September 26th.--One of those delicious autumnal days, when the air, the
sky, and the earth seem lulled into a universal calm, softer and milder
even than May. We sallied forth for a walk, in a mood congenial to the
weather and the season, avoiding, by mutual consent, the bright
and sunny common, and the gay highroad, and stealing through shady,
unfrequented lanes, where we were not likely to meet any one,--not even
the pretty family procession which in other years we used to contemplate
with so much interest--the father, mother, and children, returning from
the wheat-field, the little ones laden with bristling close-tied bunches
of wheat-ears, their own gleanings, or a bottle and a basket which had
contained their frugal dinner, whilst the mother would carry her babe
hushing and lulling it, and the father and an elder child trudged after
with the cradle, all seeming weary and all happy. We shall not see such
a procession as this to-day; for the harvest is nearly over, the fields
are deserted, the silence may almost be felt. Except the wintry notes
of the redbreast, nature herself is mute. But how beautiful, how gentle,
how harmonious, how rich! The rain has preserved to the herbage all
the freshness and verdure of spring, and the world of leaves has lost
nothing of its midsummer brightness, and the harebell is on the banks,
and the woodbine in the hedges, and the low furze, which the lambs
cropped in the spring, has burst again into its golden blossoms.
All is beautiful that the eye can see; perhaps the more beautiful for
being shut in with a forest-like closeness. We have no prospect in
this labyrinth of lanes, cross-roads, mere cart-ways, leading to the
innumerable little farms into which this part of the parish is divided.
Up-hill or down, these quiet woody lanes scarcely give us a peep at the
world, except when, leaning over a gate, we look into one of the small
enclosures, hemmed in with hedgerows, so closely set with growing
timber, that the meady opening looks almost like a glade in a wood;
or when some cottage, planted at a corner of one of the little greens
formed by the meeting of these cross-ways, almost startles us by the
unexpected sight of the dwellings of men in such a solitude. But that
we have more of hill and dale, and that our cross-roads are excellent in
their kind, this side of our parish would resemble the description given
of La Vendee, in Madame Laroche-Jacquelin's most interesting book.* I am
sure if wood can entitle a country to be called Le Bocage, none can
have a better right to the name. Even this pretty snug farmhouse on
the hillside, with its front covered with the rich vine, which goes
wreathing up to the very top of the clustered chimney, and its sloping
orchard full of fruit--even this pretty quiet nest can hardly peep out
of its leaves. Ah! they are gathering in the orchard harvest. Look at
that young rogue in the old mossy apple-tree--that great tree, bending
with the weight of its golden-rennets--see how he pelts his little
sister beneath with apples as red and as round as her own cheeks, while
she, with her outstretched frock, is trying to catch them, and laughing
and offering to pelt again as often as one bobs against her; and look at
that still younger imp, who, as grave as a judge, is creeping on
hands and knees under the tree, picking up the apples as they fall so
deedily,** and depositing them so honestly in the great basket on the
grass, already fixed so firmly and opened so widely, and filled almost
to overflowing by the brown rough fruitage of the golden-rennet's next
neighbour the russeting; and see that smallest urchin of all, seated
apart in infantine state on the turfy bank, with that toothsome piece
of deformity a crumpling in each hand, now biting from one sweet, hard,
juicy morsel and now from another--Is not that a pretty English picture?
And then, farther up the orchard, that bold hardy lad, the eldest born,
who has scaled (Heaven knows how) the tall, straight upper branch
of that great pear-tree, and is sitting there as securely and as
fearlessly, in as much real safety and apparent danger, as a sailor on
the top-mast. Now he shakes the tree with a mighty swing that brings
down a pelting shower of stony bergamots, which the father gathers
rapidly up, whilst the mother can hardly assist for her motherly fear--a
fear which only spurs the spirited boy to bolder ventures. Is not that a
pretty picture? And they are such a handsome family too, the Brookers.
I do not know that there is any gipsy blood, but there is the true
gipsy complexion, richly brown, with cheeks and lips so red, black
hair curling close to their heads in short crisp rings, white shining
teeth--and such eyes!--That sort of beauty entirely eclipses your mere
roses and lilies. Even Lizzy, the prettiest of fair children, would look
poor and watery by the side of Willy Brooker, the sober little personage
who is picking up the apples with his small chubby hands, and filling
the basket so orderly, next to his father the most useful man in the
field. 'Willy!' He hears without seeing; for we are quite hidden by
the high bank, and a spreading hawthorn bush that overtops it, though
between the lower branches and the grass we have found a convenient
peep-hole. 'Willy!' The voice sounds to him like some fairy dream, and
the black eyes are raised from the ground with sudden wonder, the long
silky eyelashes thrown back till they rest on the delicate brow, and a
deeper blush is burning on those dark cheeks, and a smile is dimpling
about those scarlet lips. But the voice is silent now, and the little
quiet boy, after a moment's pause, is gone coolly to work again. He
is indeed a most lovely child. I think some day or other he must marry
Lizzy; I shall propose the match to their respective mammas. At present
the parties are rather too young for a wedding--the intended bridegroom
being, as I should judge, six, or thereabout, and the fair bride
barely five,--but at least we might have a betrothment after the royal
fashion,--there could be no harm in that. Miss Lizzy, I have no doubt,
would be as demure and coquettish as if ten winters more had gone over
her head, and poor Willy would open his innocent black eyes, and wonder
what was going forward. They would be the very Oberon and Titania of the
village, the fairy king and queen.
*An almost equally interesting account of that very peculiar and
interesting scenery, may be found in The Maid of La Vendee, an English
novel, remarkable for its simplicity and truth of painting, written by
Mrs. Le Noir, the daughter of Christopher Smart, an inheritrix of much
of his talent. Her works deserve to be better known.
**'Deedily,'--I am not quite sure that this word is good English; but it
is genuine Hampshire, and is used by the most correct of female writers,
Miss Austen. It means (and it is no small merit that it has no exact
synonym) anything done with a profound and plodding attention, an action
which engrosses all the powers of mind and body.
Ah! here is the hedge along which the periwinkle wreathes and twines so
profusely, with its evergreen leaves shining like the myrtle, and its
starry blue flowers. It is seldom found wild in this part of England;
but, when we do meet with it, it is so abundant and so welcome,--the
very robin-redbreast of flowers, a winter friend. Unless in those
unfrequent frosts which destroy all vegetation, it blossoms from
September to June, surviving the last lingering crane's-bill,
forerunning the earliest primrose, hardier even than the mountain
daisy,--peeping out from beneath the snow, looking at itself in the ice,
smiling through the tempests of life, and yet welcoming and enjoying the
sunbeams. Oh, to be like that flower!
The little spring that has been bubbling under the hedge all along
the hillside, begins, now that we have mounted the eminence and are
imperceptibly descending, to deviate into a capricious variety of clear
deep pools and channels, so narrow and so choked with weeds, that a
child might overstep them. The hedge has also changed its character. It
is no longer the close compact vegetable wall of hawthorn, and maple,
and brier-roses, intertwined with bramble and woodbine, and crowned with
large elms or thickly-set saplings. No! the pretty meadow which rises
high above us, backed and almost surrounded by a tall coppice, needs
no defence on our side but its own steep bank, garnished with tufts of
broom, with pollard oaks wreathed with ivy, and here and there with long
patches of hazel overhanging the water. 'Ah, there are still nuts on
that bough!' and in an instant my dear companion, active and eager and
delighted as a boy, has hooked down with his walking-stick one of the
lissome hazel stalks, and cleared it of its tawny clusters, and in
another moment he has mounted the bank, and is in the midst of the
nuttery, now transferring the spoil from the lower branches into that
vast variety of pockets which gentlemen carry about them, now bending
the tall tops into the lane, holding them down by main force, so that
I might reach them and enjoy the pleasure of collecting some of the
plunder myself. A very great pleasure he knew it would be. I doffed my
shawl, tucked up my flounces, turned my straw bonnet into a basket, and
began gathering and scrambling--for, manage it how you may, nutting is
scrambling work,--those boughs, however tightly you may grasp them by
the young fragrant twigs and the bright green leaves, will recoil
and burst away; but there is a pleasure even in that: so on we go,
scrambling and gathering with all our might and all our glee. Oh, what
an enjoyment! All my life long I have had a passion for that sort of
seeking which implies finding (the secret, I believe, of the love of
field-sports, which is in man's mind a natural impulse)--therefore I
love violeting,--therefore, when we had a fine garden, I used to love
to gather strawberries, and cut asparagus, and above all, to collect
the filberts from the shrubberies: but this hedgerow nutting beats that
sport all to nothing. That was a make-believe thing, compared with
this; there was no surprise, no suspense, no unexpectedness--it was as
inferior to this wild nutting, as the turning out of a bag-fox is to
unearthing the fellow, in the eyes of a staunch foxhunter.
Oh, what enjoyment this nut-gathering is! They are in such abundance,
that it seems as if there were not a boy in the parish, nor a young man,
nor a young woman,--for a basket of nuts is the universal tribute of
country gallantry; our pretty damsel Harriet has had at least half a
dozen this season; but no one has found out these. And they are so full
too, we lose half of them from over-ripeness; they drop from the socket
at the slightest motion. If we lose, there is one who finds. May is as
fond of nuts as a squirrel, and cracks the shell and extracts the kernel
with equal dexterity. Her white glossy head is upturned now to watch
them as they fall. See how her neck is thrown back like that of a swan,
and how beautifully her folded ears quiver with expectation, and how her
quick eye follows the rustling noise, and her light feet dance and pat
the ground, and leap up with eagerness, seeming almost sustained in the
air, just as I have seen her when Brush is beating a hedgerow, and she
knows from his questing that there is a hare afoot. See, she has caught
that nut just before it touched the water; but the water would have
been no defence,--she fishes them from the bottom, she delves after them
amongst the matted grass--even my bonnet--how beggingly she looks at
that! 'Oh, what a pleasure nutting is!--Is it not, May? But the pockets
are almost full, and so is the basket-bonnet, and that bright watch the
sun says it is late; and after all it is wrong to rob the poor boys--is
it not, May?'--May shakes her graceful head denyingly, as if she
understood the question--'And we must go home now--must we not? But we
will come nutting again some time or other--shall we not, my May?'