and as pleasant to look upon. The petal of the buttercup has an enamel
of gold; with the nail you may scrape it off, leaving still a yellow
ground, but not reflecting the sunlight like the outer layer. From the
centre the golden pollen covers the fingers with dust like that from
the wing of a butterfly. In the bunches of grass and by the gateways
the germander speedwell looks like tiny specks of blue stolen, like
Prometheus' fire, from the summer sky. When the mowing-grass is ripe
the heads of sorrel are so thick and close that at a little distance
the surface seems as if sunset were always shining red upon it. From
the spotted orchis leaves in April to the honeysuckle-clover in June,
and the rose and the honeysuckle itself, the meadow has changed in
nothing that delights the eye. The draining, indeed, has made it more
comfortable to walk about on, and some of the rougher grasses have gone
from the furrows, diminishing at the same time the number of cardamine
flowers; but of these there are hundreds by the side of every tiny
rivulet of water, and the aquatic grasses flourish in every ditch. The
meadow-farmers, dairymen, have not grubbed many hedges--only a few, to
enlarge the fields, too small before, by throwing two into one. So that
hawthorn and blackthorn, ash and willow, with their varied hues of
green in spring, briar and bramble, with blackberries and hips later
on, are still there as in the old, old time. Bluebells, violets,
cowslips--the same old favourite flowers--may be found on the mounds or
sheltered near by. The meadow-farmers have dealt mercifully with the
hedges, because they know that for shade in heat and shelter in storm
the cattle resort to them. The hedges--yes, the hedges, the very
synonym of Merry England--are yet there, and long may they remain.
Without hedges England would not be England. Hedges, thick and high,
and full of flowers, birds, and living creatures, of shade and flecks
of sunshine dancing up and down the bark of the trees--I love their
very thorns. You do not know how much there is in the hedges.
We have still the woods, with here and there a forest, the beauty of
the hills, and the charm of winding brooks. I never see roads, or
horses, men, or anything when I get beside a brook. There is the grass,
and the wheat, the clouds, the delicious sky, and the wind, and the
sunlight which falls on the heart like a song. It is the same, the very
same, only I think it is brighter and more lovely now than it was
twenty years ago.
Along the footpath we travel slowly; you cannot walk fast very long in
a footpath; no matter how rapidly at first, you soon lessen your pace,
and so country people always walk slowly. The stiles--how stupidly they
are put together. For years and years every one who has passed them, as
long as man can remember, has grumbled at them; yet there they are
still, with the elms reaching high above, and cows gazing over--cows
that look so powerful, but so peacefully yield the way. They are a
better shape than the cattle of the ancient time, less lanky, and with
fewer corners; the lines, to talk in yachtsman's language, are finer.
Roan is a colour that contrasts well with meadows and hedges. The
horses are finer, both cart-horse and nag. Approaching the farmsteads,
there are hay-ricks, but there are fewer corn-ricks. Instead of the
rows on rows, like the conical huts of a savage town, there are but a
few, sometimes none. So many are built in the fields and threshed there
"to rights," as the bailiff would say. It is not needful to have them
near home or keep them, now the threshing-machine has stayed the flail
and emptied the barns. Perhaps these are the only two losses to those
who look at things and mete them with the eye--the corn-ricks and the
barns. The corn-ricks were very characteristic, but even now you may
see plenty if you look directly after harvest. The barns are going by
degrees, passing out of the life of farming; let us hope that some of
them will be converted into silos, and so saved.
At the farmsteads themselves there are considerations for and against.
On the one hand, the house and the garden is much tidier, less uncouth;
there are flowers, such as geraniums, standard roses, those that are
favourites in towns; and the unsightly and unhealthy middens and pools
of muddy water have disappeared from beside the gates. But the old
flowers and herbs are gone, or linger neglected in corners, and somehow
the gentle touch of time has been effaced. The house has got a good
deal away from farming. It is on the farm, but disconnected. It is a
residence, not a farmhouse. Then you must consider that it is more
healthy, sweeter, and better for those who live in it. From a little
distance the old effect is obtainable. One thing only I must protest
against, and that is the replacing of tiles with slates. The old red
tiles of the farmhouses are as natural as leaves; they harmonise with
the trees and the hedges, the grass, the wheat, and the ricks. But
slates are wrong. In new houses, even farmhouses, it does not matter so
much; the owners cannot be found fault with for using the advantages of
modern times. On old houses where tiles were once, to put slates is an
offence, nothing less. Every one who passes exclaims against it. Tiles
tone down and become at home; they nestle together, and look as if you
could be happily drowsy and slumber under them. They are to a house
what leaves are to a tree, and leaves turn reddish or brown in the
autumn. Upon the whole, with the exception of the slates--the hateful
slates--the farmsteads are improved, for they have lost a great deal
that was uncouth and even repulsive, which was slurred over in old
pictures or omitted, but which was there.
The new cottages are ugly with all their ornamentation; their false
gables, impossible porches, absurd windows, are distinctly repellent.
They are an improvement in a sanitary sense, and we are all glad of
that, but we cannot like the buildings. They are of no style or time;
only one thing is certain about them--they are _not_ English.
Fortunately there are plenty of old cottages, hundreds of them (they
show little or no sign of disappearing), and these can be chosen
instead. The villages are to outward appearance much as they used to
be, but the people are very different. In manners, conversation, and
general tone there is a great change. It is, indeed, the people who
have altered more than the surface of the country. Hard as the farmer
may work, and plough and sow with engine and drill, the surface of the
land does not much vary; but the farmer himself and the farmer's man
are quite another race to what they were. Perhaps it was from this fact
that the impression grew up that modern agriculture has polished away
all the distinctive characteristics of the country. But it has not done
so any more than it has removed the hills. The truth is, as I have
endeavoured to explain, innovations so soon become old in the fields.
The ancient earth covers them with her own hoar antiquity, and their
newness disappears. They have already become so much a part of the life
of the country that it seems as if they had always been there, so
easily do they fit in, so easily does the eye accept them.
Intrinsically there is nothing used in modern agriculture less
symmetrical than what was previously employed. The flails were the
simplest of instruments, and were always seen with the same
accompaniment--the interior of a barn. The threshing-machine is
certainly not less interesting; it works in the open air, often with
fine scenic surroundings, and the number of people with it impart
vivacity. In reaping with the reaping-hook there were more men in the
wheat, but the reaping-machine is not without colour. Scythes are not
at all pleasant things; the mowing-machine is at least no worse. As for
the steam-plough, it is very interesting to watch. All these fit in
with trees and hedges, fields and woods, as well, and in some cases in
a more striking manner than the old instruments. The surface of the
ground presents more varied colours even than before, and the sunlight
produces rich effects. Nor have all the ancient aspects disappeared as
supposed--quite the reverse. In the next field to the steam-plough the
old ploughs drawn by horses may be seen at work, and barns still stand,
and the old houses. In hill districts oxen are yet yoked to the plough,
the scythe and reaping-hook are often seen at work, and, in short, the
old and the new so shade and blend together that you can hardly say
where one begins and the other ends. That there are many, very many
things concerning agriculture and country life whose disappearance is
to be regretted I have often pointed out, and having done so, I feel
that I can with the more strength affirm that in its natural beauty the
country is as lovely now as ever.
It is, I venture to think, a mistake on the part of some who depict
country scenes on canvas that they omit these modern aspects, doubtless
under the impression that to admit them would impair the pastoral scene
intended to be conveyed. So many pictures and so many illustrations
seem to proceed upon the assumption that steam-plough and
reaping-machine do not exist, that the landscape contains nothing but
what it did a hundred years ago. These sketches are often beautiful,
but they lack the force of truth and reality. Every one who has been
fifty miles into the country, if only by rail, knows while looking at
them that they are not real. You feel that there is something wanting,
you do not know what. That something is the hard, perhaps angular fact
which at once makes the sky above it appear likewise a fact. Why omit
fifty years from the picture? That is what it usually means--fifty
years left out; and somehow we feel as we gaze that these fields and
these skies are not of our day. The actual fields, the actual machines,
the actual men and women (how differently dressed to the conventional
pictorial costumes!) would prepare the mind to see and appreciate the
colouring, the design, the beauty--what, for lack of a better
expression, may be called the soul of the picture--far more than
forgotten, and nowadays even impossible accessories. For our sympathy
is not with them, but with the things of our own time.
VILLAGE MINERS
"Right so, the hunter takes his pony which has been trained for the
purpose, and stalks the deer behind him; the pony feeds towards the
herd, so that they do not mind his approach, and when within a hundred
yards, the hunter kneels down in the grass and fixes his iron rest or
fork in the ground. He rests his Winchester rifle in the fork, and aims
under the pony (which stands quite still) at his game. He generally
kills one dead at the first shot, and wounds two or three more, firing
rapidly after the first discharge so as to get as many shots as
possible before the herd is out of range." So writes a friend in the
wilds of Texas, adding that the hides fetch a few dollars. "Right so,
departed Sir Launcelot."... "Right so, Sir Launcelot, his father,
dressed his spear."... "Right so, he heard a voice that said;"--so runs
the phrase in the "Mort d'Arthur," that ancient history of the Round
Table, which was published nearly four hundred years ago. The
coincidence of phrase indicates some resemblance in the circumstances,
though so wide apart in time and distance. In England, in those old
days, men lived in the woods and forests--out-of-doors--and were
occupied with manual works. They had no opportunities of polishing
their discourse, or their literary compositions. At this hour, in
remote parts of the great continent of America, the pioneers of modern
civilisation may be said to live amid medieval surroundings. The vast
forests and endless prairies give a romance to common things. Sometimes
pathos and sometimes humour arises in the log-cabin, and when the
history of these simple but deeply human incidents comes to be told in
this country, we are moved by the strange piquancy of event and
language. From the new sounds and scenes, these Anglo-Saxons hewing a
way through pine and hemlock now, as their ancestors hewed a way into
England, have added fresh words and phrases to our common tongue. These
words are not slang, they are pure primeval language. They express the
act, or the scene, or the circumstance, as exactly as if it was painted
in sound. For instance, the word "crack" expresses the noise of a
rifle; say "crack," and you have the very sound; say "detonation," and
it gives no ear-picture at all. Such a word is "ker-chunk." Imagine a
huge log of timber falling from rock to rock, or a wounded opossum out
of a tree, the word expresses the sound. There are scores of such
examples, and it is these pure primitive words which put so much force
into the narratives of American pathos and humour.
Now, the dwellers in our own villages and country places in their way
make use of just such expressions, that is, of words which afford the
ear a picture of the act or circumstance, hieroglyphs of sound, and
often, both in language and character, exhibit a close parallelism with
the Californian miners. Country people say "fall" for autumn; "fall" is
the usual American term for that season, and fall is most appropriate
for the downward curve of time, the descent of the leaf. A slender slip
of womanhood in the undeveloped period is alluded to in the villages as
a "slickit" of a girl. "Slickit" means thin, slender, a piece that
might be whittled off a stick with a knife, not a shaving, for a
shaving curls, but a "slickit," a long thin slice. If any one be
carving awkwardly with the left wrist doubled under, the right arm
angularly extended, and the knife sawing at a joint, our village miners
and country Californians call it "cack-" or "cag-handed." Cag-handed is
worse than back-handed; it means awkward, twisted, and clumsy. You may
see many a cag-handed person hacking at a fowl.
Hamlet folk are very apt to look a gift horse in the mouth, and if any
one should receive a present not so large as expected, it would be
contemptuously described as a "footy" little thing. "Footy" pronounced
with a sneering expression of countenance conveys a sense of
despicableness, even to those who do not know its exact definition,
which may be taken as mean. Suppose a bunch of ripe nuts high up and
almost out of reach; by dint of pressing into the bushes, pulling at
the bough, and straining on tiptoe, you may succeed in "scraambing" it
down. "Scraambing," or "scraambed," with a long accent on the aa,
indicates the action of stretching and pulling downwards. Though
somewhat similar in sound, it has no affinity with scramble; people
scramble for things which have been thrown on the ground. In getting
through hedges the thorns are apt to "limm" one's clothes, tearing a
jagged hole in the coat. Country children are always "limming" their
clothes to pieces; "limm," or "limb," expresses a ragged tear.
Recently, fashion set the example of ladies having their hair shorn as
short as men. It is quite common to see young ladies, the backs of
whose heads are polled, all the glory of hair gone, no plait, no twist,
but all cut close and somewhat rough. If a village Californian were to
see this he would say, "they got their hair hogged off." "Hogged" means
cut off short so as to stand up like bristles. Ponies often have hogs'
manes; all the horses in the Grecian sculpture have their manes hogged.
In bitter winter weather the servants in the dairies who have much to
do with buckets of water, and spend the morning in splashing--for
dairies need much of that kind of thing--sometimes find that the drops
have frozen as they walk, and discover that their aprons are fringed
with "daglets," _i.e._ icicles. Thatched roofs are always hung with
"daglets" in frost; thatch holds a certain amount of moisture, as of
mist, and this drips during the day and so forms stalactites of ice,
often a foot or more in length. "Clout" is a "dictionary word," a knock
on the head, but it is pronounced differently here; they say a "clue"
in the head. Stuttering and stammering each express well-known
conditions of speech, but there is another not recognised in dictionary
language. If a person has been made a butt of, laughed at, joked, and
tormented till he hesitates and fumbles as it were with his words, he
is said to be in a state of "hacka." "Hacka" is to have to think a
minute before he can say what he wants to.
"Simmily" is a word of little interest, being evidently a mere
provincialism and distortion of "seemingly," as "summat" of
"something," or "somewhat," indifferently.
Occasionally a person is seized with a giggling fit, laughs on the
least, or without any, provocation--a rather idiotic state--which he is
quite conscious of but cannot stop. Presently some one will ask, "Have
you found a wicker's nest?" which is a biting sarcasm, though the
precise meaning seems uncertain, unless it bears some relation to
mare's nest. Mares wicker, so do goats; giggling is wickering. The
first work a boy does is to go out with a clapper, or his own strong
voice, to scare birds from the corn all day; this we call bird-keeping,
but the lads themselves, with an appreciation of the other side of the
case, call it bird-starving. Forage is often used in a general sense of
food, or in the more particular sense of green food, as clover, or
vetches. Fodder, on the other hand, indicates dry food, such as hay;
the labourers go twice a day in winter to fodder the cattle, that is,
to carry them their hay. Many of these labourers before they start out
to work, in their own words, "fodder" their boots. Some fine soft hay
is pushed into the boots, forming a species of sock. Should either of
them have a clumsy pair, they say his boots are like a seed-lip, which
is a vessel like a basket used in sowing corn, and would be a very
loose fit. They have not yet forgotten the ancient superstition about
Easter Sunday, and the girls will not go out without a new ribbon at
least; they must have something new on that day, if the merest trifle.
The backwoodsmen have found out many ways of curing cuts, wounds,
bruises and injuries, rough methods, but effectual, and use the herbs
and leaves much as their English forefathers did a century ago. For the
most part in villages the knowledge and use of herbs has died out, and
there are not many who resort to them. Elder-flower ointment, however,
keeps its ground, and is, I think, still made for sale in the shops of
towns. But the true country elder-flower ointment contains a little
piece of adder's-tongue fern, which is believed to confer magical
virtue. So curious a plant may naturally have had a mysterious value
attached to it in old times. It is the presence of this touch of
home-lore in the recipe which makes the product so different from the
"ointment of the apothecary," manufactured by scale and weight and
prosaic rule. Upon some roofs the houseleek still grows, though it is
now often torn away as injurious. Where it grows it is usually on
outhouses attached to the main building, sloping lean-tos. It does not
present so glowing an appearance as the stonecrop, which now and then
flourishes on houses, and looks like a brilliant golden cushion against
the red tiles. The houseleek, however, is a singular plant, worthy of
examination; it has an old-world look, as if it had survived beyond its
date into the nineteenth century. It hides in odd places and gables
like a relic of witchcraft, and a black cat and an aged woman with a
crutch-handled stick would be its appropriate owner. The houseleek is
still used for the cure of wounds and cuts. A leaf--the leaves are
rather like portions of the plant than mere leaves--is bruised to pulp,
and the juice and some of the pulp mixed with cream. They say it is
efficacious. They call it "silgreen." In old English singreen means
evergreen. Silgreen and singreen seem close congeners. Possibly sil or
sin may be translated "through" as much as "ever," for the leaf of the
plant is thick, and green all through, if broken like a tough cake. I
think I would rather use it than the tobacco juice which the mowers and
reapers are now so fond of applying to the cuts they frequently get.
They appear to have quite forsaken the ancient herbal remedies, as the
sickle-herb, knotted figwort, and so on. Tobacco juice does not seem a
nice thing for a bleeding wound; probably it gets well rather in spite
of it than because of it.
If any one wanted a tonic in old farmhouses, it used to be the custom,
and till quite lately, to put a nail in sherry, making an iron wine,
which was believed to be very restorative. Now, one of the recent
additions to the wine merchants' lists is a sherry from Australia,
Tintara, which is recommended on account of its having been extracted
from grapes growing on an ironstone soil. So the old things come up
again in another form. There are scores of iron tonics of various kinds
sold in the shops; possibly the nail in sherry was almost as good.
Those who did not care to purchase sherry, put their nail in cider. A
few odd names of plants may yet be heard among the labourers, such as
"loving-andrews" for the blue meadow geranium; "loggerums" for the hard
knapweed, and also for the scabious; "Saturday night's pepper" for the
spurge, which grows wild in gardens; and there is a weed called
"good-neighbour," but as to which it is I am ignorant. The spotted-leaf
orchis flowers, which grow in moist and shady meads, lifting their
purplish heads among the early spring grass, are called by the children
"gran'fer goslings." To express extreme lack--as of money--they will
say their purses are as bare as a toad is of feathers.
In these days it is the fashion to praise mattresses and to depreciate
the feather-bed. Nothing so healthy as a mattress, nothing so good in
every way. Mattresses are certainly cheaper, and there it ends. I
maintain that no modern invention approaches the feather-bed. People
try to persuade me to eat the coarsest part of flour--actually the
rejected part--and to sleep on a mattress; that is to say, to go back
about twenty thousand years in civilisation. But I decline. Having some
acquaintance with wheat, I prefer the fine white flour, which is the
very finest of all the products of the earth; having slept on all sorts
of beds, sitting on a pole, lying on turf leaning against a tree, and
so forth, no one will ever persuade me that any couch is equal to a
feather-bed. But should any desire a yet cheaper mattress than those
advertised, I can put them in the way to obtain it. Among my hamlet
Californians it is not unusual to find beds in use stuffed with the
"hucks" of oats, _i.e._ the chaff. Like the backwoodsmen, they have to
make shift with what they can get. Their ancestors steamed their arrows
so as to soften the wood, when it was bound to a rigid rod and hung up
in the chimney to dry perfectly straight. The modern cottager takes a
stout stick and boils it in the pot till it becomes flexible. He then
bends it into the shape of a hook, ties it with string in that curve,
and suspends it in his chimney corner to dry crooked. This crooked
stick is the fagging hook used to pull the wheat towards the reaper
with the left hand, while he cuts it with the reap-hook in the right.