“BY the powers that guard innocence and celibacy,” soliloquized Kenelm
Chillingly, “but I have had a narrow escape! and had that amphibious
creature been in girl’s clothes instead of boy’s, when she intervened
like the deity of the ancient drama, I might have plunged my armorial
Fishes into hot water. Though, indeed, it is hard to suppose that a
young lady head-over-ears in love with Mr. Compton yesterday could have
consigned her affections to me to-day. Still she looked as if she could,
which proves either that one is never to trust a woman’s heart or never
to trust a woman’s looks. Decimus Roach is right. Man must never relax
his flight from the women, if he strives to achieve an ‘Approach to the
Angels.’”
These reflections were made by Kenelm Chillingly as, having turned his
back upon the town in which such temptations and trials had befallen
him, he took his solitary way along a footpath that wound through meads
and cornfields, and shortened by three miles the distance to a cathedral
town at which he proposed to rest for the night.
He had travelled for some hours, and the sun was beginning to slope
towards a range of blue hills in the west, when he came to the margin
of a fresh rivulet, overshadowed by feathery willows and the quivering
leaves of silvery Italian poplars. Tempted by the quiet and cool of
this pleasant spot, he flung himself down on the banks, drew from his
knapsack some crusts of bread with which he had wisely provided himself,
and, dipping them into the pure lymph as it rippled over its pebbly bed,
enjoyed one of those luxurious repasts for which epicures would exchange
their banquet in return for the appetite of youth. Then, reclining along
the bank, and crushing the wild thyme that grows best and sweetest in
wooded coverts, provided they be neighboured by water, no matter whether
in pool or rill, he resigned himself to that intermediate state between
thought and dream-land which we call “revery.” At a little distance he
heard the low still sound of the mower’s scythe, and the air came to his
brow sweet with the fragrance of new-mown hay.
He was roused by a gentle tap on the shoulder, and turning lazily round,
saw a good-humoured jovial face upon a pair of massive shoulders, and
heard a hearty and winning voice say,--
“Young man, if you are not too tired, will you lend a hand to get in
my hay? We are very short of hands, and I am afraid we shall have rain
pretty soon.”
Kenelm rose and shook himself, gravely contemplated the stranger, and
replied in his customary sententious fashion, “Man is born to help his
fellow-man,--especially to get in hay while the sun shines. I am at your
service.”
“That’s a good fellow, and I’m greatly obliged to you. You see I had
counted on a gang of roving haymakers, but they were bought up
by another farmer. This way;” and leading on through a gap in the
brushwood, he emerged, followed by Kenelm, into a large meadow,
one-third of which was still under the scythe, the rest being occupied
with persons of both sexes, tossing and spreading the cut grass. Among
the latter, Kenelm, stripped to his shirt-sleeves, soon found himself
tossing and spreading like the rest, with his usual melancholy
resignation of mien and aspect. Though a little awkward at first in
the use of his unfamiliar implements, his practice in all athletic
accomplishments bestowed on him that invaluable quality which is termed
“handiness,” and he soon distinguished himself by the superior activity
and neatness with which he performed his work. Something--it might be in
his countenance or in the charm of his being a stranger--attracted the
attention of the feminine section of haymakers, and one very pretty girl
who was nearer to him than the rest attempted to commence conversation.
“This is new to you,” she said smiling.
“Nothing is new to me,” answered Kenelm, mournfully. “But allow me to
observe that to do things well you should only do one thing at a time. I
am here to make hay and not conversation.”
“My!” said the girl, in amazed ejaculation, and turned off with a toss
of her pretty head.
“I wonder if that jade has got an uncle,” thought Kenelm. The farmer,
who took his share of work with the men, halting now and then to look
round, noticed Kenelm’s vigorous application with much approval, and at
the close of the day’s work shook him heartily by the hand, leaving a
two-shilling piece in his palm. The heir of the Chillinglys gazed on
that honorarium, and turned it over with the finger and thumb of the
left hand.
“Be n’t it eno’?” said the farmer, nettled.
“Pardon me,” answered Kenelm. “But, to tell you the truth, it is the
first money I ever earned by my own bodily labour; and I regard it with
equal curiosity and respect. But if it would not offend you, I would
rather that, instead of the money, you had offered me some supper; for I
have tasted nothing but bread and water since the morning.”
“You shall have the money and supper both, my lad,” said the farmer,
cheerily. “And if you will stay and help till I have got in the hay, I
dare say my good woman can find you a better bed than you’ll get in the
village inn; if, indeed, you can get one there at all.”
“You are very kind. But before I accept your hospitality excuse one
question: have you any nieces about you?”
“Nieces!” echoed the farmer, mechanically thrusting his hands into his
breeches-pockets as if in search of something there, “nieces about me!
what do you mean? Be that a newfangled word for coppers?”
“Not for coppers, though perhaps for brass. But I spoke without
metaphor. I object to nieces upon abstract principle, confirmed by the
test of experience.”
The farmer stared, and thought his new friend not quite so sound in his
mental as he evidently was in his physical conformation, but replied,
with a laugh, “Make yourself easy, then. I have only one niece, and she
is married to an iron-monger and lives in Exeter.”
On entering the farmhouse, Kenelm’s host conducted him straight into the
kitchen, and cried out, in a hearty voice, to a comely middle-aged dame,
who, with a stout girl, was intent on culinary operations, “Hulloa! old
woman, I have brought you a guest who has well earned his supper, for he
has done the work of two, and I have promised him a bed.”
The farmer’s wife turned sharply round. “He is heartily welcome to
supper. As to a bed,” she said doubtfully, “I don’t know.” But here her
eyes settled on Kenelm; and there was something in his aspect so
unlike what she expected to see in an itinerant haymaker, that she
involuntarily dropped a courtesy, and resumed, with a change of tone,
“The gentleman shall have the guest-room: but it will take a little time
to get ready; you know, John, all the furniture is covered up.”
“Well, wife, there will be leisure eno’ for that. He don’t want to go to
roost till he has supped.”
“Certainly not,” said Kenelm, sniffing a very agreeable odour.
“Where are the girls?” asked the farmer.
“They have been in these five minutes, and gone upstairs to tidy
themselves.”
“What girls?” faltered Kenelm, retreating towards the door. “I thought
you said you had no nieces.”
“But I did not say I had no daughters. Why, you are not afraid of them,
are you?”
“Sir,” replied Kenelm, with a polite and politic evasion of that
question, “if your daughters are like their mother, you can’t say that
they are not dangerous.”
“Come,” cried the farmer, looking very much pleased, while his dame
smiled and blushed, “come, that’s as nicely said as if you were
canvassing the county. ‘Tis not among haymakers that you learned
manners, I guess; and perhaps I have been making too free with my
betters.”
“What!” quoth the courteous Kenelm, “do you mean to imply that you were
too free with your shillings? Apologize for that, if you like, but I
don’t think you’ll get back the shillings. I have not seen so much of
this life as you have, but, according to my experience, when a man once
parts with his money, whether to his betters or his worsers, the chances
are that he’ll never see it again.”
At this aphorism the farmer laughed ready to kill himself, his wife
chuckled, and even the maid-of-all-work grinned. Kenelm, preserving his
unalterable gravity, said to himself,--
“Wit consists in the epigrammatic expression of a commonplace truth, and
the dullest remark on the worth of money is almost as sure of successful
appreciation as the dullest remark on the worthlessness of women.
Certainly I am a wit without knowing it.”
Here the farmer touched him on the shoulder--touched it, did not slap
it, as he would have done ten minutes before--and said,--
“We must not disturb the Missis or we shall get no supper. I’ll just go
and give a look into the cow-sheds. Do you know much about cows?”
“Yes, cows produce cream and butter. The best cows are those which
produce at the least cost the best cream and butter. But how the best
cream and butter can be produced at a price which will place them free
of expense on a poor man’s breakfast-table is a question to be settled
by a Reformed Parliament and a Liberal Administration. In the meanwhile
let us not delay the supper.”
The farmer and his guest quitted the kitchen and entered the farmyard.
“You are quite a stranger in these parts?”
“Quite.”
“You don’t even know my name?”
“No, except that I heard your wife call you John.”
“My name is John Saunderson.”
“Ah! you come from the North, then? That’s why you are so sensible and
shrewd. Names that end in ‘son’ are chiefly borne by the descendants of
the Danes, to whom King Alfred, Heaven bless him! peacefully assigned
no less than sixteen English counties. And when a Dane was called
somebody’s son, it is a sign that he was the son of a somebody.”
“By gosh! I never heard that before.”
“If I thought you had I should not have said it.”
“Now I have told you my name, what is yours?”
“A wise man asks questions and a fool answers them. Suppose for a moment
that I am not a fool.”
Farmer Saunderson scratched his head, and looked more puzzled than
became the descendant of a Dane settled by King Alfred in the north of
England.
“Dash it,” said he at last, “but I think you are Yorkshire too.”
“Man, who is the most conceited of all animals, says that he alone has
the prerogative of thought, and condemns the other animals to the meaner
mechanical operation which he calls instinct. But as instincts are
unerring and thoughts generally go wrong, man has not much to boast of
according to his own definition. When you say you think, and take it
for granted, that I am Yorkshire, you err. I am not Yorkshire. Confining
yourself to instinct, can you divine when we shall sup? The cows you are
about to visit divine to a moment when they shall be fed.”
Said the farmer, recovering his sense of superiority to the guest whom
he obliged with a supper, “In ten minutes.” Then, after a pause, and
in a tone of deprecation, as if he feared he might be thought fine, he
continued, “We don’t sup in the kitchen. My father did, and so did I
till I married; but my Bess, though she’s as good a farmer’s wife as
ever wore shoe-leather, was a tradesman’s daughter, and had been brought
up different. You see she was not without a good bit of money: but even
if she had been, I should not have liked her folks to say I had lowered
her; so we sup in the parlour.”
Quoth Kenelm, “The first consideration is to sup at all. Supper
conceded, every man is more likely to get on in life who would rather
sup in his parlour than his kitchen. Meanwhile, I see a pump; while you
go to the cows I will stay here and wash my hands of them.”
“Hold! you seem a sharp fellow, and certainly no fool. I have a son,
a good smart chap, but stuck up; crows it over us all; thinks no small
beer of himself. You’d do me a service, and him too, if you’d let him
down a peg or two.”
Kenelm, who was now hard at work at the pump-handle, only replied by a
gracious nod. But as he seldom lost an opportunity for reflection, he
said to himself, while he laved his face in the stream from the spout,
“One can’t wonder why every small man thinks it so pleasant to let down
a big one, when a father asks a stranger to let down his own son for
even fancying that he is not small beer. It is upon that principle in
human nature that criticism wisely relinquishes its pretensions as an
analytical science, and becomes a lucrative profession. It relies on the
pleasure its readers find in letting a man down.”