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EX BIBUOTHECA ?: MARY RV5SELL- MITFORD 'DIED' 1&55 FIRST -EDITION PVBLISHED-1^43 THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES THE SEIZES OF ENGLISH IDTLLS VILLAGE PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN College Library Page OUR VILLAGE i WALKS IN THE COUNTRT Frost and Thaw . . . .17 The First Primrose . . . .25 Violeting . . . * 3 2 The Cowslip-ball . . . 38 The Hard Summer . . . .49 Nutting . . . . .61 The Wood ..... 69 The Dell 76 The Old House at Aberleigh . . 85 The Shaw . . . .94 The Fall of the Leaf . . . .104 SELECT SKETCHES Hannah . .113 Modern Antiques . .122 A Great Farm-house . . . ,132 1221S04 v Page Bramley Maying . . , .141 A Parting Glance at Our Village . . 1 50 A Country Cricket-match . . 167 Wheat-hoeing . . . .182 Whit sun-eve . . . . . io The Haymakers . . . .200 Hay-carrying . . . .214 Lost and Found . . . .220 The Old Gipsy . 237 The Toung Gipsy . . . .248 Jack Hatch . . 260 The Mole-catcher . v , .270 The Village Schoolmistress . . .279 The Rat-catcher . , . . 294 Aunt Martha , . , .306 In the very spring and pride of their tottering prettiness .... frontispiece Title-page ..... / and my white greyhound . . . facing page 2 1 Nothing but for sober melancholy use . ,, 36 Striving against the heat . . . > 73 A singular division of labour . . ,, 80 Toulh and age . . . . 87 Screamed at by the dame . . . ,,98 Symptoms of a Jlirtation still . . 133 Scolding little boys and girls . . 148 Oh ! they 'will never do for cricket . . ,, 181 Not a stroke have they done for these Jive minutes ,, 196 Mending by Master Keephimself . . ,, 197 His oivn visions growing into reality . ,, 212 An old crone stooping over a kettle . . ,,245 Isaac is a tall, /ean, gloomy personage . ,, 260 Most of the three-colour blocks used in this book have been made by the Graphic Photo- Engraving Co., London Miss MITFORD, in one of her letters to Miss Barrett (afterwards Mrs Barrett Browning), says : " I have never been without pecuniary care, care that pressed upon my thoughts the last thing at night, to wake in the morning with a dreary sense of pain, a pressure of something that weighed me to the earth." Such, indeed, was her life, made sordid and in part miserable through the diversions of a father, of whom it is difficult to speak with patience or find in his character one redeeming principle. A gambler who grasped and lost in play the fortunes of a wife and daughter in addition to his own, and when all was exhausted, lived upon and gambled with the earnings of his only child even in dying leaving her only a heritage of debts to the amount of a thousand pounds, which she most nobly liquidated. But out of all this sordidness and suffering there was born to her a beautiful, quiet heroism, full of a great cheerfulness ; and there was given to her, in compensation, a perfect appreciation and delight in x nature's loveliness, and a great industry which hardly knew fatigue. Mary Russell Mitford was born at Alresford, Hampshire, on the 1 6th December 1787. Her father had been educated for the medical profession, and had passed his degree at the Edinburgh University. Her mother, Mary Russell, was the daughter of Richard Russell, one of those richly beneficed clergymen who held two livings, Overton and Ash, both in Hamp- shire. She was born into comfortable circumstances, her mother having a considerable fortune, as, indeed, had her father ; and throughout her early child- hood this comfort prevailed, though her father was constantly diminishing the fortunes by his wasteful extravagance and wretched gambling habits. When he had exhausted the whole of their large for- tunes it is said, indeed, that during his life-time he threw away money to the extent of seventy thousand pounds his daughter added to the family fortunes by winning a prize in a lottery worth twenty thousand pounds. She was attracted to the numbers by the fact that the figures of 2224 made, when added together, the number of her years. This came in time to save them from penury. Mary was sent to a school kept by a Mrs St Quinton, which had something of a reputation, for several ladies, who afterwards reached literary fame among them the well-known L. E. L. had previously been educated there. She left this school, however, x in 1802, and went to live with her parents, and from that time forward supported them both by her earn- ings. She began to write poetry, and published her first volume in 1810; and, strange to say, these verses, which are very curious to look back upon, attained a second edition, and, we believe, were widely read in America. From poetry, she passed on to writing a drama, and soon it became necessary that she should use all the literary gifts she had in order to maintain her parents and keep the house together. It was fortunate, indeed, that the necessity of finding money for her father to gamble with led Miss Mitford to turn her thoughts to what we would venture to say she was born for, viz, to the pictur- ing of those charming scenes of country life so exquisitely drawn, so full of a bright cheerfulness, so redolent of fresh air, that have been our delight ever since they appeared. It is amusing to think that this work, which was of true genius, was re- jected by Thomas Campbell for the New Monthly Magazine because he thought it was beneath the dignity of his pages. They were handed over to a little tiny magazine called the Ladies' Magazine, which had a circulation at that time of two hundred and fifty copies, but after the first story of " Our Village," it immediately rose to two thousand, and the delightful stories have been perennially printed ever since. xiv Miss Mitford was for many years an invalid, and one looks with the more disgust upon the character of the father, who could so recklessly live upon and gamble away the earnings of such a fragile creature. He, however, died in 1842, and the poor invalid lived on in peace, helped by a government pension of one hundred pounds a year and a public subscrip- tion (which was mainly used to pay her father's debts), until the year 1855, when the shock of a carriage accident accelerated the ravages of rheuma- tism, and she died on Jan. loth. Her genius, though of a very limited order, is so perfect in expression in these wonderful idylls of our English village life, so true in detail, as to re- mind one of the old Dutch painters in their perfection of light and shade and fulness of colour. They have not the intuitive sense of fine art which Mrs GaskelPs books contain, but they have in them a beauty en- tirely their own and absolutely unique in our litera- ture. It is curious that Harriet Martineau looked upon her as the originator of that modern style which we call " graphic description," but Mrs Browning was far nearer the truth, it seems to us, when she describes her as the "Prose Crabbe in the sun." The publishers have endeavoured to bring to- gether all the pictures of actual village life contained in the five volumes of stories. They have chosen those first which revealed the author at her best and xv that were more directly studies of nature and the village character. The greater number of these studies are real portraits, so that the volume pre- sents nearly all that the author wrote of " our village." Several selections of the stories have been illus- trated, but the possibility to reproduce colour more accurately has tempted the publishers to make more vivid, scenes that are fast disappearing from our English life. VILLAGE OF all situations for a constant residence, that which appears to me most delightful is a little village far in the country ; a small neighbourhood, not of fine mansions finely peopled, but of cottages and cottage-like houses, " messuages or tenements," as a friend of mine calls such ignoble and non- descript dwellings, with inhabitants whose faces are as familiar to us as the flowers in our garden j a little world of our own, close-packed and insulated like ants in an ant-hill, or bees in a hive, or sheep in a fold, or nuns in a convent, or sailors in a ship j where we know every one, are known to every one, interested in every one, and authorised to hope that every one feels an interest in us. How pleasant it is to slide into these true-hearted feelings from the kindly and unconscious influence of habit, and to learn to know and to love the people about us, with all their peculiarities, just as we learn to know and to love the nooks and turns of the shady lanes and sunny commons that we pass every day. Even in books I like a confined locality, and so do the critics when they talk of the unities. Nothing is so tiresome as to be whirled half over Europe at the chariot wheels of a hero, to go to sleep at Vienna, and awaken at Madrid j it pro- duces a real fatigue, a weariness of spirit. On the other hand, nothing is so delightful as to sit down in a country village in one of Miss Austen's delicious novels, quite sure before we leave it to become intimate with every spot and every person it contains ; or to ramble with Mr White l over his own parish of Selborne, and form a friendship with the fields and coppices, as well as with the birds, mice, and squirrels, who inhabit them ; or to sail with Robinson Crusoe to his island, and live there with him and his goats and his man Friday how much we dread any new-comers, any fresh importa- tion of savage or sailor ! we never sympathise for a moment in our hero's want of company, and are quite grieved when he gets away ; or to be ship- wrecked with Ferdinand on that other lovelier island the island of Prospero, and Miranda, and Caliban, and Ariel, and nobody else, none of Dryden's exotic inventions that is best of all. And a small neigh- bourhood is as good in sober waking reality as in poetry or prose ; a village neighbourhood, such as this Berkshire hamlet in which I write, a long, straggling, winding street at the bottom of a fine eminence, with a road through it, always abounding in carts, horsemen, and carriages, and lately enlivened 1 White's Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne ; one of the most fascinating books ever written. I wonder that no naturalist has adopted the same plan. 3 by a stage-coach from B to S , which passed through about ten days ago, and will, I suppose, return some time or other. There are coaches of all varieties nowadays ; perhaps this may be intended for a monthly diligence, or a fortnight fly. Will you walk with me through our village, courteous reader ? The journey is not long. We will begin at the lower end, and proceed up the hill. The tidy, square, red cottage on the right hand, with the long well-stocked garden by the side of the road, belongs to a retired publican from a neighbouring town ; a substantial person with a comely wife j one who piques himself on independence and idleness, talks politics, reads newspapers, hates the minister, and cries out for reform. He introduced into our peaceful vicinage the rebellious innovation of an illu- mination on the Queen's acquittal. Remonstrance and persuasion were in vainj he talked of liberty and broken windows so we all lighted up. Oh ! how he shone that night with candles, and laurel, and white bows, and gold paper, and a transparency (originally designed for a pocket-handkerchief) with a flaming portrait of her Majesty, hatted and feathered, in red ochre. He had no rival in the village, that we all acknowledged ; the very bonfire was less splendid ; the little boys reserved their best crackers to be expended in his honour, and he gave them full six- pence more than any one else. He would like an illumination once a month ; for it must not be con- cealed that, in spite of gardening, of newspaper reading, of jaunting about in his little cart, and frequenting both church and meeting, our worthy neighbour begins to feel the weariness of idleness. 4 OU1{ VILLAGE He hangs over his gate, and tries to entice passengers to stop and chat ; he volunteers little jobs all round, smokes cherry trees to cure the blight, and traces and blows up all the wasps' nests in the parish. I have seen a great many wasps in our garden to-day, and shall enchant him with the intelligence. He even assists his wife in her sweepings and dustings. Poor man ! he is a very respectable person, and would be a very happy one if he would add a little employment to his dignity. It would be the salt of life to him. Next to his house, though parted from it by another long garden with a yew arbour at the end, is the pretty dwelling of the shoemaker, a pale, sickly-looking, black-haired man, the very model of sober industry. There he sits in his little shop from early morning till late at night. An earthquake would hardly stir him j the illumination did not. He stuck immovably to his last, from the first lighting up, through the long blaze and the slow decay, till his large, solitary candle was the only light in the place. One cannot conceive anything more perfect than the contempt which the man of transparencies and the man of shoes must have felt for each other on that evening. There was at least as much vanity in the sturdy industry as in the strenuous idleness, for our shoemaker is a man of substance he employs three journeymen, two lame, and one a dwarf, so that his shop looks like an hospital ; he has purchased the lease of his commodious dwelling, some even say that he has bought it out and out ; and he has only one pretty daughter, a light, delicate, fair- haired girl of fourteen, the champion, protectress, and playfellow of every brat under three years old, whom she jumps, dances, dandles, and feeds all day long. OU^VILL^tGE 5 A very attractive person is that child-loving girl. I have never seen any one in her station who possessed so thoroughly that undefinable charm, the lady-look. See her on a Sunday in her simplicity and her white frock, and she might pass for an earl's daughter She likes flowers, too, and has a profusion of white stocks under her window, as pure and delicate as herself. The first house on the opposite side of the way is the blacksmith's ; a gloomy dwelling, where the sun never seems to shine ; dark and smoky within and without, like a forge. The blacksmith is a high officer in our little state, nothing less than a con- stable ; but, alas ! alas ! when tumults arise, and the constable is called for, he will commonly be found in the thickest of the fray. Lucky would it be for his wife and her eight children if there were no public-house in the land ; an inveterate inclination to enter those bewitching doors is Mr Constable's only fault. Next to this official dwelling is a spruce brick tenement, red, high, and narrow, boasting, one above another, three sash-windows, the only sash-windows in the village, with a clematis on one side and a rose on the other, tall and narrow like itself. That slender mansion has a fine, genteel look. The little parlour seems made for Hogarth's old maid and her stunted footboy ; for tea and card parties it would just hold one table ; for the rustle of faded silks, and the splendour of old china ; for the delight of four by honours, and a little snug, quiet scandal between the deals ; for affected gentility and real starvation. This should have been its destiny ; but fate has been B unpropitious : it belongs to a plump, merry, bustling dame, with four fat, rosy, noisy children, the very essence of vulgarity and plenty. Then comes the village shop, like other village shops, multifarious as a bazaar ; a repository for bread, shoes, tea, cheese, tape, ribands, and bacon; for everything, in short, except the one particular thing which you happen to want at the moment, and will be sure not to find. The people are civil and thriving, and frugal withal; they have let the upper part of their house to two young women (one of them is a pretty, blue-eyed girl) who teach little children their ABC, and make caps and gowns for their mammas parcel schoolmistress, parcel mantua- maker. I believe they find adorning the body a more profitable vocation than adorning the mind. Divided from the shop by a narrow yard, and opposite the shoemaker's, is a habitation of whose inmates I shall say nothing. A cottage no a miniature house, with many additions, little odds and ends of places, pantries, and what not ; all angles, and of a charming in-and-outness ; a little bricked court before one half, and a little flower-yard before the other ; the walls, old and weather-stained, covered with holyhocks, roses, honeysuckles, and a great apricot-tree ; the casement full of geraniums (ah, there is our superb white cat peeping out from among them); the closets (our landlord has the assurance to call them rooms) full of contrivances and corner-cupboards ; and the little garden behind full of common flowers, tulips, pinks, larkspurs, peonies, stocks, and carnations, with an arbour of privet, not unlike a sentry-box, where one lives in a VILLAGE 7 delicious green light, and looks out on the gayest of all gay flower-beds. That house was built on pur- pose to show in what an exceeding small compass comfort may be packed. Well, I will loiter there no longer. The next tenement is a place of importance, the Rose Inn ; a whitewashed building, retired from the road behind its fine swinging sign, with a little bow- window room coming out on one side, and forming, with our stable on the other, a sort of open square, which is the constant resort of carts, waggons, and return chaises. There are two carts there now, and mine host is serving them with beer in his eternal red waistcoat. He is a thriving man and a portly, as his waistcoat attests, which has been twice let out within this twelvemonth. Our landlord has a stirring wife, a hopeful son, and a daughter, the belle of the village ; not so pretty as the fair nymph of the shoe- shop, and far less elegant, but ten times as fine ; all curl-papers in the morning, like a porcupine, all curls in the afternoon, like a poodle, with more flounces than curl-papers, and more lovers than curls. Miss Phoebe is fitter for town than country ; and to do her justice, she has a consciousness of that fitness, and turns her steps townwards as often as she can. She is gone to B to-day with her last and principal lover, a recruiting sergeant a man as tall as Sergeant Kite, and as impudent. Some day or other he will carry off Miss Phoebe. In a line with the bow-window room is a low garden-wall, belonging to a house under repair the white house opposite the collar-maker's shop, with four lime-trees before it, and a waggon-load of 8 OU^VILL^fGE bricks at the door. That house is the plaything of a wealthy, well-meaning, whimsical person who lives about a mile off. He has a passion for brick and mortar, and, being too wise to meddle with his own residence, diverts himself with altering and re-altering, improving and re-improving, doing and undoing here. It is a perfect Penelope's web. Carpenters and brick- layers have been at work for these eighteen months, and yet I sometimes stand and wonder whether any- thing has really been done. One exploit in last June was, however, by no means equivocal. Our good neighbour fancied that the limes shaded the rooms, and made them dark (there was not a creature in the house but the workmen), so he had all the leaves stripped from every tree. There they stood, poor miserable skeletons, as bare as Christmas under the glowing midsummer sun. Nature revenged herself in her own sweet and gracious manner ; fresh leaves sprang out, and at nearly Christmas the foliage was as brilliant as when the outrage was committed. Next door lives a carpenter, " famed ten miles round, and worthy all his fame " few cabinet- makers surpass him, with his excellent wife, and their little daughter Lizzy, the plaything and queen of the village, a child three years old according to the register, but six in size and strength and intellect, in power and in self-will. She manages everybody in the place, her schoolmistress included ; turns the wheeler's children out of their own little cart, and makes them draw her ; seduces cakes and lollypops from the very shop window ; makes the lazy carry her, the silent talk to her, the grave romp with her ; does anything she pleases ; is absolutely irresistible. Her chief attraction lies in her exceeding power of loving, and her firm reliance on the love and in- dulgence of others. How impossible it would be to disappoint the dear little girl when she runs to meet you, slides her pretty hand into yours, looks up gladly in your face and says, " Come ! " You must go ; you cannot help it. Another part of her charm is her singular beauty. Together with a good deal of the character of Napoleon, she has something of his square, sturdy, upright form, with the finest limbs in the world, a complexion purely English, a round, laughing face, sunburnt and rosy, large, merry, blue eyes, curling brown hair, and a wonderful play of countenance. She has the imperial attitudes, too, and loves to stand with her hands behind her, or folded over her bosom; and sometimes, when she has a little touch of shyness, she clasps them to- gether on the top of her head, pressing down her shining curls, and looking so exquisitely pretty ! Yes, Lizzy is queen of the village ! She has but one rival in her dominions, a certain white greyhound called Mayflower, much her friend, who resembles her in beauty and strength, in playfulness, and almost in sagacity, and reigns over the animal world as she over the human. They are both coming with me, Lizzy and Lizzy's "pretty May." We are 'now at the end of the street ; a cross lane, a rope-walk shaded with limes and oaks, and a cool, clear pond overhung with elms, lead us to the bottom of the hill. There is still one house round the corner, ending in a picturesque wheeler's shop. The dwelling-house is more ambitious. Look at the fine flowered window- blinds, the green door with the brass knocker, and io OU VILLAGE the somewhat prim but very civil person, who is sending off a labouring man with sirs and curtsies enough for a prince of the blood. Those are the curate's lodgings apartments, his landlady would call them : he lives with his own family four miles off, but once or twice a week he comes to his neat little parlour to write sermons, to marry, or to bury, as the case may require. Never were better or kinder people than his host and hostess : and there is a reflec- tion of clerical importance about them since their connection with the Church which is quite edifying a decorum, a gravity, a solemn politeness. Oh, to see the worthy wheeler carry the gown after his lodger on a Sunday, nicely pinned up in his wife's best hand- kerchief ! or to hear him rebuke a squalling child or a squabbling woman ! The curate is nothing to him. He is fit to be perpetual churchwarden. We must now cross the lane into the shady rope- walk. That pretty white cottage opposite, which stands straggling at the end of the village in a garden full of flowers, belongs to our mason, the shortest of men, and his handsome, tall wife : he, a dwarf, with the voice of a giant ; one starts when he begins to talk, as if he were shouting through a speaking-trumpet ; she, the sister, daughter, and grand-daughter of a long line of gardeners, and no contemptible one herself. It is very magnanimous in me not to hate her ; for she beats me in my own way, in chrysanthemums, and dahlias, and the like gauds. Her plants are sure to live ; mine have a sad trick of dying, perhaps because I love them " not wisely, but too well," and kill them with over-kindness. Half-way up the hill is another OU^VILL^fGE ii detached cottage, the residence of an officer and his beautiful family. That eldest boy, who is hanging over the gate, and looking with such intense childish admiration at my Lizzy, might be a model for a Cupid. How pleasantly the road winds up the hill, with its broad, green borders and hedgerows so thickly timbered ! How finely the evening sun falls on that sandy excavated bank, and touches the farmhouse on the top of the eminence ! and how clearly defined and relieved is the figure of the man who is just coming down ! It is poor John Evans, the gardener an excellent gardener till about ten years ago, when he lost his wife, and became insane. He was sent to St. Luke's, and dismissed as cured j but his power was gone and his strength ; he could no longer manage a garden, nor submit to the restraint, no T encounter the fatigue of regular employment : so he retreated to the workhouse, the pensioner and facto- tum of the village, amongst whom he divided his services. His mind often wanders, intent on some fantastic and impracticable plan, and lost to present objects : but he is perfectly harmless, and full of a child-like simplicity, a smiling contentedness, a most touching gratitude. Every one is kind to John Evans, for there is that about him which must be loved ; and his unprotectedness, his utter defencelessness, have an irresistible claim on every better feeling. I know nobody who inspires so deep and tender a pity ; he improves all around him. He is useful, too, to the extent of his little power ; will do anything, but loves gardening best, and still piques himself on his old arts of pruning fruit-trees and raising cucumbers. 12 OU VILLAGE He is the happiest of men just now, for he has the management of a melon bed a melon bed ! fie ! What a grand, pompous name was that for three melon plants under a hand-light ! John Evans is sure that they will succeed. We shall see; as the chancellor said, " I doubt." We are now on the very brow of the eminence, close to the Hill-house and its beautiful garden. On the outer edge of the paling, hanging over the bank that skirts the road, is an old thorn such a thorn ! The long sprays covered with snowy blossoms, so graceful, so elegant, so lightsome, and yet so rich ! There only wants a pool under the thorn to give a still lovelier reflection, quivering and trembling, like a tuft of feathers, whiter and greener than the life, and more prettily mixed with the bright blue sky. There should, indeed, be a pool ; but on the dark grass-plot, under the high bank, which is crowned by that magnificent plume, there is something that does almost as well Lizzy and Mayflower in the midst of a game at romps, "making a sunshine in the shady place"; Lizzy rolling, laughing, clapping her hands, and glowing like a rose ; Mayflower play- ing about her like summer lightning, dazzling the eyes with her sudden turns, her leaps, her bounds, her attacks, and her escapes. She darts round the lovely little girl, with the same momentary touch that the swallow skims over the water, and has exactly the same power of flight, the same matchless ease, and strength, and grace. What a pretty picture they would make ; what a pretty foreground they do make to the real landscape ! The road winding cjown the hill with a slight bend, like that in the High 13 Street at Oxford ; a waggon slowly ascending, and a horseman passing it at a full trot (ah ! Lizzy, Mayflower will certainly desert you to have a gambol with that blood-horse !) half-way down, just at the turn, the red cottage of the lieutenant, covered with vines, the very image of comfort and content ; farther down, on the opposite side, the small, white dwelling of the little mason : then the limes and the rope-walk; then the village street, peeping through the trees, whose clustering tops hide all but the chimneys, and various roofs of the houses, and here and there some angle of a wall : farther on, the elegant town of B , with its fine old church-towers and spires ; the whole view shut in by a range of chalky hills ; and over every part of the picture, trees so profusely scattered, that it appears like a woodland scene, with glades and villages inter- mixed. The trees are of all kinds and all hues, chiefly the finely shaped elm, of so bright and deep a green, the tips of whose high outer branches drop down with such a crisp and garland-like richness, and the oak, whose stately form is just now so splendidly adorned by the sunny colouring of the young leaves. Turning again up the hill, we find ourselves on that peculiar charm of English scenery, a green common divided by the road j the right side fringed by hedge- rows and trees, with cottages and farm-houses irregu- larly placed, and terminated by a double avenue of noble oaks ; the left prettier still, dappled by bright pools of water, and islands of cottages and cottage- gardens, and sinking gradually down to corn-fields and meadows, and an old farm-house, with pointed roofs and clustered chimneys, looking out from its 14 blooming orchard, and backed by woody hills. The common is itself the prettiest spot of the prospect : half covered with low furze, whose golden blossoms reflect so intensely the last beams of the setting sun, and alive with cows and sheep, and two sets of cricketers ; one of young men, surrounded by spec- tators, some standing, some sitting, some stretched on the grass, all taking a delighted interest in the game ; the other, a merry group of little boys, at a humble distance, for whom even cricket is scarcely lively enough, shouting, leaping, and enjoying them- selves to their hearts' content. But cricketers and country boys are too important persons in our village to be talked of merely as figures in the landscape. They deserve an individual introduction an essay to themselves and they shall have it. No fear of forgetting the good-humoured faces that meet us in our walks every day. WALKS IN THE COUNTRY JANUARY 2 3RD. At noon to-day I and my white greyhound, Mayflower, set out for a walk into a very beautiful world a sort of silent fairy-land a creation of that matchless magician, the hoar-frost. There had been just snow enough to cover the earth and all its covers with one sheet of pure and uniform white, and just time enough since the snow had fallen to allow the hedges to be freed of their fleecy load, and clothed with a delicate coating of rime. The atmosphere was deliciously calm ; soft, even mild, in spite of the thermometer ; no percep- tible air, but a stillness that might almost be felt, the sky, rather grey than blue, throwing out in bold relief the snow-covered roofs of our village, and the rimy trees that rise above them, and the sun shining dimly as through a veil, giving a pale, fair light, like the moon, only brighter. There was a silence, too, that might become the moon, as we stood at our little gate looking up the quiet street; a Sabbath- like pause of work and play, rare on a work-day ; nothing was audible but the pleasant hum of frost, that low, monotonous sound, which is perhaps the nearest approach that life and nature can make to absolute silence. The very waggons as they come 1 8 OU VILLAGE down the hill along the beaten track of crisp, yellowish frost-dust, glide along like shadows j even May's bounding footsteps, at her height of glee and of speed, fall like snow upon snow. But we shall have noise enough presently : May has stopped at Lizzy's door; and Lizzy, as she sat on the window-sill with her bright, rosy face laughing through the casement, has seen her and disappeared. She is coming. No ! The key is turning in the door, and sounds of evil omen issue through the key-holesturdy "Let me outs," and "I will goes," mixed with shrill cries on May and on me from Lizzy, piercing through a low continuous harangue, of which the prominent parts are apologies, chilblains, sliding, broken bones, lollypops, rods, and ginger- bread, from Lizzy's careful mother. " Don't scratch the door, May ! Don't roar so, my Lizzy ! We'll call for you as we come back." " I'll go now ! Let me out ! I will go ! " are the last words of Miss Lizzy. Mem. Not to spoil that child if I can help it. But I do think her mother might have let the poor little soul walk with us to-day. Nothing worse for children than coddling. Nothing better for chil- blains than exercise. Besides, I don't believe she has any and as to breaking her bones in sliding, I don't suppose there's a slide on the common. These murmuring cogitations have brought us up the hill, and half-way across the light and airy common, with its bright expanse of snow and its clusters of cottages, whose turf fires send such wreaths of smoke sailing up the air, and diffuse such aromatic fragrance around. And now comes the delightful sound of childish voices, ringing with glee 19 and merriment almost from beneath our feet. Ah, Lizzy, your mother was right ! They are shout- ing from that deep, irregular pool, all glass now, where, on two long, smooth, liny slides, half-a- dozen ragged urchins are slipping along in tottering triumph. Half-a-dozen steps bring us to the bank right above them. May can hardly resist the temptation of joining her friends, for most of the varlets are of her acquaintance, especially the rogue who leads the slide he with the brimless hat, whose bronzed complexion and white flaxen hair, reversing the usual lights and shadows of the human countenance, give so strange and foreign look to his flat and comic features. This hob- goblin, Jack Rapley by name, is May's great crony ; and she stands on the brink of the steep irregular descent, her black eyes fixed full upon him, as if she intended him the favour of jumping on his head. She does : she is down, and upon him : but Jack Rapley is not easily to be knocked off his feet. He saw her coming, and in the moment of her leap sprung dexterously ofF the slide on the rough ice, steadying himself by the shoulder of the next in file, which unlucky follower, thus unexpectedly checked in his career, fell plump back- wards, knocking down the rest of the line like a nest of card-houses. There is no harm done; but there they lie, roaring, kicking, sprawling, in every attitude of comic distress, whilst Jack Rapley and Mayflower, sole authors of this calamity, stand apart from the throng, fondling, and coquetting, and compli- menting each other, and very visibly laughing, May in her black eyes, Jack in his wide, close-shut mouth, 20 OU VILLAGE and his whole monkey-face, at their comrades' mis- chances. I think, Miss May, you may as well come up again, and leave Master Rapley to fight your battles. He'll get out of the scrape. He is a rustic wit a sort of Robin Goodfellow the sauciest, idlest, cleverest, best-natured boy in the parish ; always fore- most in mischief, and always ready to do a good turn. The sages of our village predict sad things of Jack Rapley, so that I am sometimes a little ashamed to confess, before wise people, that I have a lurking pre- dilection for him (in common with other naughty ones), and that I like to hear him talk to May almost as well as she does. " Come, May ! " and up she springs, as light as a bird. The road is gay now ; carts and post- chaises, and girls in red cloaks, and, afar off, looking almost like a toy, the coach. It meets us fast and soon. How much happier the walkers look than the riders especially the frost-bitten gentleman, and the shivering lady with the invisible face, sole passengers of that commodious machine ! Hooded, veiled, and bonneted, as she is, one sees from her attitude how miserable she would look uncovered. Another pond, and another noise of children. More sliding ? Oh, no ! This is a sort of higher pretension. Our good neighbour, the lieutenant, skating, and his own pretty little boys, and two or three other four-year-old elves, standing on the brink in an ecstasy of joy and wonder ! O what happy spectators ! And what a happy performer ! They admiring, he admired, with an ardour and sincerity never excited by all the quadrilles and the spread-eagles of the Seine and the Serpentine. He really skates well, though, and I am glad I 3 F<%pST ^f^D THdW 21 came this way ; for, with all the father's feelings sitting gaily at his heart, it must still gratify the pride of skill to have one spectator at that solitary pond who has seen skating before. Now we have reached the trees the beautiful trees ! never so beautiful as to-day. Imagine the effect of a straight and regular double avenue of oaks, nearly a mile long, arching over-head, and closing into perspective like the roof and columns of a cathedral, every tree and branch encrusted with the bright and delicate congelation of hoar-frost, white and pure as snow, delicate and defined as carved ivory. How beautiful it is, how uniform, how various, how filling, how satiating to the eye and to the mind above all, how melancholy ! There is a thrilling awfulness, an intense feeling of simple power in that naked and colourless beauty which falls on the earth, like the thoughts of death death pure, and glorious, and smiling but still death. Sculpture has always the same effect on my imagination, and painting never. Colour is life. We are now at the end of this magnificent avenue, and at the top of a steep eminence commanding a wide view over four counties a landscape of snow. A deep lane leads abruptly down the hill j a mere narrow cart-track, sinking between high banks clothed with fern and furze and low broom, crowned with luxuriant hedge- rows, and famous for their summer smell of thyme. How lovely these banks are now the tall weeds and the gorse fixed and stiffened in the hoar-frost, which fringes round the bright, prickly holly, the pendent foliage of the bramble, and the deep orange leaves of the pollard oaks ! Oh, this is rime in its C 22 OU VILLAGE loveliest form ! And there is still a berry here and there on the holly, " blushing in its natural coral," through the delicate tracery, still a stray hip or haw for the birds, who abound here always. The poor birds, how tame they are, how sadly tame ! There is the beautiful and rare crested wren, " that shadow of a bird," as White of Selborne calls it, perched in the middle of the hedge, nestling, as it were, amongst the cold, bare boughs, seeking, poor, pretty thing, for the warmth it will not find. And there, farther on, just under the bank, by the slender runlet, which still trickles between its transparent fantastic margin of thin ice, as if it were a thing of life there, with a swift, scudding motion, flits, in short, low flights, the gorgeous kingfisher, its magnificent plumage of scarlet and blue flashing in the sun, like the glories of some tropical bird. He is come for water to this little spring by the hillside water which even his long bill and slender head can hardly reach, so nearly do the fantastic forms of those garland-like icy margins meet over the tiny stream beneath. It is rarely that one sees the shy beauty so close or so long ; and it is pleasant to see him in the grace and beauty of his natural liberty, the only way to look at a bird. We used, before we lived in a street, to fix a little board outside the parlour window, and cover it with bread crumbs in the hard weather. It was quite delightful to see the pretty things come and feed, to conquer their shyness, and do away with their mistrust. First came the more social tribes, " the robin red-breast and the Wren," cautiously, sus- piciously, picking up a crumb on the wing, with the little, keen, bright eye fixed on the window ; then 23 they would stop for two pecks ; then stay till they were satisfied. The shyer birds, tamed by their example, came next ; and at last, one saucy fellow of a blackbird a sad glutton, he would clear the board in two minutes used to tap his yellow bill against the window for more. How we loved the fearless confidence of that fine, frank-hearted creature ! And surely he loved us. I wonder the practice is not more general. "May! May! naughty May!" She has frightened away the kingfisher ; and now in her coaxing penitence she is covering me with snow. " Come, pretty May ! it is time to go home." JANUARY 28TH. We have had rain, and snow, and frost, and rain again j four days of absolute con- finement. Now it is a thaw and a flood j but our light, gravelly soil, and country boots, and country hardihood, will carry us through. What a drip- ping, comfortless day it is ! just like the last days of November : no sun, no sky, grey or blue ; one low, overhanging, dark, dismal cloud, like London smoke : Mayflower is out coursing too, and Lizzy is gone to school. Never mind. Up the hill again ! Walk we must. Oh, what a watery world to look back upon ! Thames, Kennet, London all overflowed ; our famous town, inland once, turned into a sort of Venice ; C. park converted into an island ; and the long range of meadows from B. to W. one huge, unnatural lake, with trees growing out of it. Oh, what a watery world ! I will look at it no longer. I will walk on. The road is alive again. Noise is 24 OU^ VILLAGE re-born. Waggons creak, horses splash, carts rattle, and pattens paddle through the dirt with more than their usual clink. The common has its old, fine tints of green and brown, and its old variety of inhabitants, horses, cows, sheep, pigs, and donkeys. The ponds are unfrozen, and cackling geese and gabbling ducks have replaced the lieutenant and Jack Rapley. The avenue is chill and dark, the hedges are dripping, the lanes knee-deep, and all nature is in a state of " dissolution and thaw." MARCH 6TH. Fine March weather : boisterous, blustering, much wind and squalls of rain ; and yet the sky, where the clouds are swept away, deliciously blue, with snatches of sunshine, bright, and clear, and healthful, and the roads in spite of the slight, glitter- ing showers, crisply dry. Altogether, the day is tempting, very tempting. It will not do for the dear common, that windmill of a walk ; but the close, sheltered lanes at the bottom of the hill, which keep out just enough of the stormy air, and let in all the sun, will be delightful. Past our old house, and round by the winding lanes, and the workhouse, and across the lea, and so into the turnpike road again that is our route for to-day. Forth we set, Mayflower and I, rejoicing in the sunshine, and still more in the wind, which gives such an intense feeling of existence, and, co-operating with brisk motion, sets our blood and our spirits in a glow. For mere physical pleasure there is nothing, perhaps, equal to the enjoyment of being drawn in a light carriage against such a wind as this, by a blood- horse at his height of speed. Walking comes next to it ; but walking is not quite so luxurious or so spiritual j not quite so much what one fancies 25 26 OU3 VILLAGE of flying or being carried above the clouds in a balloon. Nevertheless, a walk is a good thing ; especially under this southern hedgerow, where nature is just beginning to live again ; the periwinkles, with their starry blue flowers, and their shining, myrtle-like leaves, garlanding the bushes ; woodbines and elder- trees pushing out their small, swelling buds ; and grasses and mosses springing forth in every variety of brown and green. Here we are at the corner where four lanes meet, or rather where a passable road of stones and gravel crosses an impassable one of beautiful but treacherous turf, and where the small, white farm-house, scarcely larger than a cottage, and the well-stocked rick-yard behind, tell of comfort and order, but leave all unguessed the great riches of the master. How he became so rich is almost a puzzle ; for, though the farm be his own, it is not large; and though prudent and frugal on ordinary occasions, Farmer Barnard is no miser. His horses, dogs, and pigs are the best kept in the parish May herself, although her beauty be injured by her fatness, half envies the plight of his bitch Fly; his wife's gowns and shawls cost as much again as any shawls or gowns in the village ; his dinner parties (to be sure they are not frequent) display twice the ordinary quantity of good things two couples of ducks, two dishes of green peas, two turkey poults, two gammons of bacon, two plum-puddings ; moreover, he keeps a single-horse chaise, and has built and endowed a Methodist chapel. Yet is he the richest man in these parts. Everything prospers with him. Money drifts about him like snow. He looks like a rich man. THE FI