In despite of machine-sewn boots and their cheapness, the village cobbler is still an inst.i.tution, and has a considerable number of patrons. The labourers working in the fields need a boot that will keep out the damp, and for that purpose it must be hand-sewn: the cobbler, having lived among them all his life, understands what is wanted better than the artisan of the cities, and knows how to stud the soles with nails and cover toe and heel with plates till the huge boot is literally iron-clad. Even the children wear boots which for their size are equally heavy: many of the working farmers also send theirs to be repaired. The only thing to be remembered in dealing with a village cobbler is, if you want a pair of boots, to order them six months beforehand, or you will be disappointed. The business occupies him about as long as it takes a shipwright to build a ship.
Under the trees of the lane that connects one part of the village with another stands a wooden post once stout now decaying; and opposite it at some distance the remnants of a second. This was a rope-walk, but has long since fallen into disuse; the tendency of the age having for a long time been to centralise industry of all kinds. It is true that of late years many manufacturers have found it profitable to remove their workshops from cities into the country, the rent of premises being so much less, water to be got by sinking a well, less rates, and wages a little cheaper. They retain a shop and office in the cities, but have the work done miles away. But even this is distinctly a.s.sociated with centralisation. The workmen are merely paid human machines; they do not labour for their own hands in their own little shops at home, or as the rope-maker slowly walked backwards here, twisting the hemp under the elms of the lane, afterwards, doubtless, to take the manufactured article himself to market and offer his wares for sale from a stand in the street.
The millwright used to be a busy man here and there in the villages, but the railways take the wheat to the steam mills of cities, and where the water-mills yet run, ironwork has supplanted wood. In some few places still the women and girls are employed making gloves of a coa.r.s.e kind, doing the work at home in their cottages; but the occupation is now chiefly carried on nearer to the great business centres than this.
Another extinct trade is that of the bell foundry. One village situate in the hills hard by was formerly celebrated for the church bells cast there, many of which may be found in far distant towers ringing to this day.
Near the edge of the hill, just above the washpool, stands the village church. Old and grey as it is, yet the usage of the pool by the shepherds dates from still earlier days. Like some of the farmhouses further up among the hills, the tower is built of flints set in cement, which in the pa.s.sage of time has become almost as hard as the flint itself. The art of chipping flint to a face for the purpose of making lines or patterns in walls used to be carried to great perfection, and even old garden walls may be seen so ornamented.
The tower is large and tall, and the church a great one; or so it appears in comparison with the small population of the place. But it may be that when it was built there were more inhabitants; for some signs remain that here--as in many other such villages--the people have decreased in numbers: the population has shifted elsewhere. An adjacent parish lying just under the downs has now not more than fifty inhabitants; yet in the olden time a church stood there--long since dismantled: the ancient churchyard is an orchard, no one being permitted to dig or plough the ground.
Entering the tower by the narrow nail-studded door, it is not so easy to ascend the winding geometrical stone staircase, in the confined s.p.a.ce and the darkness, for the arrow-slits are choked with cobwebs and the dust of years. A faint fluttering sound comes from above, as of wings beating the air in a confined s.p.a.ce--it is the jackdaws in the belfry; just as the starlings and swallows in the huge old-fashioned chimneys make a similar murmuring noise before they settle. Pa.s.sing a slit or two--the only means of marking the height which has been reached--and the dull tick of the old clock becomes audible: slow and accompanied with a peculiar grating vibration, as if the frame of the antique works had grown tremulous with age. The dial-plate outside is square, placed at an angle to the perpendicular lines of the tower: the gilding of the hour-marks has long since tarnished and worn away before the storms, and they are now barely distinguishable; and it is difficult to tell the precise time by the solitary pointer, there being no minute hand.
Past another slit, and the narrow stone steps--you must take care to keep close to the outer wall where they are widest, for they narrow to the central pillar--are scooped out by the pa.s.sage of feet during the centuries; some, too, are broken, and others are slippery with something that rolls and gives under the foot. It is a number of little sticks and twigs which have fallen down from the jackdaws" nests above: higher up the steps are literally covered with them, so that you have to kick them aside before you can conveniently ascend. These sticks are nearly all of the same size, brown and black from age and the loss of the sap, the bark remaining on. It is surprising how the birds contrive to find so many suitable to their purpose, searching about under the trees; for they do not break them off, but take those that have fallen.
The best place for finding these sticks--and those the rooks use--is where a tree has been felled or a thick hedge cut some months before.
In cutting up the smaller branches into f.a.ggots the men necessarily frequently step on them, and so break off innumerable twigs too short to be tied up in the bundle. After they have finished f.a.ggoting, the women rake up the fragments for their cottage fires; and later on, as the spring advances, the birds come for the remaining twigs, of which great quant.i.ties are left. These they pick up from among the gra.s.s; and it is noticeable that they like twigs that are dead but not decayed: they do not care for them when green, and reject them when rotten. Have they discovered that green wood shrinks in drying, and that rotten wood is untrustworthy? Rooks, jackdaws, and pigeons find their building materials in this way, where trees or hedges have been cut; yet even then it must require some patience. They use also a great deal of material rearranged from the nests of last year--that is, rooks and jackdaws.
Stepping out at last into the belfry, be careful how you tread; for the flooring is worm-eaten, and here and there planks are loose: keep your foot, if possible, on the beams, which at least are fixed. It is a giddy height to fall from down to the stone pavement below, where the ringers stand. Their ropes are bound round with list or cloth, or some such thing, for a better grasp for the hand. High as it is to this the first floor, if you should attempt to ring one of these bells, and forget to let the rope slip quickly, it will jerk you almost to the ceiling: thus many a man has broken his bones close to the font where he was christened as a child.
Against the wall up here are iron clamps to strengthen the ancient fabric, settling somewhat in its latter days; and, opening the worm-eaten door of the clock-case--the key stands in it--you may study the works of the old clock for a full hour, if so it please you; for the clerk is away labouring in the field, and his aged wife, who produced the key of the church and pointed the nearest way across the meadow, has gone to the spring. The ancient building, standing lonely on the hill, is utterly deserted; the creak of the boards under foot or the grate of the rusty hinge sounds hollow and gloomy. But a streak of sunlight enters from the arrow-slit, a bee comes in through the larger open windows with a low inquiring buzz; there is a chattering of sparrows, the peculiar shrill screech of the swifts, and a "jack-jack-daw-jack-daw"-ing outside. The sweet scent of clover and of mown gra.s.s comes upon the light breeze--mayhap the laughter of haymakers pa.s.sing through the churchyard underneath to their work, and idling by the way as haymakers can idle.
The name of the maker on the clock shows that it was constructed in a little market town a few miles distant a century ago, before industries were centralised and local life began to lose its individuality. There are sparrows" nests on the wooden case over it, and it is stopped now and then by feathers getting into the works: it matters nothing here; _Festina lente_ is the village motto, and time is little regarded. So, if you wish, take a rubbing, with heelball borrowed from the cobbler, of the inscriptions round the rims of the great bells; but be careful even then, for the ringers have left one carelessly tilted, and if the rope should slip, nineteen hundredweight of brazen metal may jam you against the framework.
The ringers are an independent body, rustics though they be-- monopolists, not to be lightly ordered about, as many a vicar has found to his cost, having a silent belfry for his pains, and not a man to be got, either, from adjacent villages. It is about as easy to knock this solid tower over with a walking-stick as to change village customs. But if towards Christmas you should chance to say to the ringers that such and such a chime seemed rung pleasantly, be certain that you will hear it night after night coming with a throbbing joyfulness through the starlit air--every note of the peal rising clear and distinct at the exact moment of time, as if struck by machinery, yet with a quivering undertone that dwells on the ear after the wave of sound has gone. Then go out and walk in the garden or field, for it is a n.o.ble music; remember, too, that it is a music that has echoed from the hills hundreds and hundreds of years. Rude men as they are, these bellringers gratefully respond to the least appreciation of their art.
A few more turns about the spiral staircase, and then step out on the roof. The footstep is deadened by the dull coloured lead, oxidised from exposure. The tarnished weatherc.o.c.k above revolves so stiffly as to be heedless of the light air,--only facing a strong breeze. The irreverent jackdaws, now wheeling round at a safe distance, build in every coign of vantage, no matter how incongruous their intrusion may be--on the wings of an angel, behind the flowing robe of Saint Peter, or yonder in the niche, grey and lichen-grown, where stood the Virgin Mary before iconoclastic hands dashed her image to the ground. If a gargoyle be broken or choked so that no water comes through it, they will use it, but not otherwise. And they have nests, too, just on the ledge in the thickness of the wall, outside those belfry windows which are partially boarded up. Anywhere, in short, high up and well sheltered, suits the jackdaw.
When nesting time is over, jackdaws seem to leave the church and roost with the rooks; they use the tower much as the rooks do their hereditary group of trees at a distance from the wood they sleep in at other seasons. How came the jackdaw to make its nest on church towers in the first place? The bird has become so a.s.sociated with churches that it is difficult to separate the two; yet it is certain that the bird preceded the building. Archaeologists tell us that stone buildings of any elevation, whether for religious purposes or defence, were not erected till a comparatively late date in this island. Now, the low huts of primeval peoples would hardly attract the jackdaw. It is the argument of those who believe in immutable and infallible instinct that the habits of birds, etc, are unchangeable: the bee building a cell to-day exactly as it built one centuries before our era. Have we not here, however, a modification of habit?
The jackdaw could not have originally built in tall stone buildings.
Localising the question to this country, may we not almost fix the date when the jackdaw began to use the church, or the battlements of the tower, by marking the time of their first erection? The jackdaw was clever enough, and had reason sufficient to enable him to see how these high, isolated positions suited his peculiar habits; and I am bold enough to think that if the bee could be shown a better mode of building her comb, she would in time come to use it.
In the churchyard, not far from the foot of the tower where the jackdaws are so busy, stands a great square tomb, built of four slabs of stone on edge and a broader one laid on the top. The inscription is barely legible, worn away by the ironshod heels of generations of ploughboys kicking against it in their rude play, and where they have not chipped it, filled with lichen. The s.e.xton says that this tomb in the olden days was used as the pay-table upon which the poor received their weekly dole. His father told him that he had himself stood there hungry, with the rest--not broken-down cripples and widows, but strong, hale men, waiting till the loaves were placed upon the broad slab, so that the living were fed literally over the grave of the dead.
The farmers met every now and then in the vestry and arranged how many men each would find work for--or rather partial work--so that the amount of relief might be apportioned. Men coming from a distance, or even from the next parish, were jealously excluded from settling, lest there should be more mouths to feed; if a family, on the other hand, could by any possibility be got rid of, it was exiled. There were more hands than work; now the case is precisely opposite. A grim witness, this old tomb, to a traditionary fragment in that history of the people which is now placed above a mere list of monarchs.
The oldest person in the village was a woman--as is often the case-- reputed to be over a hundred: a tidy cottager, well tended, feeble in body, but brisk of tongue. She reckoned her own age by the thatch of the roof. It had been completely new thatched five times since she could recollect. The first time she was a great girl, grown up: her father had it thatched twice afterwards; her husband had it done the fourth time, and the fifth was three years ago. That made about a hundred years altogether.
The straw had lasted better lately, because there were now no great elm trees to drip, drip on it in wet weather. Cottagers are frequently really squatters, building on the waste land beside the highway close to the hedgerow, and consequently under the trees. This dripping on the roof is very bad for thatch. Straw is remarkably durable, even when exposed to the weather, if good in the first place and well laid on. It may be reckoned to last twenty years on an average, perhaps more. Five thatchings, then, made eighty years; add three years since the last thatching; and the old lady supposed she was seventeen or eighteen at the first--i.e. just a century since. But in all likelihood her recollections of the first thatching were confused and uncertain: she was perhaps eight or ten at that time, which would reduce her real age to a little over ninety. A great part of the village had twice been destroyed by fire since she could remember. These fires are or were singularly destructive in villages--the flames running from thatch to thatch, and, as they express it, "wrastling" across the intervening s.p.a.ces. A pain is said to "wrastle," or shoot and burn. Such fires are often caused by wood ashes from the hearth thrown on the dustheap while yet some embers contain sufficient heat to fire straw or rubbish.
The old woman"s memories were wholly of gossipy family history; I have often found that the very aged have not half so much to tell as those of about sixty to seventy years. The next oldest was a man about eighty; all he knew of history was that once on a time some traitor withdrew the flints from the muskets of the English troops, subst.i.tuting pieces of wood, which, of course, would not ignite the powder, and thus they were beaten. Of date, place, or persons he had no knowledge. He "minded" a great snowfall when he was a boy, and helping to drag the coaches out and making a firm road for them with hurdles. Once while grubbing a hedge near the road he found five shillings" worth of pennies--the great old "coppers"--doubtless hidden by a thief. He could not buy so much with one of the new sort of coppers: liked them as King George made best.
An old lady of about seventy, living at the village inn, a very brisk body, seemed quite unable to understand what was meant by history, but could tell me a story if I liked. The story was a rambling narrative of an amour in some foreign country. The lady, to conceal a meeting with her paramour, which took place in the presence of her son, who was an imbecile (or, in her own words, had "no more sense than G.o.d gave him," a common country expression for a fool), went upstairs and rained raisins on him from the window. The son told the husband what had happened; but, asked to specify the time, could only fix it by, "When it rained raisins." This was supposed to be merely a fresh proof of his imbecility, and the lady escaped.
In this imperfect narrative is there not a distorted version of a chapter in the "Pentameron"? But how did it get into the mind of an illiterate old woman in an out-of-the-way village? Nothing yet of Waterloo, Culloden, Sedgmoor, or the civil war; but in the end an old man declared that King Charles had once slept in an old house just about to be pulled down. But then "King Charles" slept according to local tradition, in most of the old houses in the country. However, I resolved to visit the place.
Tall yew hedges, reaching high overhead, thick and impervious, such as could only be produced in a hundred years of growth and countless clippings, enclosing a green pleasaunce, the gra.s.s uncut for many a year, weeds overrunning the smooth surface on which the bowls once rolled true to their bias. In the shelter of these hedges, upon the sunny side, you might walk in early spring when the east wind is harshest, without a breath penetrating to chill the blood, warm as within a cloak of sables, enjoying that peculiar genial feeling which is induced by sunshine at that period only, and which is somewhat akin to the sense of convalescence after a weary illness. Thus, sauntering to and fro, your footstep, returning on itself, pa.s.sed the thrush sitting on her nest calm and confident.
No modern exotic evergreens ever attract our English birds like the true old English trees and shrubs. In the box and yew they love to build; spindly laurels and rhododendrons, with vacant draughty s.p.a.ces underneath, they detest, avoiding them as much as possible. The common hawthorn hedge round a country garden shall contain three times as many nests, and be visited by five times as many birds, as the foreign evergreens, so costly to rear and so sure to be killed by the first old-fashioned frost.
The thrushes are singularly fond of the yew berry; it is of a sticky substance, sweet and not unpleasant. Holly berries, too, are eaten; and holly hedges, despite their p.r.i.c.kly leaves, are favourites with garden birds. It would be possible, I think, to so plan out a garden as to attract almost every feathered creature.
A fine old filbert walk extends far away towards the orchard: the branches meet overhead. In autumn the fruit hangs thick; and what is more exquisite, when gathered from the bough and eaten, as all fruit should be, on the spot? I cannot understand why filbert walks are not planted by our modern capitalists, who make nothing of spending a thousand pounds in forcing-houses. I cannot help thinking that true taste consists in the selection of what is thoroughly characteristic of soil and climate. Those magnificent yew hedges, the filbert walk--all, in fact are to be levelled to make way for a garish stucco-fronted hunting-box, with staring red stables and every modern convenience. The sun-dial shaft is already heaved up and broken.
The old mansion was used as a grammar school for a great many years, but has been deserted for the last quarter of a century; and melancholy indeed are the silent hollow halls and dormitories. The whitewashed walls are yellow and green from damp, and covered in patches with saltpetre efflorescence; but they still bear the hasty inscriptions scrawled on them by boyish hands--some far back in the eighteenth century. The history of this little kingdom, with its dynasties of tutors and masters, its succeeding generations of joyous youth, might be gathered from these writings on the walls: sketches in burned stick or charcoal of extinct monarchs of the desk; rude doggerel verses; curious jingles of Latin and English words of which every great school has its specimens; dates of day and month when doubtless some daring expedition was carried out; and here and there (originally hidden behind furniture, we may suppose) bitter words of hatred against the injustice of ruling authorities--arbitrary ushers and cruel masters.
The cas.e.m.e.nts, broken and blown in, have permitted all the winds of heaven to wreak their will; and the storms sweeping over from the adjacent downs beat as they choose upon the floor. Within an upper window--now obviously enough a wind-door--two swallows" nests have been built against the wall close to the ceiling, and their pleasant twitter greets you as you enter; and so does the whistling of the starlings on the roof. But without there, below, the ring of the bricklayer"s trowel as he chips a brick has already given them notice to quit.
CHAPTER FIVE.
VILLAGE ARCHITECTURE--THE COTTAGE PREACHER--COTTAGE SOCIETY--THE SHEPHERD--EVENTS OF THE VILLAGE YEAR.
Some few farmhouses, with cow-yards and rickyards attached, are planted in the midst of the village; and these have cottages occupied by the shepherds and carters, or other labourers, who remain at work for the same employer all the year. These cottages are perhaps the best in the place, larger and more commodious, with plenty of s.p.a.ce round them, and fair-sized gardens close to the door. The system of hiring for a twelvemonth has been bitterly attacked; but as a matter of fact there can be no doubt that a man with a family is better off when settled in one spot with constant employment, and any number of odd jobs for his wife and children. The cottages not attached to any particular farm-- belonging to various small owners--are generally much less convenient; they are huddled together, and the footpaths and rights of way frequently cross, and so lead to endless bickering.
Not the faintest trace of design can be found in the ground-plan of the village. All the odd nooks and corners seem to have been preferred for building sites; and even the steep side of the hill is dotted with cottages, with gardens at an angle of forty-five degrees or more, and therefore difficult to work. Here stands a group of elm trees; there half-a-dozen houses; next a cornfield thrusting a long narrow strip into the centre of the place; more cottages built with the back to the road, and the front door opening just the other way; a small meadow, a well, a deep lane, with banks built up of loose stone to prevent them slipping-- only broad enough for one waggon to pa.s.s at once--and with cottages high above reached by steps; an open s.p.a.ce where three more crooked lanes meet; a turnpike gate, and, of course, a beerhouse hard by it.
Each of these crooked lanes has its group of cottages and its own particular name; but all the lanes and roads pa.s.sing through the village are known colloquially as "the street". There is an individuality, so to say, in these by-ways, and in the irregular architecture of the houses, which does not exist in the straight rows, each cottage exactly alike, of the modern blocks in the neighbourhood of cities. And the inhabitants correspond with their dwelling in this respect--most of them, especially the elder folk, being "characters" in their way.
Such old-fashioned cottages are practically built around the chimney; the chimney is the firm nucleus of solid masonry or brickwork about which the low walls of rubble are cl.u.s.tered. When such a cottage is burned down the chimney is nearly always the only thing that remains, and against the chimney it is built up again. Next in importance is the roof, which, rising from very low walls, really encloses half of the inhabitable s.p.a.ce.
The one great desire of the cottager"s heart--after his garden--is plenty of sheds and outhouses in which to store wood, vegetables, and lumber of all kinds. This trait is quite forgotten as a rule by those who design "improved" cottages for gentlemen anxious to see the labourers on their estates well lodged; and consequently the new buildings do not give so much satisfaction as might be expected. It is only natural that to a man whose possessions are limited, things like potatoes, logs of wood, chips, odds and ends should a.s.sume a value beyond the appreciation of the well-to-do. The point should be borne in mind by those who are endeavouring to give the labouring cla.s.s better accommodation.
A cottage attached to a farmstead, which has been occupied by a steady man who has worked on the tenancy for the best part of his life, and possibly by his father before him, sometimes contains furniture of a superior kind. This has been purchased piece by piece in the course of years, some representing a a little legacy--cottagers who have a trifle of property are very proud of making wills--and some perhaps the last remaining relics of former prosperity. It is not at all uncommon to find men like this, whose forefathers no great while since held farms, and even owned them, but fell by degrees in the social scale, till at last their grandchildren work in the fields for wages. An old chair or cabinet which once stood in the farmhouse generations ago is still preserved.
Upon the shelf may be found a few books--a Bible, of course; hardly a cottager who can read is without his Bible--and among the rest an ancient volume of polemical theology, bound in leather; it dates back to the days of the fierce religious controversies which raged in the period which produced Cromwell. There is a rude engraving of the author for frontispiece, t.i.tle in red letter, a tedious preface, and the text is plentifully bestrewn with Latin and Greek quotations. These add greatly to its value in the cottager"s eyes, for he still looks upon a knowledge of Latin as the essential of a "scholard." This book has evidently been handed down for many generations as a kind of heirloom, for on the blank leaves may be seen the names of the owners with the inevitable addition of "his" or "her book." It is remarkable that literature of this sort should survive so long.
Even yet not a little of that spirit which led to the formation of so many contending sects in the seventeenth century lingers in the cottage.
I have known men who seemed to reproduce in themselves the character of the close-cropped soldiers who prayed and fought by turns with such energy. They still read the Bible in its most literal sense, taking every word as addressed to them individually, and seriously trying to shape their lives in accordance with their convictions.
Such a man, who has been labouring in the hay-field all day, in the evening may be found exhorting a small but attentive congregation in a cottage hard by. Though he can but slowly wade through the book, letter by letter, word by word, he has caught the manner of the ancient writer, and expresses himself in an archaic style not without its effect.
Narrow as the view must be which is una.s.sisted by education and its broad sympathies, there is no mistaking the thorough earnestness of the cottage preacher. He believes what he says, and no persuasion, rhetoric, or force could move him one jot. His congregation approve his discourse with groans and various e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns. Men of this kind won Cromwell"s victories; but to-day they are mainly conspicuous for upright steadiness and irreproachable moral character, mingled with some surly independence. They are not "agitators" in the current sense of the term; the local agents of labour a.s.sociations seem chosen from quite a different cla.s.s.
Pausing once to listen to such a man, who was preaching in a roadside cottage in a loud and excited manner, I found he was describing, in graphic if rude language, the procession of a martyr of the Inquisition to the stake. His imagination naturally led him to picture the circ.u.mstances as corresponding to the landscape of fields with which he had been from youth familiar. The executioners were dragging the victim bound along a footpath across the meadows to the pile which had been prepared for burning him. When they arrived at the first stile they halted, and held an argument with the prisoner, promising him his life and safety if he would recant, but he held to the faith.
Then they set out again, beating and torturing the sufferer along the path, the crowd hissing and reviling. At the next stile a similar scene took place--promise of pardon, and scornful refusal to recant, followed by more torture. Again, at the third and last stile, the victim was finally interrogated, and, still firmly clinging to his belief, was committed to the flames in the centre of the field. Doubtless there was some historic basis for the story; but the preacher made it quite his own by the vigour and life of the local colouring in which he clothed it, speaking of the green gra.s.s, the flowers, the innocent sheep, the f.a.ggots, and so on, bringing it home to the minds of his audience to whom f.a.ggots and gra.s.s and sheep were so well known. They worked themselves into a state of intense excitement as the narrative approached its climax, till a continuous moaning formed a deep undertone to the speaker"s voice. Such men are not paid, trained, or organised; they labour from goodwill in the cause.
Now and then a woman, too, may be found who lectures in the little cottage room where ten or fifteen, perhaps twenty, are packed almost to suffocation; or she prays aloud and the rest respond. Sometimes, no doubt, persons of little sincerity practise these things from pure vanity and the ambition of preaching--for there is ambition in cottage life as elsewhere; but the men and women I speak of are thoroughly in earnest.
Cottagers have their own social creed and customs. In their intercourse, one point which seems to be insisted upon particularly is a previous knowledge or acquaintance. The very people whose morals are known to be none of the strictest--and cottage morality is sometimes very far from severe--will refuse, and especially the women, to admit a strange girl, for instance, to sleep in their house for ample remuneration, even when introduced by really respectable persons.
Servant-girls in the country where railways even now are few and far between often walk long distances to see mistresses in want of a.s.sistance, by appointment. They get tired; perhaps night approaches and then comes the difficulty, of lodging them if the house happens to be full. Cottagers make the greatest difficulty, unless by some chance it should be discovered that they met the girl"s uncle or cousin years ago.
To their friends and neighbours, on the contrary, they are often very kind, and ready to lend a helping hand. If they seldom sit down to a social gathering among themselves, it is because they see each other so constantly during the day, working in the same fields, and perhaps eating their luncheon a dozen together in the same outhouse. A visitor whom they know from the next village is ever welcome to what fare there is. On Sundays the younger men often set out to call on friends at a distance of several miles, remaining with them all day; they carry with them a few lettuces, or apples from the tree in the garden (according to the season), wrapped up in a coloured handkerchief, as a present.
Some of the older shepherds still wear the ancient blue smock-frock, crossed with white "facings" like coa.r.s.e lace; but the rising generation use the greatcoat of modern make, at which their forefathers would have laughed as utterly useless in the rain-storms that blow across the open hills. Among the elder men, too, may be found a few of the huge umbrellas of a former age, which when spread give as much shelter as a small tent. It is curious that they rarely use an umbrella in the field, even when simply standing about; but if they go a short journey along the highway, then they take it with them. The aged men sling these great umbrellas over the shoulder with a piece of tar-cord, just as a soldier slings his musket, and so have both hands free--one to stump along with a stout stick and the other to carry a flag basket.
The stick is always too lengthy to walk with as men use it in cities, carrying it by the k.n.o.b or handle; it is a staff rather than a stick, the upper end projecting six or eight inches above the hand.
If any labourers deserve to be paid well, it is the shepherds: upon their knowledge and fidelity the princ.i.p.al profit of a whole season depends on so many farms. On the bleak hills in lambing time the greatest care is necessary; and the fold, situated in a hollow if possible, with the down rising on the east or north, is built as it were of straw walls, thick and warm, which the sheep soon make hollow inside, and thus have a cave in which to nestle.