The pride of rustic life is the child's form of caste-feeling. The
country child is the aristocrat; he has _des relations suivies_ with
game-keepers, nay, with the most interesting mole-catchers. He has a
perfectly self-conscious joy that he is not in a square or a suburb. No
essayist has so much feeling against terraces and villas.
As for imitation country--the further suburb--it is worse than town; it
is a place to walk in; and the tedium of a walk to a child's mind is
hardly measurable by a man, who walks voluntarily, with his affairs to
think about, and his eyes released, by age, from the custom of perpetual
observation. The child, compelled to walk, is the only unresting
observer of the asphalt, the pavement, the garden gates and railings, and
the tedious people. He is bored as he will never be bored when a man.
He is at his best where, under the welcome stress and pressure of
abundant crops, he is admitted to the labours of men and women, neither
in mere play nor in the earnest of the hop-field for the sake of his
little gains. On the steep farm lands of the Canton de Vaud, where maize
and grapes are carried in the _botte_, so usually are children expected
in the field that _bottes_ are made to the shape of a back and arms of
five years old. Some, made for harvesters of those years, can hold no
more than a single yellow ear of maize or two handfuls of beans. You may
meet the same little boy with the repetitions of this load a score of
times in the morning. Moreover the Swiss mother has always a fit sense
of what is due to that labourer. When the plums are gathered, for
instance, she bakes in the general village oven certain round open tarts
across which her arm can hardly reach. No plum tarts elsewhere are
anything but dull in comparison with these. There is, besides, the first
loaf from the new flour, brown from the maize and white from the wheat.
Nor can a day of potato-gathering be more appropriately ended than with a
little fire built afield and the baking of some of the harvest under the
wood ashes. Vintaging needs no praises, nor does apple-gathering; even
when the apples are for cider, they are never acrid enough to baffle a
child's tooth.
Yet even those children who are so unlucky as never to have worked in a
real field, but have been compelled to vary their education with nothing
but play, are able to comfort themselves with the irregular harvest of
the hedges. They have no little hand in the realities of cultivation,
but wild growths give them blackberries. Pale are the joys of nutting
beside those of haymaking, but at least they are something.
Harvests apart, Spring, not Autumn, should make a childhood of memories
for the future. In later Autumn, life is speeding away, ebbing, taking
flight, a fugitive, taking disguises, hiding in the dry seed, retreating
into the dark. The daily progress of things in Spring is for children,
who look close. They know the way of moss and the roots of ivy, they
breathe the breath of earth immediately, direct. They have a sense of
place, of persons, and of the past that may be remembered but cannot be
recaptured. Adult accustomed eyes cannot see what a child's eye sees of
the personality of a person; to the child the accidents of voice and look
are charged with separate and unique character. Such a sense of place as
he got in a day within some forest, or in a week by some lake, so that a
sound or odour can bring it back in after days, with a shock--even such a
sense of single personality does a little watchful girl get from the
accents, the turns of the head, the habits of the hands, the presence of
a woman. Not all places, nor all persons, are so quick with the
expression of themselves; the child knows the difference. As for places
that are so loaded, and that breathe so, the child discerns them
passionately.
A travelled child multiplies these memories and has them in their
variety. His heart has room for many places that have the spirit of
place. The glacier may be forgotten, but some little tract of pasture
that has taken wing to the head of a mountain valley, a field that has
soared up a pass unnamed, will become a memory, in time, sixty years old.
That is a fortunate child who has tasted country life in places far
apart, who has helped, followed the wheat to the threshing-floor of a
Swiss village, stumbled after a plough of Virgil's shape in remoter
Tuscan hills, and gleaned after a vintage. You cannot suggest pleasanter
memories than those of the vintage, for the day when the wine will be
old.