as two peas,” and you must make a note of it, as Captain Cuttle says, was the thought first suggested by the coincidence. I went into a cosy, clean-faced inn on the main street, and addressed myself with much satisfaction to a short season of rest and refreshment, exchanging hot and dusty boots for slippers, and going through other preliminaries to a comfortable time of it. Rang the bell for dinner, but before ordering it, asked the waiting-maid, with a complacent idea that I had improved my walking pace, and made more than half the way—
“How far is it to Saffron Walden?”
“Twelve miles, sir.”
“Twelve miles, indeed! Why, it is only twelve miles from Great Bardfield!”
“Well, this is Great Bardfield, sir.”
“Great Bardfield! What! How is this? What do you mean?”
She meant what she said, and it was as true as two and two make four; and she was not to be beaten out of it by a stare of astonishment, however a discomfited man might expand his eyes with wonder, or cloud his face with chagrin. It was a patent fact. There, on the opposite side of the street, was the house in which I slept the night before; and here, just coming up to the door of the inn, was the good lady of my host. Her form and voice, and other identifications dispelled the mist of the mistake; and it came out as clear as day that I had followed the direction of my host, to bear to the left, far too liberally, and that I had been walking at my best speed in a “vicious circle” for full two hours and a half, and had landed just where I commenced, at least within the breadth of a narrow street of the same point.
My good friends urged me to stop and dine with them, and then make a fair start for the end of my week’s journey. But it was still twelve miles to Saffron Walden, and I was determined to put half of them behind me before dinner. So, taking a second leave of them in the course of three hours, I set out again on my walk, a wiser man in the practical understanding of the proverb, “The longest way around is the shortest way there.” At 2 p.m. I reached Thaxted, and rectified my first notion of the town, formed when I mistook it for Bardfield. Having made six miles extra between the two points, I resumed my walk after a short delay at the latter.
The weather was glorious. A cloudless sun shone upon a little sky-crystalled world of beauty, smaller in every dimension than you ever see in America. And this is a feature of English scenery that will strike the American traveller most impressively at the first glance, whether he looks at it by night or day. It is not that Nature, in adjusting the symmetries of her scenic structures, nicely apportions the skyscape to the landscape of a country merely for artistic effect. It is not because the island of Great Britain is so small in circumference that the sky is proportioned to it, as the crystal is to the dial of a watch; that it is so apparently low; that the stars it holds to its moist, blue bosom are so near at midnight, and the sun so large at noon. It comes, doubtless, from that constant humidity of the atmosphere which distinguishes the climate of England, and gives to both land and sky an aspect which is quite unknown to our great western continent. An American, after having habituated himself to this aspect, on returning to his own country, will be almost surprised at a feature of its scenery which he never noticed before. He will be struck at the loftiness of the sky; at the vividness of its blue and gold, the sharp, unsoftened light of the stars, and, as it were, the contracted pupil of the sun’s eye at mid-day. The sunset glories of our western heavens play upon a ground of rigid blue. “The Northern Lights,” which, at their winter evening illuminations, seem to have shredded into wavy filaments all the rainbows that have spanned the chambers of the East since the Flood, and to upspring, in mirthful fantasy, to hang their infinitely-tinted tresses to the zenith’s golden diadem of stars—even they sport upon the same lofty concave of dewless blue, which looks through and through the lacework and everchanging drapery of their mingled hues in the most witching mazes of their nightly waltz, giving to each a definiteness that our homely Saxon tongue might fit with a name.
But here, on the lower grounds of instructive meditation, is a humbler individuality of the country to notice. Here is the most sadly abused and melancholy living creature in all England’s animal realm that meets me in the midst of these reflections on things supernal and glorious. I will let the Northern Lights go, with their gorgeous pantomimes and midnight revelries, and have a moment’s communing with this unfortunate quadruped. It is called in derision here a “donkey,” but an ass, in a more generous time, when one of his race and size bore upon his back into the Holy City the world’s Saviour and Re-Creator. Poor, libelled, hopeless beast! I pity you from my heart’s heart. How I wish for Sterne’s pen to do you some measure of justice or condolence under this heavy load of opprobrium that bends your back and makes your life so sunless and bitter! Come here, sir!—here is a biscuit for you, of the finest wheat; few of your race get such morsels; so, eat it and be thankful. What ears! No wonder our friend Patrick called you “the father of all rabbits” at first sight. No! don’t turn away your head, as if I were going to strike you.
Most animals are best described from a certain point ofview,—in a fixed and quiescent attitude. But the donkey should be taken in the very act of this characteristic motion. You put out your hand in the gentlest manner to pat any one of them you meet, and he will instinctively turn away his head for fear of a beating.
There is an interesting speculation now coming up among modern reveries in regard to the immortality of certain animals of great intelligence and domestic virtues. A large and tender kindness of disposition is the father of the thought, it may be; but the thought seems to gain ground and take shape, that so much of apparently human mind and heart as the dog possesses cannot be destined to annihilation at his death, but must live and enlarge in another sphere of existence. Having thus opened, if it may be said reverently, a back-door into immortality for sagacious and affectionate dogs and horses, they leave it ajar for the admission of animals of less intelligence—even for all the kinds that Noah took into the ark, perhaps, although the theory is still nebulous and undefined. Now, I would beg the kind-hearted adherents to this theory not to think I am seeking to play off a satirical pleasantry upon it, if I express a hope, which is earnest and true, that, if there be an immortality for any class of dumb animals, the donkey shall go into it first, and have a better place in it than their parlor dogs or nicely-groomed horses. Evidently they are building up a claim to this illustrious distinction of another existence for these pets on the sole ground of merit, not of works, even, but of mere intelligence, fidelity, and affection. Granted; but the donkey should go in first and take the highest place on that basis. When you come to the standard of moral measurement, it may be claimed as among the highest of human as well as animal virtues, “to learn to suffer and be strong.” And this virtue the donkey has learned and practised incomparably beyond any other creature that ever walked on four legs since the Flood. Let these good people remember that their fanciful and romantic favoritisms are not to rule in the destinies awarded to the infinitesimally human spirits of domestic animals in another world, if another be in reserve for them. Let them remember that their softly-cushioned dogs, and horses so delicately clad, and fed, and fondled, have had a pretty good time of it in this life, and that in another, the poor, despised, abused donkey, going about begging, with such a long and melancholy face, for withered cabbage leaves and woody-grained turnips cast out and trodden under feet of happier animals,—that this meek little creature, kicked, cuffed, and club-beaten all the way from hopeless youth to an ignominious grave, will carry into another world merits and mementoes of his earthly lot that will obtain, if not entitle him to, some compensation in the award of a future condition. It is treading on delicate ground even to set one foot within the pale of their unscriptural theory; but as many of them hold the Christian faith in pureness of living and doctrine, let me remind them of that parable which shows so impressively how the disparities in human condition here are reversed in the destinies of the great hereafter.
But, to return to the earthly lot and position of this poor, libelled animal. Among all the four-footed creatures domesticated to the service of man, this has always been the veriest scapegoat and victim of the cruellest and crabbedest of human dispositions. Truly, it has ever been born unto sorrow, bearing all its life long a weight of abuse and contumely which would break the heart of a less sensitive animal in a single week. From the beginning it has been the poor man’s beast of burden; and “pity ’tis ’tis true,” poor men, in all the generations of human poverty, have been far too prone to harshness of temper and treatment towards the beasts that serve them and share their lot of humble life. The donkey is made a kind of Ishmaelite in the great family of domestic animals. He is made, not born so. He is beaten about the head unmercifully with a heavy stick, and then jeered at for being stupid and obstinate! just as if any other creature, of four or two legs, would not be stupid after such fierce congestion of the brain. His long ears subject him to a more cruel prejudice than ever color engendered in the circle of humanity but just above him. True, he is rather unsymmetrical in form. His head is disproportionately long and large, quite sufficient in these dimensions to fit a camel. He is generally a hollow-backed, pot-bellied creature, about the size of a yearling calf, with ungainly, sloping haunches, and long, coarse hair. But nearly all these deformities come out of the shameful treatment he gets. You occasionally meet one that might hold up its head in any animal society; with straight back, symmetrical body and limbs, and hair as soft and sleek as the fur of a Maltese cat; with contented face, and hopeful and happy eyes, showing that he has a kind master.
The donkey is really a useful and valuable animal, which might be introduced into America with great advantage to our farmers. I know of no animal of its size so tough and strong. It is astonishing, as well as shocking, to see what loads he is made to draw here. The vehicle to which he is usually harnessed is a heavy, solid affair, frequently as large as our common horse-carts. He is put to all kinds of work, and is almost exclusively the poor man’s beast of burden and travel. In cities and large towns, his cart is loaded with the infinitely-varied wares of street trade; with cabbages, fish, fruit, or with some of the thousand-and-one nicknacks that find a market among the masses of the common people. At watering-places, or on the “commons” or suburban playgrounds of large towns, he is brought out in a handsome saddle, or a well got-up little carriage, and let by the hour or by the ride to invalid adults, or to children bubbling over with life. Here, although the everlasting club, to which he is born, is wielded by his driver, he often looks comfortable and sleek, and sometimes wears a red ribbon at each ear. It would not pay to bring on to the ground the scrawny, bony creature that generally tugs in the costermonger’s cart. It is in the coal region or trade that you meet with him and his driver in their worst apostacy from all that is seemly in man or beast. To watch the poor creature, begrimed with coal-dust, wriggling up a long, steep hill, with a load four times his own weight, griping with his little sheep-footed hoofs into the black, slimy pavement of the road, while his tall, sooty-faced and harsh-voiced master, perhaps sitting on the top or on a shaft, is punching and beating him; to see this is enough to stir up the old adam in the meekest Christian to emotions of pugilistic indignation. It has often cost me a doubtful and protracted effort to keep it down. Indeed, I have often yielded to it so far as to wish that once more the poor creature might be honored of God with His gift to Balaam’s ass, and be able to speak, bolt outright, an indignant remonstrance, in human speech, against such treatment. It would serve them right!—these lineal descendants of Balaam, who have inherited his club and wield it more cruelly.
A word or two more about this animal, and I will pass on to others of more dignity of position. He is the cheapest as well as smallest beast of burden to be found in Christendom. You may buy one here for twenty or thirty English shillings. I am confident that they would be extremely serviceable in America, if once introduced. It costs but very little to keep them, and they will do all kinds of work up to the draught of 600 or 800 lbs. You frequently see here a span of them trotting off in a cart, with brisk and even step. Sometimes they are put on as leaders to a team of horses. I once saw on my walk a heavy Lincolnshire horse in the shafts, a pony next, and a donkey at the head, making a team graduated from 18 hands to 6 in height; and all pulling evenly, and apparently keeping step with each other, notwithstanding the disparity in the length of their legs.
It would be unjust to that goodwill to man and beast which is being organised and stimulated in England through an infinite number of societies, if I should omit to state that, at last, a little rill of this benevolence has reached the donkey. That most valuable and widely-circulated penny magazine, “The British Workman,” and its little companion for British workmen’s children, “The Band of Hope Review,” have advocated the rights and better treatment of this humble domestic for several years. His cause has also been pleaded in a packet of little papers called “Leaflets of the Law of Kindness for the Children.” And now, at last, a wealthy and benevolent champion, on whom the mantle of Elizabeth Fry, his aunt, has fallen, has taken the lead in the work of raising the useful creature to the level of the other animals of the pasture, stable, and barn-yard. Up to the present time, every creature that walks on four or two legs, either haired, woolled, or feathered, with the single exception of the donkey has had the door of the Agricultural Exhibition thrown wide open to it, to enter the lists for prizes or “honorable mention,” and for general admiration. A pig, whose legs and eyes have all been absorbed out of sight by an immense rotundity of fat, is often decked with a ribbon, of the Order of the Garter genus, as a reward of merit, or of grace of form and proportions! Turkeys, geese, ducks, and hens of different breeds, strut or waddle off with similar distinctions. As for blood-horses, bulls, cows, and sheep, one not versed in such matters might be tempted to think that men, especially the poorer sort, were made for beasts, and not beasts for men. And yet,mirabile dictu! at these great social gatherings of man-and-animal kind, there has not been even “a negro-pew” for the donkey. A genuine, raw, Guinea negro might have as well entered the Prince of Wales’ Ball in New York bare-footed, and offered to play a voluntary on his banjo for the dancers, as this despised quadruped have hoped to obtain theentreeto these grand and fashionable assemblies of the shorter-earedeliteof society.
But this prejudice against color and long ears is now going the way of other barbarisms. The gentleman to whom I have referred, a Member of Parliament, whose means are as large as his benevolence, has taken the first and decisive step towards raising the donkey to his true place in society. He has offered a liberal prize for the best conditioned one exhibited at the next Agricultural Fair. Since this offer was made, a very decided improvement has been noticed among the donkeys of the London costermongers, as if the competition for the first prize was to be a very large one.
It will be a kind of St. Crispin’s Day to the whole of the long-eared race—a day of emancipation from forty centuries of obloquy and oppression. Doubtless they will be admitted hereafter to the Royal Agricultural Society’s exhibitions, to compete for honors with animals that have hitherto spurned such association with contempt.
HOSPITALITIES OF “FRIENDS”—HARVEST ASPECTS—ENGLISH COUNTRY INNS; THEIR APPEARANCE, NAMES, AND DISTINCTIVE CHARACTERISTICS—THE LANDLADY, WAITER, CHAMBERMAID, AND BOOTS—EXTRA FEES AND EXTRA COMFORTS.
I reached Saffron Walden at 4 p.m., notwithstanding my involuntary walk of six extra miles in the morning. Here I remained over the Sabbath, again enjoying the hospitality of a Friend. And perhaps I may say it here and now with as much propriety as at any other time and place, that few persons, outside the pale of that society, have more frequently or fully enjoyed that hospitality than myself. This pleasant experience has covered the space of more than sixteen years. During this period, with the exception of short intervals, I have been occupied with movements which the Friends in England have always regarded with especial sympathy. This connection has brought me into acquaintance with members of the society in almost every town in Great Britain in which they reside; and in more than a hundred of their homes I have been received as a guest with a kindness which will make to my life’s end one of its sunniest memories.
On the following Monday, I resumed my walk northward, after a carriage ride which a Friend kindly gave me for a few miles on the way. Passed through a pre-eminently grain-producing district. Apparently full three-fourths of the land were covered with wheat, barley, oats, and beans. The fields of each were larger than I had noticed before; some containing 100 acres. The coming harvest is putting forth the full glory of its golden promise. The weather is all a farmer could wish, beautiful, warm, and bright. Nature, in every feature of its various scapes, seems to smile with the joy of that human happiness which her ministries inspire. Here, in these still expanses, waving with luxuriant crops, apparently so thinly peopled, one, forgetting the immense populations crowded into city spaces, is almost tempted to ask, where are all the mouths to eat this wide sea of food for man and beast, softening so gently into a yellow sheen under the very rim of the distant horizon? But, in the great heart of London, beating with the wants of millions, he will be likely to reverse the question, and ask, where can one buy bread wherewith to feed this great multitude?
At Sawston, a rustic little village on the southern border of Cambridgeshire, I entered upon the enjoyment of English country-inn life with that relish which no one born in a foreign land can so fully feel as an American. As one looks upon the living face of some distinguished celebrity for the first time, after having had his portrait hung up in the parlor for twenty years, so an American looks, for the first time, at that great and picturesque speciality among human institutions, the village inn of old England. The like of it he never saw in his own country and never will. In fact, he would not like to see it there, plucked up out of its ancient histories and associations. In the ever-green foliage of these it stands inwoven, as with its own network of ivy. Other countries, even older than England, have had their taverns from time immemorial; but they are all kept in the background of human life. They do not come out in contemporaneous history with any definiteness; not even accidentally. If a king is murdered in one of them, or if it is the theatre of the most thrilling romance of love, you do not know whether it is a building of stone, brick, or wood; whether it is one, two, or three stories in height. No outlines nor aspects are given you to help to fill up a rational picture of it. Neither the landlord nor the landlady is drawn as a representative man or woman. Either might be mistaken for a guest in their own house, if seen in hat or bonnet by a stranger.
But not so of the English country inn. It comes out into the foreground of a thousand interesting histories and pictures of common life. In them it has an individuality as marked as the parish church,couchantein its wide-rimmed nest of grave stones; as marked in unique architecture, location, and surroundings. In none of these features will you find two alike, if you travel from one end of the country to the other; especially among those a century old. You might as well mistake one of the living animals for the other, as to mistake “The Blue Boar” for “The Red Lion.” They differ as much from each other in general make and aspect as do their nominal prototypes. To give every one of their thousands “a local habitation and a name” of striking distinctness, has required an ingenuity which has produced many interesting feats of house-building and nomenclature. Both these departments of genius figure largely in the poetry and classics of the institution, with which the reading million of America have been familiar from youth up. And when any of them come to travel in England, it will greatly enhance their enjoyment to find that the pictures they have admired and the descriptions they have read of the famous country inn have been true to the very life and letter. All its salient features they recognise at once, and are ready to exclaim, “How natural!” meaning by that, how true is the original to the picture which they have seen so frequently. If they go far enough, they will find the very original of every one of the hundred pictures they have seen, painted by pen or pencil. They will find that all of them have been true copies from nature. Here is the portly-looking, well-to-do, two-story tavern, standing out with its comfortable, cream-colored face broadside to the street. It is represented in the old engraving with a coach-and-four drawn up before the door, surrounded by a crowd of spectators and passengers, some descending and ascending on ladders over the forward wheels; some looking with admiration at the scarlet coats of the pursy and consequential driver and guard; some exchanging greetings, others farewell salutations; ostlers in long waistcoats, plush or fustian shorts, and yellow leggings, standing bareheaded with watering-pails at the “’osses’ ’eads;” trunks great and small going up and down; village boys in high excitement; village grandfathers looking very animated; the landlord, burly, bland, and happy, with a face as rotund and genial as the full moon shining upon the scene; and those round, rosy, sunny, laughing faces peering out of the windows with delightful wonderment and exhilaration, winked at by the driver, and saluted with a graceful motion of his whip-handle in recognition of the barmaid, chambermaid, and all the other maids of the house. The coach, with all its picturesque appointments, its four-in-hand, the stirring heraldry of its horn coming down the road, its rattling wheels, the life and stir aroused and moved in its wake,—all this has gone from the presence of a higher civilisation. It will never re-appear in future pictures of actual life in England. It is all gone where the hedges and hedge-row trees will probably go in their turn. But the same village inn remains, and can be as easily recognised as a widow in weeds, who still wears a hopeful face, and makes the best of her bereavement.
But that humbler type of hostelry so often represented in sketches of English rural life and scenery—the little, cozy, one-story, wayside, or hamlet inn, with its thatched roof, checker-work window, low door, and with a loaded hay-cart standing in front of it, while the driver, in his round, wool hat, and in his smock-frock, is drinking at a pewter mug of beer, with one hand on his horse’s neck—this the hand of modern improvements has not yet reached. This may be found still in a thousand villages and hamlets, surrounded with all its rural associations; the green, the geese, and gray donkeys feeding side by side; low-jointed cottages, with long, sloping roofs greened over with moss or grass, and other objects usually shadowed dimly in the background of the picture. It is these quiet hamlets and houses in the still depths of the country, away from the noise and bluster of railway life and motion, that best represent and perpetuate the primeval characteristics of a nation. These the American traveller will find invested with all the old charm with which his fancy clothed them. It will well repay him for a month’s walk to see and enjoy them thoroughly.
In these days of sun-literature, whose letters are human faces, and whose new volumes are numbered by the million yearly, without a duplicate to one of them, I am confident that a volume of these English village inns of the olden school, in photographs, would command a large sale and admiration in America, merely as specimens of unique and interesting architecture. A thousand might be taken, every one as unlike the other in distinctive form and feature, as every one of the same number of men would be to the other.
The diversification of names, being more difficult, is still more remarkable. Although the spread eagle figures largely as the patron genius of American hotels, still nine-tenths of them bear the names of states, counties, towns, or national or local celebrities. But here natural history comes out strong and wide. The heraldry of sovereigns, aristocracy, gentry, commercial and industrial interests, puts up its variousarmsupon hundreds of inns in town and country. All occupations and recreations are well represented. Thus no country in the world approaches England in the wide scope and play of hotel nomenclature. Some of the combinations are exceedingly unique and most interesting in their incongruity. Dickens has not exaggerated this characteristic; not even done it justice in his hotel scenes. Things are put together on a hundred tavern signs that were never joined before in the natural or moral world, and put together frequently in most grotesque association. For instance, there is a large, first-class inn right in the very heart of London, which has for a sign, not painted on a board, but let into the wall of the upper story, in solid statuary, a huge human mouth opened to its utmost capacity, and a bull, round and plump, standing stoutly on its four legs between the two distended jaws. Now, the leading idea of this device is involved in a tempting obscurity, which leads one, at first sight, into different lines of conjecture. What did the designer of this group of statuary really intend to represent? Was it to let the outside world know that, in that inn, the “Roast Beef of Old England” was always to be foundpar excellence? If so, would a man’s mouth swallowing a bull whole, and apparently alive, with hide and horns, tend to stimulate the appetite of a passing traveller, and to draw him into the establishment? But leaving these ambiguous symbols to be interpreted by the passing public according to different perceptions of their meaning, how many in a thousand would guess aright the name given to the tavern by these tokens? Would not ninety-nine in a hundred say, “The Mouth and Bull,” to be sure, not only on the principle that the major includes the minor, but also because the human element is entitled to precedence in the picture? But the ninety-nine would be completely mistaken, if they adopted this natural conclusion. They would find they had counted without their host, who knows better than they the relative position and value of things. What has the law of logic to do with fat beef? The name of his famous hotel is “THE BULL AND MOUTH;” and few in London have attained to its celebrity as a historical building. One is apt to wonder if this precedence given to the beast is really incidental, or adopted to give euphony to the name of an inn, or whether there is a latent and spontaneous leaning to such a method of association, from some cause or other connected with perceptions of personal comfort afforded at such establishments. Accidental or intentional, this form of association is very common. There is no tavern in London better known thanThe Elephant and Castle, a designation that would sound equally well if the two substantives were transposed. Even the loftiest symbols of sovereignty often occupy the secondary place in these compound titles. There are, doubtless, a hundred inns in Great Britain bearing the name ofThe Rose and Crown, but not one, to my knowledge, called “The Crown and Rose.” The same order obtains in sporting sections and terminology. It is always “TheHareand Hounds;” never “Houndsand Hare.”
This characteristic in itself is very interesting, and no American, with an eye to the unique, would like to see it changed. But if the more syntax of hotel names in England is so pleasant for him to study, how much more admirable is their variety! He has read at home of many of them in lively romance and grave history but he finds here that not half has been told him. He is familiar with the Lions, Red, White, and Black; the Bulls and Boars of the same colors; the Black and White Swans and Harts; the Crown and Anchor, the Royal George, Queen’s Head, and a few others of similar designation. These names have figured in volumes of English literature which he has perused. But let him travel on the turnpike road through country towns and villages, and he will meet with names he never thought of before, mounted over the doors of some of the most comfortable and delightful houses of entertainment for man and beast that can be found in the world. Here are a few that I have noticed: “The Three Jolly Butchers,” “The Old Mash Tub,” “The Old Mermaid,” “The Old Malt Shovel,” “The Chequers,” “The Dog-in-Doublet,” “Bishop Boniface,” “The Spotted Cow,” “The Green Dragon,” “The Three Horseshoes,” “The Bird-in-Hand,” “The Spare Rib,” “The Old Cock,” “Pop goes the Weasel.” There are wide spaces between these names which may be filled up from actual life with numbers of equal uniqueness. But it is not in architecture nor in name that the country inn presents its most attractive characteristic. These features merely specialise its outward corporeity. The living, brightening, all-pervading soul of the establishment is the LANDLADY. Let her name be written in capitals evermore. There is nothing so naturally, speakingly, and gloriously English in the wide world as she. It is doubtful if the nation is aware of this, but it is the fact. Her English individuality stands outembonpoint, rosy, genial, self-complacent, calm, serene, happyfying, and happy. She is the man and master of the house. She permeates it with her rayful presence, and fills it with a pleasant morning in foggy and blue-spirited days. She it is who greets the coming and speeds the parting guest with a grace which suns, with equal light and warmth, both remembrance and anticipation. It is not put on like a Sunday dress; it is not a thin gloss of French politeness that a feather, blown the wrong way, will brush off. It is not a color; it is a quality. You see it breathe and move in her like a nature, not as an art. Let no American traveller fancy he has seen England if he has not seen the Landlady of the village inn. If he has to miss one, he had better give up his visit to the Crystal Palace, Stratford-upon-Avon, Abbottsford, or even the House of Lords, or Windsor itself. Neither is so perfectly and exclusively English as the mistress of “The Brindled Cow,” in one of the rural counties of the kingdom.
It would be necessary to coin a new word if one were sought to contain and convey the distinctive characteristic of inn-life in England. Perhapshomefulnesswould do this best, as it would more fully than any other term describe the coziness, quiet, and comfort to be enjoyed at these places of entertainment. Not one in a hundred of them ever heard the sound of the hotel-going bell, as we hear it in America. You are not thundered up or down by a vociferous gong. Then there is no marching nor counter-marching of a long line of waiters in white jackets around the dinner table, laying down plate, knife, fork, and spoon with uniform step and motion, as if going through a dress-parade or a military drill. There is no bustle, no noise, no eager nor anxious look of served or servants. Every one is calm, collected, and comfortable. “The cares that infest the day” do not ride into the presence of that roast beef and plum pudding on the wrinkles of any man’s forehead, however business affairs may go with him outside. No one is in a hurry to sit down or to arise from the table. The whole economy of the establishment is to make you as much at home as possible; to individualise you, as far as it can be done, in every department of personal comfort. You follow your own time and inclination, and eat and drink when and how you please, with others or alone. The congregate system is the exception, not the rule. It seldom ever obtains at breakfast or tea. In many cases you have a little round table all to yourself at these meals. But if there is a common table for half a dozen persons, the tea and toast and other eatables are never aggregated into a common stock. Each person if he is a single guest, has his own allotment, even to a separate tea-pot. Thetable d’hote, if there be one at all, is made up like a select dinner party, rather early in the morning. If the guests of the house are not directly invited, they are asked, in a tone of hospitality, if they will join in the social meal, the only one got up by the establishment at which the table is not mapped out in separate holdings, or little independencies of dishes, each bounded by the wants and capacities of the individual occupant.
The presiding and working faculty of a common English inn distinguishes it by another salient characteristic from the hotels of other countries. The landlady is, of course, the president of the establishment, whether or not she calls any man lord in the retired and family department of the house. But the actualgerantes, or working corps, with which you have to do immediately, are three independent and distinct personages, called the waiter, chambermaid, andboots. If it were respectful to gender, these might be called the great triumvirate of the English inn. No traveller after a night’s lodging and breakfast, will mistake or confound the prerogatives or perquisites of these officials. If he is an American, and it be his first experience of theregime, he will be surprised and puzzled at theimperium in imperiowhich his bill, presented to him on a tea-tray, seems to represent. In no other business transaction of his life did he ever see the like. It goes far beyond anything in the line of limited partnership he ever saw. There is only one partial parallel that approaches it; and this comes to his mind as he reads the several items on his bill. When made out and interpreted, it comes to this: the proprietor, the waiter, chambermaid, and boots are independent parties, who get up a night’s lodging and two or three meals for you on the same footing as four independent underwriters would take proportionate risks at Lloyd’s in some ship at sea. Or, what would put it in simpler form to an uninitiated guest, he is apparently first charged for the raw provisions he consumes, and for the rent of his bed-room. This is the proprietor’s share. Then, there is a separate charge for each of the remaining items of the entertainment,—for cooking and serving up each meal, for making up your bed, and for blacking your boots; just as distinctly as if you had gone out into the town the previous evening and hired three separate individuals to perform these services for you; and as if you had no right nor reason to expect from the landlord a dinner all cooked and served, but that you only bought it in the larder.
Now, this is a peculiarity of the English hotel system that is apt to embarrass travellers from other countries, especially from America, where no such custom could be introduced. I do not know how old the custom is in Great Britain. Doubtless it originated in the almost universal disposition and habit of Englishmen of dropping gratuities or charity-gifts here and there with liberal hand, either to obtain or reward extra service in matters of personal comfort, or to alleviate some case of actual or stimulated suffering that meets them. It was natural and inevitable that gratuities thus given to hotel servants frequently to stimulate and reward special attention should soon become a rule, acting upon guests like a law of honor. When so many gave, and when the servants of every hotel expected a gift, a man must feel shabby to go away without dropping a few pennies into the hands of eager expectants who almost claimed the gratuity as a right. The worst stage of the system was when the expected gift was measured by your supposed position and ability, or when the waiter or the chambermaid, flattering you with what Falstaff would call an instinctive perception of your dignity, would say with an asking and hopeful smile, “What you please, sir.” Now, that was not the question with you at all. You wanted to know how much each expected, or how much you must give to acquit yourself of the charge of being “a screw,” when they put their heads and gains together in conference and comparison after you were gone. So, on the whole, it was a great relief when all these awkward uncertainties of expectation were cleared up and rectified in the system now usually adopted.
Whether you be rich or poor, or whatever position or pretension be attributed to you, the fees of the universal triumvirate are put down specifically in black and white among the other charges on your bill. As I hope these notes may convey some useful information to Americans who may be about to visit England for the first time, it may be of some use to them to state what is the usual rule in this matter at the middle-class hotels in this country; for with those of the first rank I never have made nor ever expect to make any personal acquaintance. A moderate bill for a day’s entertainment will read thus:—