The Hampshire people--Racial differences in neighbouring counties--A
neglected subject--Inhabitants of towns--Gentry and peasantry--Four
distinct types--The common blonde type--Lean women--Deleterious
effects of tea-drinking--A shepherd's testimony--A mixed race--The
Anglo-Saxon--Case of reversion of type--Un-Saxon character of the
British--Dark-eyed Hampshire people--Racial feeling with regard to
eye-colours--The Iberian type--Its persistence--Character of the
small dark man--Dark and blonde children--A dark village child.
The history of the horn-blower and his old wife, and their still
living aged children, serves to remind me that this book, which
contains so much about all sorts of creatures and forms of life, from
spiders and flies to birds and beasts, and from red alga on
gravestones to oaks and yews, has so far had almost nothing to say
about our own species--of that variety which inhabits Hampshire.
[Sidenote: Racial differences]
If the critical reader asks what is here meant by "variety," what
should I answer him? On going directly from any other district in
southern England to the central parts of Hampshire one is sensible of
a difference in the people. One is still in southern England, and
the peasantry, like the atmosphere, climate, soil, the quiet but
verdurous and varied scenery, are more or less like those of other
neighbouring counties--Surrey, Sussex, Kent, Berkshire, {221} Wilts,
and Dorset. In general appearance, at all events, the people are
much the same; and the dialect, where any survives, and even the
quality of the voices, closely resemble those in adjoining counties.
Nevertheless there is a difference; even the hasty seers who are
almost without the faculty of observation are vaguely cognisant of
it, though they would not be able to say what it consisted in.
Probably it would puzzle anyone to say wherein Hampshire differed
from all the counties named, since each has something individual;
therefore it would be better to compare Hampshire with some one
county near it, or with a group of neighbouring counties in which
some family resemblance is traceable. Somerset, Devon, Wilts, and
Dorset--these answer the description, and I leave out Cornwall only
because its people are unknown to me. The four named have seemed to
me the most interesting counties in southern England; but if I were
to make them five by adding Hampshire, the verdict of nine persons
out of ten, all equally well acquainted with the five, would probably
be that it was the least interesting. They would probably say that
the people of Hampshire were less good-looking, that they had less
red colour in their skins, less pure colour in their eyes; that they
had less energy, if not less intelligence, or at all events were less
lively, and had less humour.
These differences between the inhabitants of neighbouring and of
adjoining counties are doubtless in some measure due to local
conditions, of soil, climate, {222} food, customs, and so on, acting
for long generations on a stay-at-home people: but the main
differences are undoubtedly racial; and here we are on a subject in
which we poor ordinary folk who want to know are like sheep wandering
shepherdless in some wilderness, bleating in vain for guidance in a
maze of fleece-tearing brambles. It is true that the ethnologists
and anthropologists triumphantly point out that the Jute type of man
may be recognised in the Isle of Wight, and in a less degree even in
the Meon district; for the rest, with a wave of the hand to indicate
the northern half of the county, they say that all that is or ought
to be more or less Anglo-Saxon. That's all; since, as they tell us,
the affinities of the South Hampshire people, of the New Forest
district especially, have not yet been worked out. Not being an
anthropologist I can't help them; and am even inclined to think that
they have left undone some of the things which they ought to have
done. The complaint was made in a former chapter that we had no
monograph on fleas to help us; it may be made, too, with regard to
the human race in Hampshire. The most that one can do in such a
case, since man cannot be excluded from the subjects which concern
the naturalist, is to record one's own poor little unscientific
observations, and let them go for what they are worth.
[Sidenote: Gentry and peasantry]
There is little profit in looking at the townspeople. The big coast
towns have a population quite as heterogeneous as that of the
metropolis; even in a comparatively small rural inland town, like
Winchester, {223} one would be puzzled to say what the chief
characteristics of the people were. You may feel in a vague way that
they are unlike the people of, say, Guildford, or Canterbury, or
Reading, or Dorchester, but the variety in forms and faces is too
great to allow of any definite idea. The only time when the people
even in a town can be studied to advantage in places like Winchester,
Andover, etc., is on a market day, or on a Saturday afternoon, when
the villagers come in to do their marketing. I have said, in writing
of Somerset and its people, that the gentry, the landowners, and the
wealthy residents generally, are always in a sense foreigners. The
man may bear a name which has been for many generations in a county,
but he is never racially one with the peasant; and, as John Bright
once said, it is the people who live in cottages that make the
nation. His parents and his grandparents and his ancestors for
centuries have been mixing their blood with the blood of outsiders.
It is well always to bear this in mind, and in the market-place or
the High Street of the country town to see the carriage people, the
gentry, and the important ones generally as though one saw them not,
or saw them as shadows, and to fix the attention on those who in face
and carriage and dress proclaim themselves true natives and children
of the soil.
Even so there will be variety enough--a little more perhaps than is
wanted by the methodic mind anxious to classify these "insect
tribes." But after a time--a few months or a few years, let us {224}
say--the observer will perceive that the majority of the people are
divisible into four fairly distinct types, the minority being
composed of intermediate forms and of nondescripts. There is an
enormous disproportion in the actual numbers of the people of these
distinct types, and it varies greatly in different parts of the
county. Of the Hampshire people it may be said generally, as we say
of the whole nation, that there are two types--the blonde and the
dark; but in this part of England there are districts where a larger
proportion of dark blood than is common in England generally has
produced a well-marked intermediate type; and this is one of my four
distinct Hampshire types. I should place it second in importance,
although it comes a very long way after the first type, which is
distinctly blonde.
[Sidenote: Common blonde type]
This first most prevalent type, which greatly outnumbers all the
others put together, and probably includes more than half of the
entire population, is strongest in the north, and extends across the
county from Sussex to Wiltshire. The Hampshire people in that
district are hardly to be distinguished from those of Berkshire. One
can see this best by looking at the school-children in a number of
North Hampshire and Berkshire villages. In sixty or seventy to a
hundred and fifty children in a village school you will seldom find
as many as a dozen with dark eyes.
As was said in a former chapter, there is very little beauty or good
looks in this people; on the other hand, there is just as little
downright ugliness; they are mostly on a rather monotonous level,
just {225} passable in form and features, but with an almost entire
absence of any brightness, physical or mental. Take the best-looking
woman of this most common type--the description will fit a dozen in
any village. She is of medium height, and has a slightly oval face
(which, being Anglo-Saxon, she ought not to have), with fairly good
features; a nose fairly straight, or slightly aquiline, and not
small; mouth well moulded, but the lips too thin; chin frequently
pointed. Her hair is invariably brown, without any red or chestnut
colour in it, generally of a dull or dusty hue; and the eyes are a
pale greyish-blue, with small pupils, and in very many cases a dark
mark round the iris. The deep blue, any pure blue, in fact, from
forget-me-not to ultramarine, is as rare in this commonest type as
warm or bright hair--chestnut, red, or gold; or as a brilliant skin.
The skin is pallid, or dusky, or dirty-looking. Even healthy girls
in their teens seldom have any colour, and the exquisite roseate and
carmine reds of other counties are rare indeed. The best-looking
girls at the time of life when they come nearest to being pretty,
when they are just growing into womanhood, have an unfinished look
which is almost pathetic. One gets the fancy that Nature had meant
to make them nice-looking, and finally becoming dissatisfied with her
work, left them to grow to maturity anyhow. It is pathetic, because
there was little more to be done--a rosier blush on the cheek, a
touch of scarlet on the lips, a little brightness and elasticity in
the hair, a pencil of sunlight to make the eyes sparkle.
{226}
In figure this woman is slim, too narrow across the hips, too flat in
the chest. And she grows thinner with years. The number of lean,
pale women of this type in Hampshire is very remarkable. You see
them in every village, women that appear almost fleshless, with a
parchment-like skin drawn tight over the bones of the face,
pale-blue, washed-out eyes, and thin, dead-looking hair. What is the
reason of this leanness? It may be that the women of this blonde
type are more subject to poverty of blood than others; for the men,
though often thin, are not so excessively thin as the women. Or it
may be the effect of that kind of poison which cottage women all over
the country are becoming increasingly fond of, and which is having so
deleterious an effect on the people in many counties--the tea they
drink. Poison it certainly is: two or three cups a day of the black
juice which they obtain by boiling and brewing the coarse Indian teas
at a shilling a pound which they use, would kill me in less than a
week.
Or it may be partly the poison of tea and partly the bad conditions,
especially the want of proper food, in the villages. One day on the
downs near Winchester I found a shepherd with his flock, a man of
about fifty, and as healthy and strong-looking a fellow as I have
seen in Hampshire. Why was it, I asked him, that he was the only man
of his village I had seen with the colour of red blood in his face?
why did they look so unwholesome generally? why were the women so
thin, and the children so stunted {227} and colourless? He said he
didn't know, but thought that for one thing they did not get enough
to eat. "On the farm where I work," he said, "there are twelve of
us--nine men, all married, and three boys. My wages are thirteen
shillings, with a cottage and garden; I have no children, and I
neither drink nor smoke, and have not done so for eighteen years.
Yet I find the money is not too much. Of the others, the eight
married men all have children--one has got six at home: they all
smoke, and all make a practice of spending at least two evenings each
week at the public-house." How, after paying for beer and tobacco,
they could support their families on the few shillings that remained
out of their wages was a puzzle to him.
[Sidenote: A mixed race]
But this is to digress. The prevalent blonde type I have tried to
describe is best seen in the northern half of the county, but is not
so accentuated on the east, north, and west borders as in the
interior villages. If, as is commonly said, this people is
Anglo-Saxon, it must at some early period have mixed its blood with
that of a distinctly different race. This may have been the Belgic
or Brythonic, but as shape and face are neither Celtic nor Saxon, the
Brythons must have already been greatly modified by some older and
different race which they, or the Goidels before them, had conquered
and absorbed. It will be necessary to return to this point by-and-by.
Side by side with this, in a sense, dim and doubtful people, you find
the unmistakable Saxon, the thick-set, {228} heavy-looking,
round-headed man with blue eyes and light hair, and heavy drooping
mustachios--a sort of terrestrial walrus who goes erect. He is not
abundant as in Sussex, but is represented in almost any village, and
in these villages he is always like a bull-dog or bull-terrier among
hounds, lurchers, and many other varieties, including curs of low
degree. Mentally, he is rather a dull dog, at all events deficient
in the finer, more attractive qualities. Leaving aside the spiritual
part, he is a good all-round man, tough and stubborn, one that the
naturalist may have no secret qualms about in treating as an animal.
A being of strong animal nature, and too often in this brewer-ridden
county a hard drinker. A very large proportion of the men in rural
towns and villages with blotchy skins and watery or beery eyes are of
this type. Even more offensive than the animality, the mindlessness,
is that flicker of conscious superiority which lives in their
expression. It is, I fancy, a survival of the old instinctive
feeling of a conquering race amid the conquered.
[Sidenote: Reversion of type]
Nature, we know, is everlastingly harking back, but here in Hampshire
I cannot but think that this type, in spite of its very marked
characters, is a very much muddied and degenerate form. One is led
to this conclusion by occasionally meeting with an individual whose
whole appearance is a revelation, and strikes the mind with a kind of
astonishment, and one can only exclaim--there is nothing else to
say--Here Nature has at length succeeded in reproducing the pure
unadulterated form! Such a {229} type I came upon one summer day on
the high downs east of the Itchen.
He was a shepherd, a young fellow of twenty, about five feet eight in
height, but looking short on account of his extraordinary breadth of
shoulders and depth of chest. His arms were like a blacksmith's, and
his legs thick, and his big head was round as a Dutch cheese. He
could, I imagined, have made a breach in the stone wall near which I
found him with his flock, if he had lowered that hard round head and
charged like a rhinoceros. His hair was light brown, and his face a
uniform rosy brown--in all Hampshire no man nor woman had I seen so
beautiful in colour; and his round, keen, piercing eyes were of a
wonderful blue--"eyes like the sea." If this poor fellow, washed
clean and clothed becomingly in white flannels, had shown himself in
some great gathering at the Oval or some such place on some great
day, the common people would have parted on either side to make way
for him, and would have regarded him with a kind of worship--an
impulse to kneel before him. There, on the downs, his appearance was
almost grotesque in the dress he wore, made of some fabric intended
to last for ever, but now frayed, worn to threads in places, and
generally earth-coloured. A small old cap, earth-coloured too,
covered a portion of his big, round head, and his ancient, lumpish,
cracked and clouted boots were like the hoofs of some extinct large
sort of horse which he had found fossilised among the chalk hills.
He had but eleven shillings {230} a week, and could not afford to
spend much on dress. How he could get enough to eat was a puzzle; he
looked as if he could devour half of one of his muttons at a meal,
washed down with a bucket of beer, without hurt to his digestion. In
appearance he formed a startling contrast to the people around him:
they were in comparison a worn-out, weary-looking race, dim-eyed,
pale-faced, slow in their movements, as if they had lost all joy and
interest in life.
The sight of him taught me something I could not get from the books.
The intensity of life in his eyes and whole expression; the
rough-hewn face and rude, powerful form--rude but well balanced--the
vigour in his every movement, enabled me to realise better than
anything that history tells us what those men who came as strangers
to these shores in the fifth century were really like, and how they
could do what they did. They came, a few at a time, in open
row-boats, with nothing but their rude weapons in their hands, and by
pure muscular force, and because they were absolutely without fear
and without compassion, and were mentally but little above a herd of
buffaloes, they succeeded in conquering a great and populous country
with centuries of civilisation behind it.
Talking with him, I was not surprised to find him a discontented man.
He did not want to live in a town--he seemed not to know just what he
wanted, or having but few words he did not know how to say it; but
his mind was in a state of turmoil and revolt, and he could only
curse the head shepherd, {231} the bailiff, the farmer, and, to
finish up, the lord of the manor. Probably he soon cast away his
crook, and went off in search of some distant place, where he would
be permitted to discharge the energy that seethed and bubbled in
him--perhaps to bite the dust on the African veldt.
This, then, is one of the main facts to be noted in the blonde
Hampshire peasant--the great contrast between the small minority of
persons of the Anglo-Saxon and of the prevalent type. It was long
ago shown by Huxley that the English people generally are not Saxons
in the shape of the head, and in all Saxon England the divergence has
perhaps been greatest in this southern county. The oval-faced type,
as I have said, is less pronounced as we approach the borders of
Berkshire, and although the difference is not very great, it is quite
perceptible; the Berkshire people are rather nearer to the common
modified Saxon type of Oxfordshire and the Midlands generally.
[Sidenote: Dark Hampshire people]
In the southern half of Hampshire the dark-eyed, black-haired people
are almost as common as the blonde, and in some localities they are
actually in a majority. Visitors to the New Forest district often
express astonishment at the darkness and "foreign" appearance of the
people, and they sometimes form the mistaken idea that it is due to a
strong element of gipsy blood. The darkest Hampshire peasant is
always in shape of head and face the farthest removed from the gipsy
type.
Among the dark people there are two distinct {232} types, as there
are two in the blonde, and it will be understood that I only mean two
that are, in a measure, fixed and easily recognised types; for it
must always be borne in mind that, outside of these distinctive
forms, there is a heterogeneous crowd of persons of all shades and
shapes of face and of great variety in features. These two dark
types are: First, the small, narrow-headed person of brown skin,
crow-black hair, and black eyes; of this rarest and most interesting
type I shall speak last. Second, the person of average height,
slightly oval face, and dark eyes and hair. The accompanying
portrait of a young woman in a village on the Test is a good specimen
of this type. Now we find that this dark-haired, dark-eyed, and
often dark-skinned people are in stature, figure, shape of head, and
features exactly like the oval-faced blonde people already {233}
described. They are, light and dark, an intermediate type, and we
can only say that they are one and the same people, the outcome of a
long-mixed race which has crystallised in this form unlike any of its
originals; that the difference in colour is due to the fact that blue
and black in the iris and black and brown in the hair very seldom
mix, these colours being, as has been said, "mutually exclusive."
They persist when everything else, down to the bony framework, has
been modified and the original racial characters obliterated.
Nevertheless, we see that these mutually exclusive colours do mix in
some individuals both in the eyes and hair. In the grey-blue iris it
appears as a very slight pigmentation, in most cases round the pupil,
but in the hair it is more marked. Many, perhaps a majority, of the
dark-eyed people we are now considering have some warm brown colour
in their black hair; in members of the same family you will often
find raven-black hair and brownish-black hair; and sometimes in three
brothers or sisters you will find the two original colours, black and
brown, and the intermediate very dark or brownish-black hair.
[Illustration: A HAMPSHIRE GIRL]
The brunette of this oval-faced type is also, as we have seen,
deficient in colour, but, as a rule, she is more attractive than her
light-eyed sister. This may be due to the appearance of a greater
intensity of life in the dark eye; but it is also probable that there
is almost always some difference in disposition, that black or dark
pigment is correlated with a warmer, quicker, more sympathetic
nature. The anthropologists tell us that very slight differences in
intensity {234} of pigmentation may correspond to relatively very
great constitutional differences. One fact in reference to dark- and
light-coloured people which I came upon in Hampshire, struck me as
exceedingly curious, and has suggested the question: Is there in us,
or in some of us, very deep down, and buried out of sight, but still
occasionally coming to life and to the surface, an ancient feeling of
repulsion or racial antipathy between black and blonde? Are there
mental characteristics, too, that are "mutually exclusive"? Dark and
light are mixed in very many of us, but, as Huxley has said, the
constituents do not always rightly mix: as a rule, one side is
strongest. With the dark side strongest in me, I search myself, and
the only evidence I find of such a feeling is an ineradicable dislike
of the shallow frosty blue eye: it makes me shiver, and seems to
indicate a cold, petty, spiteful, and false nature. This may be
merely a fancy or association, the colour resembling that of the
frosty sky in winter. In many others the feeling appears to be more
definite. I know blue-eyed persons of culture, liberal-minded,
religious, charitable, lovers of all men, who declare that they
cannot regard dark-eyed persons as being on the same level, morally,
with the blue-eyed, and that they cannot dissociate black eyes from
wickedness. This, too, may be fancy or association. But here in
Hampshire I have been startled at some things I have heard spoken by
dark-eyed people about blondes. Not of the mitigated Hampshire
blonde, with that dimness in the colour of his skin, and eyes, and
hair, but of the more vivid {235} type with brighter blue eyes, and
brighter or more fiery hair, and the light skin to match. What I
have heard was to this effect:
"Perhaps it will be all right in the end--we hope it will: he says he
will marry her and give her a home. But you never know where you are
with a man of that colour--I'll believe it when I see it."
"Yes, he seems all right, and speaks well, and promises to pay the
money. But look at the colour of his eyes! No, I can't trust him."
"He's a very nice person, I have no doubt, but his eyes and hair are
enough for me," etc., etc.
Even this may be merely the effect of that enmity or suspicion with
which the stranger, or "foreigner," as he is called, is often
regarded in rural districts. The person from another county, or from
a distance, unrelated to anyone in the community, is always a
foreigner, and the foreign taint may descend to the children: may it
not be that in Hampshire anyone with bright colour in eyes, hair, and
skin is also by association regarded as a foreigner?
It remains to speak of the last of the four distinct types, the least
common and most interesting of all--the small, narrow-headed man with
very black hair, black eyes, and brown skin.
We are deeply indebted to the anthropologists who have, so to speak,
torn up the books of history, and are re-telling the story of man on
earth: we admire them for their patient industry, and because they
have gone bravely on with their self-appointed task, one peculiarly
difficult in this land of many {236} mixed races, heedless of the
scoffs of the learned or of those who derive their learning from
books alone, and mock at men whose documents are "bones and skins."
But we sometimes see that they (the anthropologists) have not yet
wholly emancipated themselves from the old written falsehoods when
they tell us, as they frequently do, that the Iberian in this country
survives only in the west and the north. They refer to the small,
swarthy Welshman; to the so-called "black Celt" in Ireland, west of
the Shannon; to the small black Yorkshireman of the Dales, and to the
small black Highlander; and the explanation is that in these
localities remnants of the dark men of the Iberian race who inhabited
Britain in the Neolithic period, were never absorbed by the
conquerors; that, in fact, like the small existing herds of
indigenous white cattle, they have preserved their peculiar physical
character down to the present time by remaining unmixed with the
surrounding blue-eyed people. But this type is not confined to these
isolated spots in the west and north; it is found here, there, and
everywhere, especially in the southern counties of England: you
cannot go about among the peasants of Hampshire, Wiltshire, and
Dorset without meeting examples of it, and here at all events, it
cannot be said that the ancient British people were not absorbed.
They, the remnant that escaped extermination, were absorbed by the
blue-eyed, broad-headed, tall men, the Goidels we suppose, who
occupied the country at the beginning of the Bronze Age; and the
absorbers were in their {237} turn absorbed by another blue-eyed
race; and these by still another or by others. The only explanation
appears to be that this type is persistent beyond all others, and
that a very little black blood, after being mixed and re-mixed with
blonde for centuries, even for hundreds of generations, may, whenever
the right conditions occur, reproduce the vanished type in its
original form.
Time brings about its revenges in many strange ways: we see that
there is a continuous and an increasing migration from Wales and the
Highlands into all the big towns in England, and this large and
growing Celtic element will undoubtedly have a great effect on the
population in time, making it less Saxon and more Celtic than it has
been these thousand years past and upwards. But in all the people,
Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Dane, or what not, there is that older
constituent--infinitely older and perhaps infinitely more persistent;
and this too, albeit in a subtler way, may be working in us to
recover its long-lost world. That it has gone far in this direction
in Spain, where the blue eye is threatened with extinction, and in
the greater portion, if not all, of France, there appears to be some
evidence to show. Here, where the Neolithic people were more nearly
exterminated and the remnant more completely absorbed, the return may
be very much slower. But when we find, as we do in Hampshire and
many other counties, that this constituent in the blood of the
people, after mixture for untold ages with so many other bloods of so
many {238} conquering races, has not only been potent to modify the
entire population, but is able to reproduce the old type in its
pristine purity; and when we almost invariably find that these
ancients born again are better men than those in whom other racial
characters predominate--more intelligent, versatile, adaptive,
temperate, and usually tougher and longer lived, it becomes possible
to believe that in the remote future--there are thousands of years
for this little black leaven to work--these islands will once more be
inhabited by a race of men of the Neolithic type.
In speaking of the character, physical and mental, of the men of
distinctly Iberian type, I must confess that I write only from my own
observation, and that I am hardly justified in founding general
statements on an acquaintance with a very limited number of persons.
My experience is that the men of this type have, generally speaking,
more character than their neighbours, and are certainly very much
more interesting. In recalling individuals of the peasant class who
have most attracted me, with whom I have become intimate and in some
instances formed lasting friendships, I find that of twenty-five to
thirty no fewer than nine are of this type. Of this number four are
natives of Hampshire, while the other five, oddly enough, belong to
five different counties. But I do not judge only from these few
individuals: a rambler about the country who seldom stays many days
in one village or spot cannot become intimately acquainted with the
cottagers. I judge partly from the few I know well, and partly from
a {239} very much larger number of individuals I have met casually or
have known slightly. What I am certain of is that the men of this
type, as a rule, differ mentally as widely as they do physically from
persons of other commoner types. The Iberian, as I know him in
southern and south-western England, is, as I have said, more
intelligent, or at all events, quicker; his brains are nimbler
although perhaps not so retentive or so practical as the slower
Saxon's. Apart from that point, he has more imagination, detachment,
sympathy--the qualities which attract and make you glad to know a man
and to form a friendship with him in whatever class he may be. Why
is it, one is sometimes asked, that one can often know and talk with
a Spaniard or Frenchman without any feeling of class distinction, any
consciousness of a barrier, although the man may be nothing but a
workman, while with English peasants this freedom and ease between
man and man is impossible? It is possible in the case of the man we
are considering, simply because of those qualities I have named,
which he shares with those of his own race on the Continent.
I have found that when one member of a family of mixed light and dark
blood is of the distinctly Iberian type, this one will almost
invariably take a peculiar and in some ways a superior position in
the circle. The woman especially exhibits a liveliness, humour, and
variety rare indeed among persons born in the peasant class. She
entertains the visitor, or takes the leading part, and her
slow-witted sisters {240} regard her with a kind of puzzled
admiration. They are sisters, yet unrelated: their very blood
differs in specific gravity, and their bodily differences correspond
to a mental and spiritual unlikeness. In my intercourse with people
in the southern counties I have sometimes been reminded of Huxley and
his account of his parents contained in a private letter to Havelock
Ellis. His father, he said, was a fresh-coloured, grey-eyed
Warwickshire man. "My mother came of Wiltshire people. Except for
being somewhat taller than the average type, she was a typical
example of the Iberian variety--dark, thin, rapid in all her ways,
and with the most piercing black eyes I have seen in anybody's head.
Mentally and physically (except in the matter of the beautiful eyes)
I am a piece of my mother, and except for my stature ... I should do
very well for a 'black Celt'--supposed to be the worst variety of
that type."
The contrast between persons of this type and Saxon or blonde has
often seemed to me greatest in childhood, since the blonde at that
period, even in Hampshire, is apt to be a delicate pink and white
whereas the individual of strongly-marked Iberian character is very
dark from birth. I will, to conclude this perhaps imprudent chapter,
give an instance in point.
[Sidenote: A dark village child]
Walking one day through the small rustic village of Martyr Worthy,
near Winchester, I saw a little girl of nine or ten sitting on the
grass at the side of the wide green roadway in the middle of the
village engaged in binding flowers round her hat. She was {241}
slim, and had a thin oval face, dark in colour as any dark Spanish
child, or any French child in the "black provinces"; and she had,
too, the soft melancholy black eye which is the chief beauty of the
Spanish, and her loose hair was intensely black. Even here where
dark eyes and dark hair are so common, her darkness was wonderful by
contrast with a second little girl of round, chubby, rosy face,
pale-yellowish hair, and wide-open blue surprised eyes, who stood by
her side watching her at her task. The flowers were lying in a heap
at her side; she had wound a long slender spray of traveller's joy
round her brown straw hat, and was now weaving in lychnis and
veronica, with other small red and blue blossoms, to improve her
garland. I found to my surprise on questioning her that she knew the
names of the flowers she had collected. An English village child,
but in that Spanish darkness and beauty, and in her grace and her
pretty occupation, how very un-English she seemed!
{242}