All the Sundays of my childhood came to life again when, driving from T——, we passed the mouth of a grassy by-road, a little way down which stood the church of my earliest worshippings. We were due to drink tea at my grandfather's old home, now occupied by one of his great-grandsons, and had scant time for more lingerings on the way if we were to keep our appointment punctually; but the sight of the familiar square, squat tower was too much for me, and I said to M. and Mr B.: "Oh, I must, Imusthave just one look!" They drove me into the lane and, scrambling down, I ran up the path through the churchyard, glancing from side to side at the same old tombstones and grassy mounds, numbering baby graves of our own household amongst them, every one with its memories of Sunday loiterers sitting and standing about until all friends had passed and the bells had stopped; and my objective was a rood-screen, which not only had a lively story to it, but had persuaded me in the course of years that it was possibly a treasure of ecclesiastical art worth finding by one now educated to know its value. I might have been disappointed if I had seen it; I certainly was deeply disappointed at not seeing it. A wicket gate in the porch was locked against me. I ran along the wall and tried to peer into the windows, but I could see nothing, except my mental picture of the past—the three-decker, the carved screen, the two square pews in the chancel, the open seats outside.
It is rather curious that they were open seats at that time of day, when otherwise the church was quite early Victorian in its ways. I know that in the next decade, when the zeal for church restoration became noticeable, the stubborn defence of vested interests in the hereditary pews was the greatest obstacle to be overcome, and I have known it prove insuperable for nearly a decade more. Even the pews in the chancel of the church here at H——, one sacred to the old-maid daughters of the rector (when in residence, which was only for a small portion of the year), the other occupied by one of my uncles and his family, were open; not like the spacious room, with panelled walls and blue silk curtains all round above the level of his tall head, in which my maternal grandfather maintained at public worship the same privacy that he enjoyed at home. It is true that every seat, except the hard "free" forms at the back, belonged to a certain house, as legally and exclusively as the walled box which it had superseded; but there was a republican aspect, generally abhorrent to genteel persons, in the uniform open benches, which marked no divisions of caste between the highest and the lowest; the old box, on the contrary, indicated the status of its owner almost as accurately as his house. The carpet, cushions, hassocks, curtains were part of his personal establishment; if he were a big man, he would probably have a stove within the luxurious enclosure, by which to doze in comfort when the weather was cold. And it was usual for the wall immediately above him to be more or less covered with tablets to the memory of his deceased ancestors. When he died himself, the blue or red curtains which had preserved his nobility from the gaze of vulgar worshippers would be changed for hangings of black cloth, and the mourning hatchment would be put up.
In this little church the organist was the National School master, down at the bottom of the building, and his instrument in my time was a concertina. There was no vestry. The parson put his things on in the chancel (in one church that I knew he first dragged his things out of the altar, which made a convenient store-chest for the loose "properties" of the place), his sacerdotal toilet being performed quite openly before the assembled congregation, in front of a looking-glass hung upon a chancel pillar; the interest we took in this piece of ritual was great or greater according as the man was shy and nervous or self-confident and vain. The canopied three-decker embraced the whole area of ritual proper, except on the rare occasions—the three enjoined by the rubric, I suppose—when Holy Communion was celebrated. In the bottom pen the clerk bawled the responses, in the middle one the parson recited prayers and lessons, in the upper (having changed his surplice for a black gown) he preached.
Usually the parson was a curate, domestically familiar to us; sometimes he was the stout and stately rector. When he came to the beautiful embowered house that at other times wore blinds over its windows, and his haughty high-nosed daughters to that chancel pew which at other times stood empty, then it behoved the parish, literally, to sit up. With him we were comparatively at ease, but confronted with them we simply shook in our shoes. They did their parish work with vigour while they were about it. The "poor" were visited all round, scolded for their injudicious management of households on ten or twelve shillings a week, which, they were assured, would be an ample income if "crowdy" (a kind of meal porridge, I think—we never heard of it except from them) were substituted for the unnecessary luxuries they indulged in; and I believe the rectory kitchen doled broken victuals to the deserving. My father nursed a man's grudge against these well-meaning women chiefly on account of the crowdy suggestion so persistently thrust upon his farm labourers; the offensive word was so often on his lips that I have never forgotten it. He was always contrasting the existing régime with that of the late rector, who used to like to play whist and ride to hounds with him, and of whom I remember nothing but the fact of his death. My father and I, driving past the rectory gates, saw a gig slowly moving up and down before them. "Hullo!" said father, pulling up. "What's the matter?" The man in charge of the gig mournfully shook his head. "You don't say so?" father ejaculated, with even greater mournfulness. That was all. It meant that the doctor was inside, and that the rector was dying.
The existing régime, however, did not leave us out in the cold. The rector came at least once during his visit to his parish, and his daughters once, to call on us—cake-and-wine calls—and similarly honoured the houses of the other village gentry. The old man was as affable as he knew how to be; the entertaining of the old-young ladies was the formidable affair. If there was not time to set things in apple-pie order before they reached the front door, what flurry and fret and vexation of heart! Well for me if I was not doing punishment on the stairs at that awful moment!
But the story of the rood-screen that I so wanted to see, and could not, is the vivid memory of all.
The rector was in residence. He was putting on his robes in the chancel, before the looking-glass, with the dignified leisureliness that was his wont. The congregation was coming in. Amongst them was a lady from one of the farmhouses (called "The Manor," an ancient house which her family lived, instead of died, in, surrounded by a moat of stagnant water covered with arsenic-green duckweed—which house, or its site, there was not time to look for), and she was followed by a domestic pet, a raven. She knelt to her preliminary prayer. Rising from her knees she beheld the presumptuous bird sitting on the desk edge of her pew, regarding her quizzically with his head cocked to one side. I was watching him in ecstasy, but she—a gentle, fair woman, whose face as I then saw it I could identify in a crowd to-day—flushed crimson with consternation and shame. She put out a flurried hand to secure him, but he hopped out of her reach; further efforts resulted in his free flight through the church to perch on the top of the screen. There he sat, and defied the congregation to catch him—to the passionate delight, I am sure, of every child present. His poor mistress, however, was overwhelmed. She sat still, trembling and cowering, her cheeks like peonies; and the rector, when he realised the situation, was furious.
"Brown! Brown!" he shouted down the church.
The stalwart schoolmaster arose from where he sat with his pupils under the tower, and advanced up the aisle with a pole in his hand. It may have been the punitive rod with which he could crack the pate of the farthest National School boy without leaving his own seat to do it, or it may have been the church broomstick; anyway, it was long enough to reach the top of the screen.
"Bong on to him, Brown!" commanded the rector in loud imperious tones—he meant "bang on to him," but his accents as well as his words ring down the grooves of time as distinctly as if heard but yesterday. "Bong on to him!"
Brown wielded the clumsy weapon as desired, and it fell with force upon the spot from which the raven deftly hopped at the last moment. The bird was quite self-possessed in the midst of the excitement; each time he measured the direction of the pole, watched its approach, and skipped over or under it in the nick of time, and he chuckled and jeered as if it were a game of play. His demeanour, and its contrast with the increasing wildness of the schoolmaster's blows and of the outraged rector's temper, made the scene so exquisitely funny that I can laugh now when I think of it. I suppose I laughed then, for the irrepressible hilarity of the congregation, confessing its sympathy with the rebel against high authority, was an aggravation of the bird's offence too serious for words. I am sorry I cannot recall how the episode ended, but, of course, the raven was defeated somehow; what I can never forget is the splendid time he gave us first. He was better than the donkey which made another red-letter Sunday for us. This animal, grazing in the churchyard, put his head through the open door in the middle of sermon time. Not content with a decorous survey of the congregation he suddenly uttered his raucous bray—hee-haw!—as if in sarcastic comment upon the preacher's words.
But many funny things happened in church which we did not understand to be funny, and therefore found no amusement in. The spectacle of the parson's hat and gloves, perhaps also his overcoat and umbrella, on the communion-table did not raise a smile, not to mention frowns. A companion picture of the old clerk holding up the lid of the same table while he dragged forth from its depths a black bottle and tilted it before one unclosed eye, to see if it contained sufficient sacramental wine for an impending celebration, passed almost unnoticed. Conversations in the vulgar tongue, audible to all, were of almost daily occurrence—or I should say weekly occurrence, for whoever heard of non-Sunday matins or evensong in those easy-going times? Oh yes, they were known of course in cathedrals and the more civilised centres of life—the "Tracts for the Times" had been stirring up what the writers called "our afflicted church" for many a year—but not in such out-of-the-world villages as those in and about which my early years were spent.
There was no rigid ecclesiastical etiquette, no rigid ecclesiastical discipline, observed in those days, and the dullness of a child's Sundays was sensibly mitigated thereby. I remember an occasion when the parson (not Canon W., of the raven episode) was reading the psalms verse and verse about with the clerk beneath him. Suddenly the latter, instead of reciting his verse, remarked aloud: "You've turned over two leaves, sir." "No, I haven't," was the equally loud and composed reply. "Yes, you have," rejoined the clerk. They had quite an altercation, carried on exactly as if they had been out on the road. The rector of the parish where my maternal grandparents lived was the same sort of free-and-easy person. I was told that once, with the benediction hardly out of his mouth, he leaned over the ledge of the pulpit to hail a gentleman of the congregation before he should get away. "Come home with me," the rector publicly invited his friend, "I've got a prime haunch of venison for dinner." I remember his way with candidates for confirmation: "Your mother can hear your catechism." And it is my belief that the bishops asked no questions of the men who royally entertained them on their visitations. You could not imagine a rector dining on venison and waited on by liveried servants being subjected to the indignity of an inquiry as to how he performed his duties.
Parsons and squires—Church and State—combined to keep the common lay person in his place. In league they governed the rural communities, by whom their authority was unquestioned. It was a benevolent despotism, as a rule, like that of the majority of the slave-owning aristocracy of America, who were also in the enjoyment (tempered by "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and other annoying portents) of their feudal powers at the time; but, as with the slave system, it took small account of the human rights of the lower "orders" and in the hands of the naturally arrogant was often grossly abused.
A squire's wife of our neighbourhood, when she went out of church—and no one presumed to go before her—used to mount a little rise of ground near the porch, and there stand to receive the obeisances of "the poor." One by one they filed before her, dropping the trembling curtsy with that deprecating, serf-like air which one is thankful to know will never be worn again by man or woman of British blood; and according as they performed their act of homage, or satisfied her mind when she chose to stop and question them, so would they be rewarded in the dispensation of her doles—doles that might well demoralise poor things whose lives were all toil from beginning to end, and who perhaps never enjoyed a full meal until they ate it on Christmas Day in the workhouse, which was the refuge of their declining years.
This squire's wife (I saw her home and the church in the park again, still the appanage of her family) was typical of her class. They all regarded their villages as a queen would regard her kingdom. The squire looked after the menfolk and saw that his tenants voted Whig or Tory, as the case might be. But the homes were the care of the lady of the great house—where there was one. Often she was a second mother to them, feeling a responsibility for their well-being almost as great as for that of her own establishment. A godmother to babies, a nurse to the sick, the kind patroness of girls going out to service, a succourer in crises of trouble, an indispensable adviser in all-important affairs—I have known such and heard of more; but whether of this sort or of that which took the line of the arbitrary schoolmistress, it was invariably her aim to lead her protégées in the way that they should go. The parson was her henchman, as she was his backer. He made his reports and she acted upon them. "You were not at church on Sunday, Jane. How was that?" The chapel—making its way into the most conservative villages (but I knew one where the rights of the lord of the manor enabled him to keep it uncontaminated by both chapels and public-houses—he bracketed them together—up to the end of the sixties)—was contemptuously ignored as long as it was possible to do so. Jane had to go to church regularly, or forfeit the favour of authority and the incalculable advantages that went with it.
Morning service was, so to speak, the state service of the day. The heads of families attended, and the families themselves in force. The afternoon service was for servants and such, and nursemaids and governesses could take their charges to keep them occupied and out of the way; Sunday-schools were not invented, apparently, though we all had to say our collect and catechism to somebody at home. There was no service in the evening. The churches had no apparatus for lighting except with daylight. Sunday evening, in summer, was the time for long family walks, aimless strolls about the lanes and fields. It was the great opportunity for love-making with the young couples "keeping company." There was no visiting from house to house, as might be supposed, with families so much at leisure and so bored for want of something to do; it would have verged upon desecration of the Sabbath to have paid a call for the mere pleasure of it. No toys or story-books, and, of course, no games, were allowed to relieve the monotony of indoor hours. "Memoirs" represented the only human element in our Sunday literature, otherwise composed of volumes of sermons; and as the memoir was always of a clergyman, or some other saintly person, there were but two scraps of interest to be found in it—his portrait at one end and the account of what he died of at the other. Later, we had a servant who took in a missionary magazine full of pictures of black men swinging on hooks thrust through their backs, widows burning alive on pyres, missionaries being horribly tortured, cooked and eaten—all sorts of interesting things. She used to smuggle them to my bed, and, when my governess had retired from the room, instead of sleeping I would sit up and read them in the lingering light of the long days until night made the page a blank. But just now I am speaking of the years before I had a governess. A missionary magazine was a Sunday book, and my early Sundays did not know the joy of them.
However, taking one thing with another, those Sundays of the past were not so very dreadful. It is, indeed, open to question whether in essential matters we have greatly improved upon them. Certainly, the inconsistencies of Sabbatarian practice, as I remember them, were no greater than they are now. There was a lady of our acquaintance who had a gift for amateur millinery and a passion for smart bonnets and she once made one under my eye on a Sunday morning. It was understood that she would have imperilled her immortal soul by using needle and cotton, and she did not dream of doing that; she put it together entirely with pins. It took her twice as long, and disturbed the serenity of her mind twice as much, but by getting up early she managed to have it finished by church time, and then to wear it to church with an easy mind. But the same thing would be done—exactly parallel things are done—under my eye to-day, any Sunday of the year.
With regard to the moral practices of week-days, which are but those of Sunday carried over, either there were fewer subtle insincerities amongst the good people of the last generation or I have a keener eye for those which I see around me now. I remember that my elders of the fifties were much addicted to whist, and that a small money stake was necessary to the dignity of their game. They remained sober, friendly, gentlemanly, uncorrupted, allowing for the exceptions to every rule. Nowadays I play a round game with a family party, and one person will not touch a prize in the shape of a coin, but change the coin into "goods" and conscience is immediately satisfied. A clergyman once intimately associated with my household loved whist, but never played cards on principle; he got over the difficulty by sitting behind someone who did, and directing the latter's play with zeal. These are little instances.
At any rate the religious faith of the fifties as to which we were all children, young and old alike, it had one precious quality that it seems never likely to have again—it sufficed. Such as it was, we were satisfied with it. It made for peace and a contented mind. To be sure, we had heard of the "Tracts," and of a terrible bishop called Colenso; we ourselves learned Keble's hymns, with Mrs Alexander's, on Sundays; but we were happily undiscerning of the significance of these portents. They were no concern of ours. We no more expected them to have practical developments than he had expected an Indian Mutiny to result from a little fuss over greased cartridges. The Church of the Fifties, as an educational agent, is more despised to-day than any other institution of that date, but the old-fashioned parson had no spiritual worries to keep him awake o' nights and wear him out before his time; no more had we. Is it not possible that the despisers would give almost anything to be able to say the same?
The last time that I saw my old good grandfather, to whose old-time home M.G. and Mr B. drove me that July afternoon, was on a Sunday. It was just before we left T—— for D——, where we were living when he died. By the same token I remember the night of the event, when we sat in the music-room with servants (taking care of us in the absence of our parents at his bedside), and how the girls made our flesh creep by telling how Rover had howled and death-watches had ticked in the walls, and winding-sheets had formed on the candles—"sure signs," every one; and how, being so wrought up, we shrieked at a sudden explosion in the fire, which ejected some little glowing shard that they declared to be a coffin—on the top of all the other gruesome portents. It was a blowy October night and we talked in firelight, as befitted the ghostly circumstances. I huddled up to my elder brother on the sofa by the hearth, in mortal dread of the dark drawing-room outside, the darker stairs, the awful attics, that must sooner or later be faced. But I do not recall any governess present, and I think we shared the fear of solitude amongst us and kept well together until morning.
As I said, the last time I saw the old man was on a Sunday—probably our last Sunday at T——.
Our district boasted its peculiarity in having
"A parish without a church,A church without a steeple,A steeple without a church,A parish without people"—
all under the jurisdiction of our rector, Canon W., and the church without a steeple, that took turns with the church of H—— in providing our Sunday services, stood at the gate of the park-like home field surrounding the grandfather's house. I think it was mostly in the afternoons that we attended it, and it was our custom to go and come through that little park instead of by the road, and to call on him by the way. These visits were our Sunday treat. There was a warm, luxurious atmosphere inside that house—which I was on the way to be entertained in for the first time since then; there was also a motherly housekeeper and an unfailing supply of cakes and sweets. We were regaled on these, inspected and catechised by the patriarch, and sent rejoicing on our way. Other families of grandchildren passed the same saluting point at about the same time, often melting into and mingling with ours before the armchair was reached (and these were the last times that M.G., my present hostess, and I had had cousinly intercourse together). His sons, farmers like himself, but none of them inheriting his force of character, lived within a walk of him, and each household looked to his for dower of various kinds. Every week he had a sheep killed to be distributed amongst them. Mutton was a sacred thing with him. Killed at a certain age—four years, I think—at the climax of condition; hung a stated number of days, according to the season, it was always a dish, if of his providing, "fit to set before a gentleman." The meat-safe of his own establishment was hung, to my eyes, quite in the clouds. It was sent up with running ropes, as a flag to a masthead, to the top of a tall tree, where the contents ripened in pure air above the range of flies (and I stood under that tree again and told his great-grandson's wife about it, his great-great-grandson holding my hand and looking up at it with me). He left a comfortable fortune to his five children, of whom my father was the youngest; and the sons quarrelled over their shares and flung the property into Chancery—where it is still if it is anywhere. Certainly it never came out again.
Well, I stood by his winged chair on a Sunday afternoon, and he looked at me with his watery and red-rimmed old eyes, set in a still fine old face that is as distinct to me as ever; then he drew me between his knees, laid his hands on my head, and formally and solemnly blessed me. The oddness of the incident impressed it indelibly on my mind. We had always been great friends, and it was our last parting. I suppose he knew it, although I did not.
I was fortunate in picking up, amongst the family relics, a little memoir of him. It told me more of his life and character than I knew before, and I think it is interesting enough to quote from briefly.
His uncommon name has aristocratic associations, as his descendants have not forgotten, and armorial bearings have been claimed on the strength of it, but as a matter of fact there is no sign of an authentic pedigree behind him. And I think, if there had been, it would be a cheapening of the dignity of his own simple excellence to obtrude it. His whole history presupposes the qualities of manhood essential to the ideal gentleman. As Landor says: "The plain vulgar are not the most vulgar," and it is only stating the proposition another way to say that the plain gentleman is more genuinely a gentleman than the fine gentleman. I know well how, when he rose in the world, he would have treated a suggestion to rake up a coat-of-arms! My father inherited that good taste which abhorred pretentiousness, as he showed in making us say "father" and "mother" at a time when every child above the labouring class said "pa" and "ma," and in refusing to let any one of the ten of us have more than one short Christian name.
He was born—the grandfather—on the 2nd of January 1770, at T——, but in which of the three farmhouses that, with their five labourers' cottages, composed the "parish without a church" (it had one once—in the fourteenth century) I do not know; not, I think, the one that was afterwards my home, as that property belonged to a different estate. All three houses were of a character to preclude the supposition that he sprang from what is figuratively termed the gutter, but the records clearly imply that it was not from a bed of ease. He used to get up early and milk the cows, and then walk to D——, about four miles off, to school. When he was seventeen the chronicle states he "did not leave his home as a runaway" but seeing no chance of advancing himself there, he, with only a small bundle of clothes, made his way to a farm at O——, where "he hired himself as a team-lad to a widow for four pounds a year and his living in the house." It is recorded that he "always spoke of her afterwards as his first friend and helper in the battle of life." From there he went to another Norfolk village, engaging himself again as a farm hand (waggoner); but soon he was a farm steward elsewhere, and soon after that manager of the estate of his father's landlord, one of the beautiful seats of the neighbourhood—which looked more beautiful than ever when I saw it again.
W—— Woods (meeting overhead on the highroad and glorious with rhododendrons in the spring), and W—— Hall, must have a word or two in passing. The splendid old house has been, since the reign of Elizabeth, the only one in W—— which represents the "parish without people" and the "steeple without a church" of the local rhyme; but before that period, when it was the seat of the Coningsbys, there was a village, also a church, where the lonely tower now stands in the park, a hoary head with no body to it. From the Coningsbys the place passed to a certain Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, and he profaned the church (which then "ceased to be used for sacred purposes") by turning it into a hay-house and dog-kennel, and "depopulated the town to make the extensive park which still exists." For his sins this wicked squire's "dead corps" (I am quoting Blomefield, writing in 1810) "could for many days find no place of burial, but growing very offensive he was at last conveyed to the church of R——," which was the church at the grandfather's gate already alluded to, "and buried there without any ceremony, and lyeth yet uncovered (if the visitors have not reformed it) with so small a matter as a few paving stones; and indeed no stone memorial was there ever for him, and if it was not for this account it would not have been known that he was buried there."
Certainly there was no visible trace of the unhallowed grave in that burial-ground of my family when I revisited it. The little "church without a steeple" I had always supposed a creation of our day, but it has a fine dog-toothed Norman doorway, and M. told me she could remember when it stood there amid ruins, and remember seeing the chapel built to enclose it. This Norman doorway, like the lovely ivied steeple, is all that speaks of the wicked judge to-day. It belonged to the church of his time. His beautiful home survived his occupation. It passed at his death to the Earls of Warwick through the marriage of his granddaughter; from them, by purchase, to the families of our times. I visited it in childhood, and I wish I could have visited it again.
Here my grandfather, while still in his twenties, administered the estate for the owner, who appears to have held him in high esteem. His first official act, we are told, was to "make the park around the mansion, and to beautify the hedges." He was not only a conspicuously practical agriculturist, but a great lover of natural beauty of the orderly kind; his care of hedges, in particular, would have been his "fad," if the word had been invented. For several years he held his post, "having at the same time a farm of his own at South R——," which was his later and last home. When he was thirty he married a lady from Surrey. My grandmother predeceased him, but I dimly remember her as a gentle and dainty old lady, fastidious in dress, manners and the ordering of her house; or it may be only this tradition of her that I remember—I cannot be sure. Richard Brinsley Sheridan was at their wedding. He is said to have been closely connected, by blood or friendship, with her people.
"Coke of Norfolk" was his friend; I knew that always. The memoir speaks of "great gatherings of agriculturists at Holkham," which he attended as his squire's representative while at W——; but after he was his own man the kindred spirits must have met and mingled, for it was Lord Leicester, I have been told, who gave to my grandfather's place at R—— the flattering nickname of "Little Holkham," which clung to it for many years. They used to compare their respective experiments and the results, and my grandfather would come from these investigations to say (according to the memoir): "We beat him in some things, and he beat us in others."
I read that he (my grandfather) "was the first to make underdraining tiles in the county. The cost to buy them was four guineas per thousand, each tile weighing eighteen pounds, with holes perforated in them, and put down without soles to rest upon; he had as few joints as possible, and did not approve of the herring-bone shape on that account"—whatever that may mean.
"When he came to South R—— they had ague in almost every house from poverty and undrained land. The poor rates were ten shillings in the pound, with a large common and unlimited rights thereon.... He estimated the claying of this common at six pounds per acre. He was seven years at it, winter and summer, not always stopping at harvest time, for in this district a pit fills with water as soon as (and often before) it is finished, not again to be reworked, constant pumping being required. Large quantities of faggots had often to be placed to bear the horses and carts in getting out of the pits. Three hundred and four hundred loads per acre were put on the land. The extent of clay pits was estimated by Mr P. of N——, when apportioning the tithe rent charge, at ten acres.... He made two ears of corn grow where only one had grown before."
Then, in 1822, there was "great depression in agriculture, and he took another farm, almost on his own terms, as tenant, and again clayed and underdrained ... it was said that no tenant-farmer at that time employed so many hands or spent so much on the same quantity of land as he did ... grass was as much cared for as arable." And on a certain field where he "harrowed in oats as a boy, he planted the land twice with fir-trees, twice cut them down and measured them up, and twice sold them." He wrote an essay for the Royal Agricultural Society "On the Rearing and Maintaining of Fences," which was printed in their journal. All his own fences (hedges) were "clipped twice in the year, at a cost of ten shillings per mile." I have seen the men doing it—they seemed always doing it—and those hedges were as smoothly rounded and trim as those of the neatest garden.
"The stitch in time was his motto," says the chronicler. The loss of a rail was replaced directly, or a tile from a building. It was so natural to him that he did not hesitate to point it out on his neighbour's premises, as when he saw a pig without a ring in its nose. A road-scraper was always on the road leading to the house and farmyard, and everyone was expected to use it, or would be reminded to do so, removing dirt on to the grass. All were trained to put farm implements under cover and to fix waggon and cart shafts up by a chain. I can answer for two of his descendants—the remnant of his youngest son's family—that they have inherited this instinct for neatness and order, although in one case circumstances rather hamper its free play. My father himself, like most of the males of my intimate acquaintance, was an untidy man and a bad domestic economist.
Two other marked traits of the grandfather's character are noted by his biographer—a great love of music and a great love of animals. It is mentioned that the guard of the mail-coach always began to play on his bugle when approaching the house, and the tune was "The Old English Gentleman" when passing it. "His kindness to animals was such that he had them often given to him when aged, from its being known that he never sold an old horse, and so they were sure to end their days with him." And "Shortly before his death, he asked for the curtains to be drawn aside that he might have a last look at the scene of his old labours, and he said, 'There are my sheep, pretty creatures!'"
It is evident that in his later life he was a distinguished county man. He was for many years agent for the trustees of large fen properties, and the agencies of some of the most important estates in Norfolk were offered him after he had retired from such duties. When the W—— property, which had been his first charge, was sold again, "The measuring up, the valuation of the timber, and the price to be fixed on the whole estate, was left to his judgment." I have read some of his business letters, and they seemed to me models of what such should be. At Agricultural Society dinners, and other public functions, honour was paid him in complimentary speeches. "You must not consider what Mr C.'s farming is now, with all the improvements that have taken place of late, but as I remember him and his farm years ago, when no one but him clayed land, underdrained, or clipped hedges." And so on. In his eighty-second year he was presented by his friends with his portrait in oils, accompanied by the following address:—
"Dear Sir,—As a testimony of our esteem for the valuable services you have rendered to Agriculture during a residence of upwards of eighty years in the same locality, in converting an unproductive waste into a fertile country, and especially as the originator of the beneficial system of deep underdraining, claying and the management of fences, now generally followed—as a benefactor of the labourer, a kind neighbour and a sincere friend—we respectfully beg to present the accompanying Portrait, painted by Ambrosini Jerome, Esqr., portrait painter to her Royal Highness the Duchess of Kent, as an Heirloom to your family, with an assurance that they will ever regard it as a noble example of a parent who has raised himself by his science, diligence and integrity from a humble position to affluence and respectability and honour, and with our sincere wishes that you may long live to enjoy the merited reward of an active, useful and well-spent life. We are," etc.
And the names of leading Norfolk are appended.
I saw that portrait, still hanging in its old place, in the dining-room where M. and I had tea with the great-grandson and his family (our coachman, quite at home in the house that had sheltered generations of his family also, had put up his carriage and was enjoying himself in the kitchen), and I noted the same fault that had struck us when it was new—the common fault of painted portraits—a lack of the virile force that gave character to his face even in extreme old age. Otherwise it was a good likeness. He holds the appropriate swath of ripe wheat in one wrinkled hand, the heavy ears supported on the other—a nobler emblem than any Heralds' College could have given him.
The great-grandson did not know, until I (who had just found it out) told him, that the picture was an heirloom and no property of his, he being but the son of a younger granddaughter. He could not tell me how it came to be still in its old place, but I could tell him. It really belongs to America. Years ago—about ten or thereabouts—I had a letter from a cousin who had emigrated to the States in his youth, recalling himself to my memory for the first time since we were children together, meeting at the grandfather's armchair at R—— on Sunday afternoons. I could not quite identify him, but my public position as a writer had supplied him with a clue to me. In this letter, which contained photographs of his home and children and details of his American life, he mentioned that he was now the head of the family and legal owner of the grandfather's portrait. It had come to him since he had emigrated, and he had never gone back, and never expected to go back; but he had an idea that I was going back, and he formally made over the picture to me. He asked me to find it, and take it, and keep it. He seemed to have lost touch and knowledge of his English connections in the course of so many years, but to feel that he had found a tangible, or, at any rate, authentic representative of them in me. If I would accept the treasure, he would be sure that it was in safe keeping—or something to that effect. In writing back to him, I, of course, refused it. I told him I was far less likely to return to England than he was, and that in any case I was not in the "line of succession"; and I heard no more about it. A year or two later I received a newspaper from his family announcing his death; then I had a letter from his son. Did I know where the portrait was? Did I know this and that and the other about the family? I could see that this young American had been nursed on legends of country seats and ancestors of the romantic pattern, that his father in his new country had idealised the old, as I had, and, unlike me, had impressed his unconscious exaggerations upon the imaginations of his children. "I am now the head of the family," wrote the young man, as if we were in the Peerage. I had to reply to him that I did not know where the portrait was, that I did not know anything about the family in England, and that nothing seemed more unlikely than that I ever should.
Now here I was, at the fountain-head of knowledge, and there was the portrait, benignly—too benignly—looking down upon me from the wall.
There, too, was the spot where the old armchair had stood. I, like my American cousin, had remembered the room surrounding it as a spacious apartment, with accommodation for a great deal of massive mahogany furniture; it had dwindled surprisingly. I thought there was a big hall, a wide staircase—and the hall was but the ordinary passage-way, and the stairs steep and cramped and twisty. I could have sworn there was a stone-pillared portico to the front door; it was a brick porch under the creepers. Well, well! It was a sweet old house, even in its reduced condition, and I had a charming time in it. They gave us a delicious tea, strawberries and raspberries (what a strawberry summer that was! I had never had quite as many as I could eat before), with unlimited cream, and thin bread-and-butter, and cakes of melting richness; and I was in the pink of health, when nothing could hurt me. After tea we strolled about the garden, grandfather's own old garden, and the dear little great-great-grandson, who as a memory can hold his own with all the ghosts behind him, ran hither and thither to gather flowers for me until I was loaded up with more than I could carry. Fain would I have had him temper zeal with discretion, but it was useless effort, and his mother would not back me.
Then, in the afterglow of the summer evening, the children were sent to the nursery, our hostess got the keys of the church, and we went across the park-like fields to the road, on the other side of which is the burial-place of the wicked squire who was so "very offensive" in various ways, and of the good old farmer, whose memory is as green as the land he tilled so righteously, his example as fruitful, his honoured name as sweet.
He died on the 9th October 1856, in his eighty-seventh year. "Around him in R—— churchyard," says the memoir, "and near him, lie his old servants, on whose gravestones are recorded their faithfulness and length of service." I saw them all; D., who died before I was born, "after thirty-five years' service"; old C.B., who died the year after his master, after "upwards of fifty years' service"; M.B., the housekeeper who gave us cakes on Sundays, four generations of whose family, daughter following mother, filled the office of nurse in successive households of ours. The many graves of aunts and uncles and cousins (my own parents lie elsewhere) were not half so touching. Old B.'s death was said to have occurred as a direct consequence of his master's; it was the fall of one that broke down the other. B. was rather an arbitrary person, as we children knew him. He ordered us about as if the place was his—practically it was; no one but my grandfather could successfully dispute his authority. But he was wrapped up in us all; the family was his family, as it had been for "upwards of fifty years"; and his master was his king who could do no wrong. My father and grey-headed uncles were summoned to his dying bed—they had not quarrelled then—and he formally blessed them as grandfather had blessed me. "My boys," he murmured, "my boys!" His mumbled last words were, "I brought 'em all up."
It was hard to tear myself from these eloquent memorials, which I was looking upon for the first time, as doubtless it was the last. All around the little graveyard was green country—that lovely English green of velvet grass and noble trees which, after a month of it, was still an ever-fresh rapture to my Australian eyes. "An unproductive waste," it was said to have been, prior to the famous underdraining and claying; could my grandfather have seen it with me, he would have felt satisfied with his work, although not a town, or a railroad, or even a telegraph wire, was in sight.
But there was the little church to revisit yet—another shrine of memory. As I walked up the aisle and looked about me, I saw that in half-a-century the hand of change had scarcely touched it. It was a new church, with the exception of the Norman doorway, when I made its acquaintance as a child taken there by its nurse, and it started with the open benches and stencilled walls that were novelties of fashion then. There they were, the same, to the very pattern and hues of the mural decoration, which showed no sign either of renewal or decay. The armorial shields (to the memory of pious benefactors, doubtless), painted in their proper colours, that made a cornice to the little apse that formed the chancel, were each in its old place, tilted forward at the same angle; I recognised them all. Many a tedious hour had they relieved, as pictures to be studied and puzzled over—the breed of the various heraldic animals, the reasons of their parti-coloured coats and antic attitudes, and so on.
And what a procession of quaint figures passed before me as I stood at the upper end, where we had our family pew, and looked down at the open door through which the dead and gone flocked in! The aged labourers, soaped and oiled, in their clean smock-frocks with the wonderful stitchery on back and front; the neat old women, who unwrapped their church books from their clean pocket-handkerchiefs when service began, and wrapped them up again as soon as it was over; the village dressmaker, who sat just behind us, and whose stylish costumes I used to study through the back of our seat while kneeling on my hassock the reverse way to her—memorable chiefly for puffy white muslin undersleeves that were kept up with elastic which showed when she covered her face with her hands, and had wristbands with black velvet run through the holes in them; the organist at his little instrument near the entrance (it is in another place now, and is not played by turning a handle, as in his time); the inevitable schoolmaster with his indispensable long cane; the servant girls and their swains, the numerous child cousins, etc., etc.—a throng of ghosts. But there was one great and sensational event connected with my early attendances at this church, matching that of the raven in the other, only in this case tragedy instead of comedy; and I was looking at it the whole time, as at a cinematograph reproduction of the living scene.
A young curate (as usual at the unimportant afternoon services) was preaching—how plainly I see him, with his pallid, tawny face and soft black eyes—and suddenly stopped dead and stood still, simply staring at the congregation. "Oh," I thought, staring back at him from my commanding position below, "what news to take home to father and mother, that Mr H. has done this funny thing!" He was recently from India, recruiting delicate health, which was already the anxious care of the ladies of the parish, who sent broths and jellies to his lodgings and coddled him at their homes as often as he would come to them. My mother and M.'s mother were his chief friends, and we children, with whom he had played, were very fond of him. Still it was pure enjoyment to me to see him stop in the middle of his sermon, and to realise that he was not going to finish it. Poor fellow! It was the end of his preaching and of his work. He said, after that long, exciting pause—the words are as unforgettable as Canon W.'s "Bong on to him!"—"I must crave your indulgence, for I can get no further." With that he fell and disappeared. Some men rushed from their seats, dragged him out of the pulpit, and carried him, insensible, from the church; and the congregation broke up and scattered, we hurrying home at a run to tell the news. My mother at once put on her bonnet and went away to nurse him. All the village ladies became his mothers from that day until his death, when the whole parish wept and wailed for him and refused to be comforted. His memory was canonised amongst us. A memoir of him was published by his unknown kindred, containing a steel-engraved portrait (not a bit like him, for it made him fair and fat), and, scattered through the latter pages, allusions to "Mrs H.C." and "Mrs F.C." rendered the book peculiarly precious to two of the bereaved families. The only way that succeeding curates could make themselves tolerable was by confessing freely that they knew themselves unworthy to fill his place. I remember Mr R., his immediate successor, standing in our dining-room (it was his first visit as our pastor) and avowing, with dramatic earnestness, that the latchet of Mr H.'s shoes he was not worthy to unloose. He became a very dear friend, however, Mr R. He was a jolly, hearty, healthy fellow, splendid to play with, with no sadness and no conspicuous saintliness about him.
We locked the door of the little haunted place, and walked back over the now dewy grass to the house, to deliver the key and say good-bye to our entertainers. Mr B. was ready for us, and drove us home through the lovely woods of W——, which owed some of their loveliness to the old man in his grave behind us, and along new ways that yet were as old and familiar and thick with ghosts as the roads we had come by in the afternoon. The whole dear land was a dream of peace in the long July twilight.
It was not a house or church, or wood or field, here or there, that swarmed with reminiscences of my life half-a-century ago; every bit of Norfolk soil that I passed over or looked upon was thick with history of the old times. I had been so sure that the March of Progress, which in the same period had made a highly modern nation out of nothing on the other side of the world, would have swept away the wild-blooming hedgerows, the divisions of the little fields, the rutty, grassy, tree-shaded lanes, the old fashions, generally, of my native county; and I could hardly believe in the luck which had spared so much that the little taken was scarcely missed. Some thirty years ago an Australian friend of mine made a long-desired pilgrimage to the home and graves of the Brontës, and blessed his fate in having chanced upon the last day before the church at Haworth, as Charlotte and Emily had used it, was closed for restoration. I was just too late for Crosby Hall, and the house of the H. family near T—— was gone; otherwise I had no disappointments in my search for the ancient landmarks. But that England was so beautifully well kept (and perhaps it was so then, although I did not notice it), it was the same England that I had left, and no part so unchanged as the part of Norfolk I returned to, which I called my own.
Driving about with M., I lived my old outdoor life again, as if there had been no break in it.
That there was any outdoor life at all in those benighted times I have heard questioned and denied in various ways by our athletic offspring. "Oh, what did people do before there were tennis and croquet and golf?" Contemporary writers are fond of drawing comparisons—I have done it myself—between the lady of old, with her prunella shoes and her swoons and her genteel incapability, and the stalwart, active, efficient damsel who now fills her place; wholly, of course, to the advantage of the latter. But, looking back, and trying to be strictly fair all round, I am not sure that the women of the fifties were so much less sensible (according to their lesser lights) than their descendants of to-day. It must be remembered that they could not be more sensible than fashion permitted, and that we are just as craven slaves to that impersonal tyrant as they were. I am sure that if fashion were suddenly to forbid tennis and croquet and golf and the rest, those invigorating pursuits would be abandoned to-morrow. You will say that our enlightened views upon physical culture would remain, to operate in other directions; and one must admit that in the fifties physical culture was unknown. There was no sanitation, no philosophy of food, no anything. Yet folks lived, and to a good old age too. They had one thing that we have not—the tranquil mind—than which there is no better foundation on which to build bodily health. We do not want their tranquil mind—certainly not—but that is beside the question.
In the fifties, although golf and tennis were not games for the multitude, bowls and cricket were as dear to the bewhiskered public as now to the clean-shaven or moustached; and women had their lawn diversions for the hours they considered enough to give to them, the balance of their active exercise being put into housework and "duties" generally. There was a primitive sort of lacrosse that we were addicted to, and archery, which was a graceful and quite scientific game. We had a small armoury of bows and arrows, bought cheap at the sale of the furniture of a neighbouring great house, and gave social entertainments on the strength of it while we lived at D——. Women with good figures showed to great advantage before the target, and eye and hand had to be as well trained for the bull's-eye as for the hoop or hole. It is true that archery was for the privileged well-to-do; an archery meeting usually had the background of a green and well-kept park. This rather disqualifies it for the purposes of comparison with our modern outdoor games. But those who did not have it did not miss it. There were nutting and blackberrying and mushrooming and May-daying—plenty of simple merrymakings—within reach of all.
On May mornings—oh, I wish I could have had an English May once more!—we were up with the birds and out in the fields to hunt for the first hawthorn bloom. It was one of the settled customs of the family, if not of the community. Often the morning was terribly cold, mostly the grass was reeking wet, but still the expedition was looked forward to with joy and carried through in the highest spirits. Blackthorn it was, if we found it at all, but it was not our fault if we did not return with some trophy of green bud or white flower to lay upon the breakfast-table. Later in the morning the village girls came round with their May garlands. A structure of crossed hoops of wood thickly wreathed with evergreens and artificial flowers, with a doll in the middle and any procurable odds and ends of ribbon, tinsel, or other finery, hung about it, fairly describes the sort of thing. Two girls carried it between them on a pole, and it was covered from view under a cloth until presented at your house door; the cloth was then whipped off, you gazed admiringly and, if generously disposed, or there were not too many of them, dropped a copper into an expectant hand or bag.
At any rate it was quite understood to be the right thing to take the air. We children were sent out in all weathers for our daily walk. I vividly remember crying with the cold, again and again, as I trudged along the snowy roads and through the bitter winds of those hard winters that used to be. Yet it was a wholesome practice, and we were wisely safeguarded against its risks, except in the matter of headgear, the close fit of which made our ears tender so that we suffered horribly from ear-ache, a malady unknown to the open-hatted head. On how many a night we wailed in sleep, or sobbed in our mother's arms by the fireside, with a roasted onion and a hot flannel pressed to the pain which they could not alleviate; and nobody knew the reason why.
When we went out in snow-time we wore snow-boots. They were woolly and waterproof, very thick, and were laced or buttoned over our other boots. For wet weather we had clogs—wooden soles with leather toe-caps and ankle-straps; the soles were cut with supports like the arched piers of a bridge, that lifted them an inch or two from the ground. Our elders, and especially the working women, used pattens—wooden soles again, but raised upon an iron frame and ring, and with one fixed strap which took the foot at the instep when it was thrust through. One could not imagine the rural housewife and her maids flushing their brick floors and wading through the "muck" of their farmyards without their pattens on, nor imagine another contrivance that would have answered the purpose better. Cheap, durable, put on and off in a moment, and needing no attention, they were most convenient to the wearers, and their effectiveness in keeping the feet dry and petticoats undrabbled must have made for health and cleanliness. Yet I suppose there are no clogs and pattens nowadays—I saw none; and, if so, it seems rather a pity. Things that have been improved upon ought to go, but why abandon those that still remain desirable? What is there to take the place of clogs and pattens in usefulness to the class which once wore them? Not goloshes, surely.
They were not the only sensible footgear of these days either. When the eldest aunt visited us she used to bring our supply of nursery shoes, in which five children scampering about the floors made less noise than one does now. Those shoes were woven of narrow strips of cloth in a flat basket pattern, sole and upper in one, like deerskin moccasins, and as soft; some old man in her village made them to the eldest aunt's order. But it may be that he was the sole manufacturer, whose art died with him, for I never saw their like elsewhere.
We drove as well as walked abroad. Ladies with carriages used them regularly of an afternoon, having paced their garden terraces—skirts held well above the hems of their snowy petticoats—earlier in the day. Mother and I had many outings together in the gig; either to L——, to do shopping, or to her father's house at twice the distance away. And she did not attempt to drive with one hand and hold up an umbrella with the other; indeed, she could not have done it, for the "gig-umbrella"—green cotton with a bulbous yellow handle—took a man's arm to support it. When it rained she drew a mackintosh hood from the box that was the gig seat and tied it over her bonnet, shutting everything in with a drawing-string round the face; there was also a curtain to it for the protection of neck and shoulders. Now, was not that a sensible idea? But we never wear on wet journeys a mackintosh hood or something better than a mackintosh hood, even in the dark when there is nobody to see us.
For driving in the sun she had another device. That father called it her "ugly" indicates that it was for comfort rather than adornment; yet I do not see why it particularly deserved that name, comparing it with the many things we wore—and wear—that cannot be termed beautiful. A length of soft silk, blue, green or brown, equal to the circumference of the bonnet-brim, was run through with three or four flexible ribs, cane or whalebone or steel springs. The ends of silk and ribs were drawn together and strings sewn to them; and when the article was put on it made a sun-shield for the eyes like a window-awning. I had a little one too. It clasped my little bonnet with a spring; and side by side we drove through the summer glare, sitting at ease with hands free, under a shelter better than that of the mushroom hat of a few years later. If, as I hold, the first principle of beauty is suitability, the "ugly" was not ugly, and it deserved to live. How much it might have added to the pleasure of my long Bush journeys, and detracted from the fatigue!
The memory of those drives with my mother is amongst the sweetest of my youth. I was a very little child then, yet we were perfect companions. All the way there and back we talked and talked, and never bored each other. I never knew her to "shut me up" or put me off with evasive or impatient answers. Once when she was ill and we were all bothering her at once, she exclaimed, "Oh, who would be a mother!" The words not only cut me to the heart as I heard them, but I never forgot they had been spoken; nor did she, and I do not think she forgave herself for them. It was the only instance I remember of her complaining under her burdens, which were so heavy for her strength, and especially of the cares of motherhood. Even the youngest aunt used to liken her to the fabled pelican that fed its young with its own blood. She had no life that was not lived for others, and first of all for us.
No doubt she was over-soft of heart where her darlings were concerned. For instance when we went shopping to L—— we always lunched at a certain pastrycook's, in a little alcove off the shop, and on the ground that it was a holiday outing I was given my choice from the bill of fare. Mother did earnestly advise me tobeginwith a savoury, as she did, but there was no compulsion in the matter, and I think I made my whole meal of sweet pastry every time. What delicious three-cornered tarts those were!
And, a year ago, I was in L——, and I looked for that pastrycook's shop—and found it!
But the intellectual pleasures of the road rivalled the material joys of the restaurant. She used to tell me stories of the places we passed, grown-up stories, and not the faked stuff that children are so commonly befooled with. I always knew at the time that I could trust every word she said, and when I grew up I never had to learn that she had deceived me. Even our frequent babies were not found under gooseberry bushes or brought in the doctor's pocket; that "God sent them," and that I should "know more about it some day" was her account of the phenomenon—puzzling, of course, but less so than the monstrous and conflicting statements of monthly nurse and servants. When the eighth (there being two more still to follow) was on the way, I was privately informed beforehand. "Our secret," mother called it; and while she made its earthly garments under my eye, we spent blissful hours building air-castles for its habitation, in the strictest confidence.
On our way to her father's house we passed a dark, still pool, sunk within precipitous walls of earth that looked as if they might have been those of an excavated quarry—a most fascinating spot. The Bride's Pool, it was called. Once upon a time, she told me, a bride and bridegroom were driving from church after their wedding and a great storm came on. The horses took fright at the thunder and lightning, and backed the carriage off the road and over the bank into the water-hole, and the bridal pair were drowned. The details of the tragedy lived in my mind for ever—how they loved each other, how their new home was waiting for them and they never entered it, how they were fished up together, clasped tight in each other's arms. Then there was the Heath (M. drove me to the edge of it, behind her own old fat pony), the furzy, lonely, wind-swept waste where the rabbits lived, a shuddery place that we liked to be well past before dark. For there was a time when a gibbet stood there, and skeleton men hung on it in an iron frame that creaked and clanked in the windy nights. She did not mind harrowing my infant soul with fore-knowledge of the world's agonies, and I do not know that she was wrong. It must have been an extreme devotion to my good that caused her to leave me behind with my grandparents and return the long way alone, as she often did.
If I was spoiled at home I was doubly spoiled with them. Even the stern grandfather gave me his gold seals and his historic snuff-box to play with. There was a wondrous scent, compounded of pot-pourri (in the room with the cabinets of china), lavender (in the linen press and drawers), heliotrope (beneath the windows), and something sweeter but indescribable (in grandmother's store-room), which differentiated that house from every other that I have known. I longed to see it again when I was actually on the road to it, but we were not out with Mr B. and his strong horse this time, and M.'s pony was too old and too petted to toddle any farther than the edge of the Heath.
To this day the smell of "cherry-pie," one element only, reminds me of the place and nothing else. It was a sweet place indeed when the youngest aunt was away from it—the eldest aunt mothered motherless cousins elsewhere—and I am happy now to have been there, if I was not quite happy at the time. I ought to have been happy, with such petting and such surroundings, but I do remember that I was homesick. The beautiful lawn, sloping from the house to the road, ended on the top of a stone wall, and I was told not to stray so far, lest I should tumble over; but secretly I strayed there often, to look along the road for a gig and a white horse. That was the great day—when mother arrived to fetch me home.
Dear old home, that to all appearances had not changed a bit! Dear old barn, with its warm, mealy, delicious odours, and its statuesque owl on the dark rafter overhead—outwardly the same as ever. Why, here again we had no end of invigorating sport and active exercise. Hard work was done there and few amusements were more amusing than to watch it a-doing, sitting well out of the way on an upturned "skep" or a pile of empty sacks. I have seen men using the flail on wheat and barley like bush fire-fighters beating out flames; and I have seen a sort of windlass thing with horses turning spokes and a man and whip in the middle, operating outside the barn a simple mechanism within, the first improvement upon the flail; but I also remember, even at T——, the hum of the tall-chimneyed travelling engine that performed all its duty in the fields, herald of the modern method, so wonderful and admirable, yet apparently so devoid of attraction for a child. There was rat-catching in that barn—the most fascinating of amusements. Little girls managed to slip in with little boys when friendly servants summoned them to the fray. A professional rat-catcher attended. Oh, the thrilling moment when he unslung the box from his back and allowed us to look at his ferrets, writhing together in the straw like eels. And when his assistants, with their sticks and dogs, were marshalled at their posts, and the sinuous, sleek bodies were sent down the holes, the breathless waiting for smothered squeaks below, for the dramatic bolt of rats into the open—poor things whose point of view was no more considered than was that of table fowls and calves (the former used to be killed horribly by having knives thrust down their throats, being then left to hang head downwards and bleed until life was drained out of them; and the latter were bled to death also, although not with such monstrous cruelty, the object in both cases being to have flesh white for table; and we, so tender-hearted for our pets, could watch the callous executioner and the long agony he inflicted)—I do not know a more enjoyable sport for those who have not developed the idea that dumb things feel as we do. At other times the owls in the barn roof hunted the rats and mice. I have seen their eyes in the dark, and the ghostly passing of their uncanny wings that make no sound. When the barn was empty what a place for games and romps!
Then we had the great Fair of the county, an event to which we looked forward, as we also looked back, for the whole year. The "Mart," with its entrancing canvas galleries full of tops, work-boxes, every beautiful thing that heart of childhood could desire, its peepshows and merry-go-rounds, its Richardson's marionettes, its Wombwell's menagerie—the thought of it must bring a glow to the heart of any Norfolk native who knew it when I did. All right-minded parents took their offspring to the Mart, if it was physically possible to take them, and I am clear in my mind (though I was afraid to inquire when I was there) that nothing to compare with it exists in England to-day. The fair itself may exist, for what I know (its charter was granted by Henry the Eighth), but if it does it will be but the gibbering shade of its former self, lagging superfluous; for its human complement has for ever passed away. I have heard my parents say that their parents went to it to buy those silk dresses and those china tea-services which were family treasures and heirlooms from generation to generation. We went to it for dolls and Noah's Arks and tin trumpets and wooden tea-things, driving home with armfuls of delight through many miles of snow or biting wind, cuddled down in our wraps within the hood of the "sociable." The Mart was "proclaimed" on the Tuesday following St Valentine's Day, and continued for, I think, three weeks afterwards.
Well, then came May Day and the garlands; Easter celebrated by the wearing for the first time of our new spring Sunday clothes—white bonnets to be quite correct; the "haysel" which meant warm days for romps in the fragrant cocks; the seaside—greatest bliss of all.
Summer, with its long light, its apparently few resources for killing time, did not weary us, that I remember. In the summer holidays, when we lived at D——, my brothers used to sit on a river bank and watch the floats of their fishing lines from dawn to dusk, often without getting a bite, and did not consider the day wasted. Little females had their dolls to take a-walking, their hoops and skipping-ropes, and battledore and shuttlecock, their dumb pets to rear, their little garden plots to weed and till. Their elders were satisfied to sit under trees when work was done, with needle or pipe or book—for we did have books. A little amusement seemed to go such a long, long way.
Then autumn—harvesting, blackberrying....
I do not know how I acquired the idea that I should find the old blackberry hedges, the sweet masses of hawthorn and dog-rose and bindweed and nightshade and all those old hedgy things, swept away by the hand of the progressive agriculturist, but such had been my belief long before my return home. In the second chapter of my book of Australian reminiscences I now read with a blush my ignorant lament over "beauty vanishing from the world" in the shape of sailing ships, the Pink Terraces of New Zealand, andthe big bird-thronged hedges of rural England. I suppose I reckoned on the methods of high farming being much the same in all countries, without allowing for the good taste and reverent conservatism of English landlords. The hedges were all there still, more beautiful to me than ever, and I went blackberrying with a basket, just as I had done as a child.
Harvesting—I saw it again on the old lands. I was in the midst of it, reminded at every turn of the old times. But there were no children playing amongst the shocks and stacks, no reapers with sickles, or gleaners filling their turned-up skirts with the scatterings left behind; the mechanical reaper gathered every straw. And there was no Harvest Home. The village churches all had their Harvest Festivals, exactly like ours in Australia; but the procession of the Last Waggon through the golden fields, the Harvest Supper—they are gone with the piquant Valentine and the jovial Waits, to return no more.
I looked at the barn, where we used to celebrate the arrival of the Last Load. I looked at the coach-house—neither of them altered in the least, that I could see—where the memorable banquets had taken place. I used to go to them, under my father's wing; at any rate, I must have gone to one, for nothing is clearer to the eye of memory than the picture of the rustic faces around the festive table. Husbands in clean smock-frocks and wives in their Sunday best, no sociological knowledge in their heads, no divine discontent in their souls, to impair their enjoyment of "the master's" hospitality. Unlimited home-brewed was dispensed to them with the roast beef and plum pudding, but I remember no rowdiness in consequence; only clouds of smoke, a succession of highly proper songs, and vociferous applause of the performers. It was etiquette for all to "favour the company" who could, and each singer seemed to have his own one song, listened to by his fellows with unwearied interest and appreciation year after year. As regularly as harvest and harvest supper came round, we had "the highten days o' June" from the oldest throat that could pipe a quavering note:
"In the highten days o' JuneNapoleon did advance——"
That is all I remember of his song, the first line of which originally ran: "On the eighteenth day of June." My father had his "Simon the Cellarer," or what not, to contribute to the programme, and smoked his pipe and drank his beer with his men, and appeared to enjoy himself as much as they did.
Now, in the interest of good-fellowship and good cheer, we have the Harvest Festival, from which the agricultural labourer is conspicuously absent, as a rule.
However, the inevitable is the inevitable. The past is past. As all the conditions of that old time hung together, together they had to go. And there is still a Future for the unborn to experiment in.
Harvest Home having been celebrated, the "master" was free to make holiday with horse and gun, and my father was ever eager—too eager—to do so. Weather that was right for hunting was a matter of more joyful satisfaction to him than weather that was right for crops. All thought of crops was thrown to the autumn winds as soon as "the season" opened.
Those old roads of Norfolk were to me haunted with hounds and red coats, echoing with the music of the pack and the horn. I asked Mr B., as he was driving me from D—— to my cousin's house, how hunting stood in the old hunting county now. He shook his head mournfully. According to him, although he was still a young man, the heydey again was gone, never to return.
He had it in his blood, like me, from the dead and gone, and so we were more or less prejudiced. But it would seem clear to the understanding of the most unbiassed person that the sport must have been more interesting in the old times, if only for the reason that hunting men did not wedge in hunting with a dozen other diversions, often in half-a-dozen different places; they gave their hearts and the season to it, falling back upon a little placid subsidiary shooting (over dogs) on off days. There were fewer railways and miscellaneous lions in the path of the straight run; there were more foxes, "stout" in proportion to the healthy peacefulness of their bringing up. Townsfolk did not "run down" in crowds to a country meet—they could not; the uninitiated outsider who did intrude where he was not wanted accepted the stern discipline of the field as part of the natural order. Farmers were similarly old-fashioned, and in easier circumstances; they were insiders moreover, although few of them aspired to the red coat—as fine riders and steady-going sportsmen as their landlords. They bred hunters and took puppies to walk, and farmed land so that it was not too fine to be galloped over. And barbed wire had not been invented.
Let me hasten to say, however, that I, personally, do not regret the inevitable change. In spite of my feelings on those haunted Norfolk roads, and my talk with Mr B., my heart does not sympathise with mourners over the decadence of the old sport. The beginnings of the heresy that the morals of "sport" in this form are open to doubt—that animals, after all, have some poor rights—seem to be welcome signs of progress on the true line of civilisation. Heresies of to-day have a fashion of changing into orthodox beliefs to-morrow, and this heresy is bound to follow the rule. Hunting that is not for food or in self-defence is like war—a relic of the savage state, surviving only because its nobler attendant features, its refined conventions, traditions and associations disguise the savagery.
I have seen an exhausted fox making a last spurt for his life, brush down, tongue out, coat wet, eyes wild with despair; and I am glad to think that, after all these years, it is possible for the human heart to feel a stir of pity for him. It felt none then. My gentle mother, who had followed the hounds herself in days of better health and fewer babies, loved to pack her little brood into a phaeton and drive them to some likely spot for seeing something of that brutally unfair contest between an army of giants and one little scrap of heroic life. I vividly remember an occasion when the horse in the shafts happened to be an old hunter of her own, supposed to have outlived his enthusiasm. At the first sound of the distant chase he propped as if shot, with pricked ears and snorting nostrils, and then bounded at a closed gate, with the intent to go over it, phaeton and children and all. It took a good horsewoman to deal with that situation, and she managed to prevent trouble by hastily detaching him from the carriage and hanging on to him until the hunt had passed.
After that Taffy took us on these expeditions. How perfectly I recall a still, soft day, a quiet road intersecting deep woods—a road dark in summer with the leafage of overarching trees—the phaeton with the white pony drawn up under the hedge, the mellow hunting cry of the pack sounding nearer and nearer, the speckle of red coats appearing and disappearing through the skeleton copse, the excitement, the rapture, the triumph—and a poor little drabbled fox struggling to evade his fate. He broke from the further hedge, crossed the road, and entered the hedge beside us almost under Taffy's nose—one of the most sensational incidents of a hunting season that I can remember falling to the lot of us non-combatants. Dead beat he was, his heart bursting, his limbs scarce able to carry him; yet even tender-hearted women and children had no feeling for him in his lonely fight against the forces of the universe, no chivalrous impulse to befriend him in his extremity. A pair of horsemen crashed through the opposite hedge into the road—Lord S. had lost his cap, and his hair was wild about his head—and they reined up to speak to us. To their excited "Where? Where?" we shouted "There! There!" and pointed them after the fugitive. And if he fell into the jaws of the hounds at last I am sure we congratulated ourselves on having helped to put him there.