May 2nd.--A delicious evening;--bright sunshine; light summer air; a sky
almost cloudless; and a fresh yet delicate verdure on the hedges and
in the fields;--an evening that seems made for a visit to my
newly-discovered haunt, the mossy dell, one of the most beautiful spots
in the neighbourhood, which after passing, times out of number, the
field which it terminates, we found out about two months ago from the
accident of May's killing a rabbit there. May has had a fancy for the
place ever since; and so have I.
Thither accordingly we bend our way;--through the village;--up the
hill;--along the common;--past the avenue;--across the bridge; and by
the hill. How deserted the road is to-night! We have not seen a single
acquaintance, except poor blind Robert, laden with his sack of grass
plucked from the hedges, and the little boy that leads him. A singular
division of labour! Little Jem guides Robert to the spots where the long
grass grows, and tells him where it is most plentiful; and then the old
man cuts it close to the roots, and between them they fill the sack, and
sell the contents in the village. Half the cows in the street--for our
baker, our wheelwright, and our shoemaker has each his Alderney--owe the
best part of their maintenance to blind Robert's industry.
Here we are at the entrance of the cornfield which leads to the dell,
and which commands so fine a view of the Loddon, the mill, the great
farm, with its picturesque outbuildings, and the range of woody hills
beyond. It is impossible not to pause a moment at that gate, the
landscape, always beautiful, is so suited to the season and the
hour,--so bright, and gay, and spring-like. But May, who has the chance
of another rabbit in her pretty head, has galloped forward to the
dingle, and poor May, who follows me so faithfully in all my wanderings,
has a right to a little indulgence in hers. So to the dingle we go.
At the end of the field, which when seen from the road seems terminated
by a thick dark coppice, we come suddenly to the edge of a ravine, on
one side fringed with a low growth of alder, birch, and willow, on
the other mossy, turfy, and bare, or only broken by bright tufts of
blossomed broom. One or two old pollards almost conceal the winding road
that leads down the descent, by the side of which a spring as bright as
crystal runs gurgling along. The dell itself is an irregular piece of
broken ground, in some parts very deep, intersected by two or three
high banks of equal irregularity, now abrupt and bare, and rocklike,
now crowned with tufts of the feathery willow or magnificent old thorns.
Everywhere the earth is covered by short, fine turf, mixed with mosses,
soft, beautiful, and various, and embossed with the speckled leaves and
lilac flowers of the arum, the paler blossoms of the common orchis, the
enamelled blue of the wild hyacinth, so splendid in this evening light,
and large tufts of oxslips and cowslips rising like nosegays from the
short turf.
The ground on the other side of the dell is much lower than the
field through which we came, so that it is mainly to the labyrinthine
intricacy of these high banks that it owes its singular character of
wildness and variety. Now we seem hemmed in by those green cliffs, shut
out from all the world, with nothing visible but those verdant mounds
and the deep blue sky; now by some sudden turn we get a peep at an
adjoining meadow, where the sheep are lying, dappling its sloping
surface like the small clouds on the summer heaven. Poor harmless, quiet
creatures, how still they are! Some socially lying side by side; some
grouped in threes and fours; some quite apart. Ah! there are lambs
amongst them--pretty, pretty lambs--nestled in by their mothers. Soft,
quiet, sleepy things! Not all so quiet, though! There is a party of
these young lambs as wide awake as heart can desire; half a dozen of
them playing together, frisking, dancing, leaping, butting, and crying
in the young voice, which is so pretty a diminutive of the full-grown
bleat. How beautiful they are with their innocent spotted faces, their
mottled feet, their long curly tails, and their light flexible forms,
frolicking like so many kittens, but with a gentleness, an assurance of
sweetness and innocence, which no kitten, nothing that ever is to be a
cat, can have. How complete and perfect is their enjoyment of existence!
Ah! little rogues! your play has been too noisy; you have awakened your
mammas; and two or three of the old ewes are getting up; and one of them
marching gravely to the troop of lambs has selected her own, given her
a gentle butt, and trotted off; the poor rebuked lamb following meekly,
but every now and then stopping and casting a longing look at its
playmates; who, after a moment's awed pause, had resumed their gambols;
whilst the stately dame every now and then looked back in her turn, to
see that her little one was following. At last she lay down, and the
lamb by her side. I never saw so pretty a pastoral scene in my life.*
*I have seen one which affected me much more. Walking in the Church-lane
with one of the young ladies of the vicarage, we met a large flock of
sheep, with the usual retinue of shepherds and dogs. Lingering after
them and almost out of sight, we encountered a straggling ewe, now
trotting along, now walking, and every now and then stopping to look
back, and bleating. A little behind her came a lame lamb, bleating
occasionally, as if in answer to its dam, and doing its very best to
keep up with her. It was a lameness of both the fore-feet; the knees
were bent, and it seemed to walk on the very edge of the hoof--on
tip-toe, if I may venture such an expression. My young friend thought
that the lameness proceeded from original malformation, I am rather
of opinion that it was accidental, and that the poor creature was
wretchedly foot-sore. However that might be, the pain and difficulty
with which it took every step were not to be mistaken; and the distress
and fondness of the mother, her perplexity as the flock passed gradually
out of sight, the effort with which the poor lamb contrived to keep up
a sort of trot, and their mutual calls and lamentations were really
so affecting, that Ellen and I, although not at all lachrymose sort of
people, had much ado not to cry. We could not find a boy to carry the
lamb, which was too big for us to manage;--but I was quite sure that the
ewe would not desert it, and as the dark was coming on, we both trusted
that the shepherds on folding their flock would miss them and return for
them;--and so I am happy to say it proved.
Another turning of the dell gives a glimpse of the dark coppice by which
it is backed, and from which we are separated by some marshy, rushy
ground, where the springs have formed into a pool, and where the
moor-hen loves to build her nest. Ay, there is one scudding away now;--I
can hear her plash into the water, and the rustling of her wings amongst
the rushes. This is the deepest part of the wild dingle. How uneven
the ground is! Surely these excavations, now so thoroughly clothed with
vegetation, must originally have been huge gravel pits; there is no
other way of accounting for the labyrinth, for they do dig gravel in
such capricious meanders; but the quantity seems incredible. Well! there
is no end of guessing! We are getting amongst the springs, and must
turn back. Round this corner, where on ledges like fairy terraces the
orchises and arums grow, and we emerge suddenly on a new side of the
dell, just fronting the small homestead of our good neighbour Farmer
Allen.
This rustic dwelling belongs to what used to be called in this part
of the country 'a little bargain': thirty or forty acres, perhaps, of
arable land, which the owner and his sons cultivated themselves, whilst
the wife and daughters assisted in the husbandry, and eked out the
slender earnings by the produce of the dairy, the poultry yard, and the
orchard;--an order of cultivators now passing rapidly away, but in
which much of the best part of the English character, its industry,
its frugality, its sound sense, and its kindness might be found. Farmer
Allen himself is an excellent specimen, the cheerful venerable old man
with his long white hair, and his bright grey eye, and his wife is a
still finer. They have had a hard struggle to win through the world
and keep their little property undivided; but good management and good
principles, and the assistance afforded them by an admirable son, who
left our village a poor 'prentice boy, and is now a partner in a great
house in London have enabled them to overcome all the difficulties of
these trying times, and they are now enjoying the peaceful evenings of
a well-spent life as free from care and anxiety as their best friends
could desire.
Ah! there is Mr. Allen in the orchard, the beautiful orchard, with its
glorious gardens of pink and white, its pearly pear-blossoms and coral
apple-buds. What a flush of bloom it is! How brightly delicate
it appears, thrown into strong relief by the dark house and the
weather-stained barn, in this soft evening light! The very grass is
strewed with the snowy petals of the pear and the cherry. And there sits
Mrs. Allen, feeding her poultry, with her three little grand-daughters
from London, pretty fairies from three years old to five (only
two-and-twenty months elapsed between the birth of the eldest and the
youngest) playing round her feet.
Mrs. Allen, my dear Mrs. Allen, has been that rare thing a beauty, and
although she be now an old woman I had almost said that she is so
still. Why should I not say so? Nobleness of feature and sweetness of
expression are surely as delightful in age as in youth. Her face and
figure are much like those which are stamped indelibly on the memory of
every one who ever saw that grand specimen of woman--Mrs. Siddons. The
outline of Mrs. Allen's face is exactly the same; but there is more
softness, more gentleness, a more feminine composure in the eye and in
the smile. Mrs. Allen never played Lady Macbeth. Her hair, almost as
black as at twenty, is parted on her large fair forehead, and combed
under her exquisitely neat and snowy cap; a muslin neckerchief, a grey
stuff gown and a white apron complete the picture.
There she sits under an old elder-tree which flings its branches over
her like a canopy, whilst the setting sun illumines her venerable figure
and touches the leaves with an emerald light; there she sits, placid and
smiling, with her spectacles in her hand and a measure of barley on
her lap, into which the little girls are dipping their chubby hands
and scattering the corn amongst the ducks and chickens with unspeakable
glee. But those ingrates the poultry don't seem so pleased and thankful
as they ought to be; they mistrust their young feeders. All domestic
animals dislike children, partly from an instinctive fear of their
tricks and their thoughtlessness; partly, I suspect, from jealousy.
Jealousy seems a strange tragic passion to attribute to the inmates of
the basse cour,--but only look at that strutting fellow of a bantam cock
(evidently a favourite), who sidles up to his old mistress with an
air half affronted and half tender, turning so scornfully from the
barley-corns which Annie is flinging towards him, and say if he be not
as jealous as Othello? Nothing can pacify him but Mrs. Allen's notice
and a dole from her hand. See, she is calling to him and feeding him,
and now how he swells out his feathers, and flutters his wings, and
erects his glossy neck, and struts and crows and pecks, proudest and
happiest of bantams, the pet and glory of the poultry yard!
In the meantime my own pet May, who has all this while been peeping into
every hole, and penetrating every nook and winding of the dell, in hopes
to find another rabbit, has returned to my side, and is sliding her
snake-like head into my hand, at once to invite the caress which she
likes so well, and to intimate, with all due respect, that it is time to
go home. The setting sun gives the same warning; and in a moment we are
through the dell, the field, and the gate, past the farm and the mill,
and hanging over the bridge that crosses the Loddon river.
What a sunset! how golden! how beautiful! The sun just disappearing, and
the narrow liny clouds, which a few minutes ago lay like soft vapoury
streaks along the horizon, lighted up with a golden splendour that the
eye can scarcely endure, and those still softer clouds which floated
above them wreathing and curling into a thousand fantastic forms,
as thin and changeful as summer smoke, now defined and deepened into
grandeur, and edged with ineffable, insufferable light! Another minute
and the brilliant orb totally disappears, and the sky above grows every
moment more varied and more beautiful as the dazzling golden lines are
mixed with glowing red and gorgeous purple, dappled with small dark
specks, and mingled with such a blue as the egg of the hedge-sparrow. To
look up at that glorious sky, and then to see that magnificent picture
reflected in the clear and lovely Loddon water, is a pleasure never to
be described and never forgotten. My heart swells and my eyes fill as
I write of it, and think of the immeasurable majesty of nature, and the
unspeakable goodness of God, who has spread an enjoyment so pure, so
peaceful, and so intense before the meanest and the lowliest of His
creatures.