Cocks crowing and wheels thundering on granite waked me at Guildford soon after six. I was out at seven, after paying 3s. 6d. for supper and bed: breakfast I was to have at Farnham. I have often fared as well as I did that night at a smaller cost, and worse at a larger. At Guildford itself, for example, I went recently into a place of no historic interest or natural beauty, and greenly consented to pay 3s. for a bed, although the woman, in answer to my question, said that the charge for supper and breakfast would be according to what I had. What I had for supper was two herrings and bread and butter, and a cup of coffee afterwards; for breakfast I had bacon and bread and tea. The supper cost 1s. 6d., exclusive of the coffee; the breakfast cost 1s. 6d. exclusive of the tea. Nor did these charges prevent the boots, who had not cleaned my boots,[77] from hanging round me at parting, as if I had been his long-lost son.

The beautiful, still, pale morning was as yet clouded by the lightest of white silk streamers. The slates glimmered with yesterday’s rain in the rising sun. It was too fine, too still, too sunny, but the castle jackdaws rejoiced in it, crying loudly in the sycamores, on the old walls, or high in air. By the time I was beginning to mount the Hog’s Back, clouds not of silk were assembling. They passed away; others appeared, but the rain was not permitted to fall. Many miles of country lay cold and soft, but undimmed, on both hands. On the north it was a mostly level land where hedgerow trees and copses, beyond the first field or two, made one dark wood to the eye, but rising to the still darker heights of Bisley and Chobham on the horizon, and gradually disclosing the red settlements of Aldershot and Farnborough, and the dark high land of Bagshot. On the south at first I could see the broken ridge of Hindhead, Blackdown, and Olderhill, and through the gap a glimpse of the Downs; then later the piny country which culminates in the dome of Crooksbury Hill; and nearer at hand a lower but steeply rising and falling region of gorse, bracken, and heather intermingled with ploughland of almost bracken colour,[78] and with the first hop gardens. Both the level-seeming sweep on the north and the hills of the south, clear as they were in that anxious light, were subject to the majestic road on the Hog’s Back. A mile out of Guildford the road is well upon the back, and for five or six miles it runs straight, yet not too straight, with slight change of altitude, yet never flat, and for the most part upon the very ridge—the topmost bristles—of the Hog’s Back. The ridge, in fact, has in some parts only just breadth enough to carry the road, and the land sinks away rapidly on both hands, giving the traveller the sensation of going on the crest of a stout wall, surveying his immense possessions northward and southward. The road has a further advantage that would be great whatever its position, but on this ridge is incalculable. It is bordered, not by a hedge, but by uneven and in places bushy wastes, often as wide as a field. The wastes, of course, are divided from the cultivated slopes below by hedges, but either these are low, as on the right, or they are irregularly expanded into thickets of yew and blackthorn, and even into beech plantations, as on the left. Whoever cares to rides or walks here instead of on the dust. A goat or two were feeding here. There was, and there nearly always is, an encampment of gypsies. The[79] telegraph posts and the stout, three-sided, old, white milestones stand here. The telegraph posts, in one place, for some distance alternate with low, thick yew trees. I liked those telegraph posts, businesslike and mysterious, and their wires that are sufficient of themselves to create the pathetic fallacy. None the less, I liked the look of the gypsies camping under them. If they were not there, in fact, they would have to be invented. They are at home there. See them at nightfall, with their caravans drawn up facing the wind, and the men by the half-door at the back smoking, while the hobbled horses are grazing and the children playing near. The children play across the road, motor cars or no motor cars, laughing at whoever amuses them. There were two caravans at the highest point near Puttenham, where the ridge is so narrow that the roadside thicket is well below the road, and I saw clear to Hindhead: in another place there were two antique, patched tents on hoops.

The wind was now strong in my face again. But it did not rain, and at moments the sun had the power to warm. There was not a moment when I had not a lark singing overhead. On the right hand slope, which is more gradual than that to the left, men were rolling some grass fields, harrowing others; lower down they were ploughing. Men[80] were beginning to work among the hop poles on the left. The oaks in the woods there were each individualized, and had a smoky look which they would not have had in Summer, Autumn, or Winter.

Houses very seldom intrude on the waste, and there are few near it. On the south side two or three big houses had been built so as to command Hindhead, etc., and a board directed me to the “Jolly Farmer” at Puttenham, but no inn was visible till I came to the “Victory,” which was well past the half-way mark to Farnham. The north side showed not more than a cottage or two, until I began to descend towards Farnham and came to a villa which had trimmed the waste outside its gates and decorated it with the inscription, “Keep off the grass.” Going downhill was too much of a pleasure for me to look carefully at Runfold, though I noticed another “Jolly Farmer” there, and a “Princess Royal,” with the date 1819. This not very common sign put into my head the merry song about the “brave Princess Royal” that set sail from Gravesend—
“On the tenth of December and towards the year’s end,”

and met a pirate, who asked them to “drop your main topsail and heave your ship to,” but got the answer,—

[81]
“We’ll drop our main topsail and heave our ship to,
But that in some harbour, not alongside of you.
So we hoisted the royals and set the topsail,
And the brave Princess Royal soon showed them her tail:
And we went a-cruising, and we went a-cruising,
And we went a-cruising, all on the salt seas.”

A PASSING STORM

near St. Cross, Winchester.

The good tune and merry words lasted me down among the market gardens and florists’ plantations, past the “Shepherd and Flock” at the turning to Moor Park, to the Wey again, and the first oast-house beside it, and so into Farnham at a quarter to nine, which I felt to be breakfast time.

While I drank my coffee the rising wind slammed a door and the first shower passed over. The sun shone for me to go to the “Jolly Farmer” across the Wey, in a waterside street of cottages and many inns, such as the “Hop Bag,” the “Bird in Hand,” and the “Lamb.” The “Jolly Farmer,” Cobbett’s birthplace, a small inn standing back a little, with a flat black and white front, was labelled “Cobbett’s Birthplace,” in letters as big as are usually given to the name of a brewer. It is built close up against a low sandy bank, which continues above the right shore of the Wey, somewhat conspicuously, for miles. Behind the “Jolly Farmer” this bank is a cliff, hollowed out into caves (no one knows how old, or whether made by Druids or smugglers), and overgrown by bushes and crowned[82] by elms full of rooks’ nests. The whole of this waterside is attractive, rustic, but busy. The Wey is already a strong stream there, and timber yards and warehouses abut on it. A small public garden occupies the angle made by one of its willowy bends.

Farnham West Street was for the moment warm in the sun as I walked slowly between its shops to where the perched brick fronts of decent old houses were scarcely interrupted by a quiet shop or two and the last inns, the “Rose and Thistle” and the “Holly Bush.” It is one of those streets in which a hundred houses have been welded into practically one block. There are some very old houses, some that are old, and some not very old, but all together compose one long, uneven wall of rustic urbanity. Castle Street is entirely different. It takes its name from the Bishop of Winchester’s castle, a palace of old red brick and several cedars standing at its upper end. Being about three times as broad as West Street, it is fit to be compared for breadth with the streets of Marlborough, Wootton Bassett, or Epsom. Most of the houses are private and not big, of red or of plastered or whitened brick; but there is a baker’s shop, a “Nelson’s Arms,” and a row of green-porched alms-houses. At the far end the street rises and curves a little[83] to the left, and is narrowed by the encroachment of front gardens only possessed by the houses at that point. A long flight of steps above this curve ascends a green slope of arum and ivy and chestnut trees, past an old episcopal fruit wall, to a rough-cast gateway, with clock and belfry, and beyond that, the palace and two black, many-storied cedars towering at its front door.

I looked in vain for a statue of Cobbett in Farnham. Long may it be before there is one, for it will probably be bad and certainly unnecessary. So long as “Rural Rides” is read he needs not to share that kind of resurrection of the just with Queen Anne and the late Dukes of Devonshire and of Cambridge. The district has bred yet another man who combines the true countryman and the writer. I mean, of course, George Bourne, author of “The Bettesworth Book,” a volume which ought to go on to the most select shelf of country books, even beside those of White, Cobbett, Jefferies, Hudson, and Burroughs. Bettesworth was a Surrey labourer, a neighbour and workman of the author’s. He was an observant and communicative man: his employer took notes from time to time, and the book is mainly a record of conversations. George Bourne gives a brief setting to the old man’s words, yet a sufficient one. Pain[84] and sorrow are not absent, and afar off we see a gray glimpse of the workhouse; but the whole is joyful. Even when Bettesworth “felt a bit Christmassy” there is no melancholy; his head merely seems “all mops and brooms.” His wife tells him that he has been laughing in his sleep. “I was always laughing, then,” he says, “until I was sore all round wi’ it.” We have Bettesworth’s own words in most cases, and George Bourne never interferes except to help. There is no insipid contrast with the outer world, though here and there we have an echo from it; we hear of railways as not particularly convenient, and a dull way of travelling; and of cut-purses, “got up they was, ye know, reg’lar fly-looking blokes, like gentlemen.” Nothing is omitted but what had to be. Bettesworth cleaned cesspools at times, and the best things in the book centre round his “excellent versatility in usefulness.” Well-sinking, reaping, lawn-mowing, pole-pulling in the hop garden, mending of roofs and steeples, and all the glorious activities connected with horses, had come into his work: as for adventure, he drove his first pair of cart horses from Staines to Smithfield Market. He had been a wanderer, too. During a long absence from friends he wrote to a brother, enclosing a gift; but on the way to the post he met an acquaintance,[85] “and I ast’n if he’d ’ave a drink. So when he says yes, I took the letter an’ tore out the dollar an’ chucked the letter over the hedge. An’ we went off an’ ’ad a bottle o’ rum wi’ this dollar. An’ that’s all as they ever heerd o’ me for seven year.”

But the conversations themselves were held while Bettesworth was laying turf, or during the quite genial fatigue following a fifteen-hour day. “Laying Turf” is one of the most charming pieces in the world. The old steeple-mender, reaper, and carter was laying turf under continuous rain and in an uncomfortable attitude, and made the unexpected comment: “Pleasant work this. I could very well spend my time at it, with good turfs.”

“The Bettesworth Book” appeared in 1901. “Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer,” the record of Bettesworth’s last years—1892–1905—appeared in 1907. At first the book may seem tame, a piece of reporting which leaves the reader not unaware of the notebooks consulted by the author. But in the end comes a picture out of the whole, painfully, dubiously emerging, truthful undoubtedly, subtle, not easy to understand, which raises George Bourne to a high place among observers. Apart from his observation, too, he shows himself a man with a ripe and generous, if staid, view of life, and a writer capable of more than accurate writing: witness[86] his picture of frozen rime on telegraph wires, of Bettesworth’s “polling beck” or potato fork, and phrases like this: “Near the beans there were brussels sprouts, their large leaves soaked with colour out of the clouded day.”

Bettesworth had fought in the Crimea, and during sixty years had been active unceasingly over a broad space of English country—Surrey, Sussex, and Hampshire—always out of doors. His memory was good, his eye for men and trades a vivid one, and his gift of speech unusual, “with swift realistic touch, convincingly true;” so that a picture of rural England during the latter half of the nineteenth century, by one born in the earlier half and really belonging to it, is the result. The portrait of an unlettered pagan English peasant is fascinating. He lived in a parish where people of urban habits were continually taking the place of the older sort who dropped out, but he had himself been labourer, soldier, “all sorts of things; but ... first and last by taste a peasant, with ideas and interests proper to another England than that in which we are living now,” and perhaps unconscious of the change since the days when he saw four men in a smithy making an axe-head: “Three with sledge-’ammers, and one with a little ’ammer, tinkin’ on the anvil.... There was one[87] part of making a axe as they’d never let anybody see ’em at.”

The talk, and George Bourne’s comments reveal this man’s way of thinking and speaking, his lonely thoughts, and his attitude in almost every kind of social intercourse. They show his physical strength, his robust and gross enjoyment, his isolation, his breeding and independence, his tenderness without pity, his courage, his determination to endure. No permissible amount of quotation can explain the subtle appeal of his talk, for example, whilst turf-laying,—

“Half unawares it came home to me, like the contact of the garden mould, and the smell of the earth, and the silent saturation of the cold air. You could hardly call it thought—the quality in this simple prattling. Our hands touching the turfs had no thought either; but they were alive for all that; and of such a nature was the life in Bettesworth’s brain, in its simple touch upon the circumstances of his existence. The fretful echoes men call opinions did not sound in it; clamour of the daily press did not disturb its quiet; it was no bubble puffed out by learning, nor indeed had it any of the gracefulness which some mental life takes from poetry and art; but it was still a genuine and strong elemental life of the human[88] brain that during those days was my companion. It seemed as if something very real, as if the true sound of the life of the village had at last reached my dull senses.”

It will now reach duller senses than George Bourne’s. No one has told better how a peasant who has not toned his other virtues with thrift is deserted in the end by God and even the majority of men. The “Memoirs” are shadowed from the first by the helplessness of Bettesworth’s epileptic wife. The whole of his last year was a dimly lighted, solitary, manly agony.... Now, a statue of Frederick Bettesworth might well be placed at the foot of Castle Street, to astonish and annoy, if a sculptor could be found.

As I was passing the “Jolly Sailor” and its jolly signboard, a gypsy, a sturdy, black-haired, and brown-faced woman, was coming into Farnham carrying a basket packed tight with daffodils. The sun shone and was warm, but the low road was still wet. It was the Pilgrim’s Way now, not merely a parallel road such as I had been on since Dorking. For some miles it kept the Wey in sight, and over beyond the river, that low wall and ledge of sand, used by the railway, crested with oak and pine here and there, and often dappled on its slope with gorse. The land on my right was different, being largely[89] sodden, bare, arable, with elms. But it was a pleasure to ride and walk and always to see the winding river and its willows, and that even green terrace now near, now far. Looking across at this scene were a number of detached houses, old and new, at good intervals along the right hand side of the road: some of them could see also the long Alice Holt woods of oaks and larches, the tips of certain small groups of trees gilded fitfully by the sunshine. At Willey Mill, soon after leaving Farnham, the road actually touched the river, and horses can walk through it parallel to the road and cool their feet; and just past this, I entered Hampshire. More often the river was midway between my road and the terrace, touching an old farm-house of brick and timber in the plashy meadows, or turning a mill with a white plunge of water under sycamores. But the gayest and most springlike sign was the fresh whitewash on every fruit tree in an orchard by the wayside; it suggested a festival. The poles were being set up in the hop gardens. The hedges enclosing them had been allowed to grow up to a great height for a screen against wind, and to make a diaphanous green wall. Many were the buildings related to hops, whose mellow brickwork seemed to have been stained by a hundred harvests.

Bentley, the first village in Hampshire, seemed[90] hardly more than a denser gathering, and all on the right hand, of the houses that had been scattered along since Farnham, with the addition of two inns and of a green which a brooklet crosses and turns into a pond at the road’s edge. After Bentley the road ascended, the place of houses was taken by trees, chiefly lines of beeches connected with several embowered mansions at some distance, one of pale stone, one of dark brick. Several rookeries inhabited these beeches. Froyle House, perhaps the chief in this neighbourhood, stood near where the road is highest, and yet closest to the river—a many-gabled pale house next to a red church tower among elms and black-flamed cypresses. Up to the church and house a quarter of a mile of grass mounted, with some isolated ancient thorns and many oaks, which in one spot near the road gathered together into a loose copse. The park itself ran with not too conspicuous or regular a boundary into hop gardens and ploughland. A low wall on a bank separated it from the road, and where a footpath had to pass the wall the stile was a slab of stone pierced by two pairs of foot-holes, approached up the bank by three stone steps. It was here, and at eleven, that I first heard the chiffchaff saying, “Chiff-chaff, chiff-chaff, chiff-chaff, chiff!” A streamlet darted out of the park towards the Wey, and on the other side[91] of the road, and below it, had to itself a little steep coomb of ash trees. An oak had been felled on the coomb side, and a man was clearing the brushwood round it, but the small bird’s double note, almost as regular as the ticking of a clock, though often coming to an end on the first half, sounded very clear in the coomb. He sang as he flitted among the swaying ash tops in that warm, cloudy sun. I thought he sang more shrilly than usual, something distractedly. But I was satisfied. Nothing so convinces me, year after year, that Spring has come and cannot be repulsed, though checked it may be, as this least of songs. In the blasting or dripping weather which may ensue, the chiffchaff is probably unheard; but he is not silenced. I heard him on March 19 when I was fifteen, and I believe not a year has passed without my hearing him within a day or two of that date. I always expect him and always hear him. Not all the blackbirds, thrushes, larks, chaffinches, and robins can hide the note. The silence of July and August does not daunt him. I hear him yearly in September, and well into October—the sole Summer voice remaining save in memory. But for the wind I should have heard him yesterday. I went on more cheerfully, as if each note had been the hammering of a tiny nail into Winter’s coffin.

[92]

My road now had the close company of the railway, which had crossed the river. The three ran side by side on a strip not more than a quarter of a mile in breadth; but the river, small, and not far from its source, was for the most part invisible behind the railway. Close to the railway bank some gypsies had pitched a tent, betrayed by the scarlet frock of one of the children. But in a moment scarlet abounded. The hounds crossing road and railway in front of me were lost to sight for several minutes before they reappeared on the rising fields towards Binsted Wyck. The riders, nearly all in scarlet, kept coming in for ten minutes or so from all hands, down lanes, over sodden arable land, between hop gardens, past folded sheep. Backwards and forwards galloped the scarlet before the right crossing of the railway was taken. The fox died in obscurity two miles away.

How warm and sweet the sun was can be imagined when I say that it made one music of the horn-blowing, the lambs’ bleating, the larks’ singing, as I sat looking at Bonham’s Farm. This plain old brick house, with fourteen windows—two dormers—symmetrically placed, fronted the road down two or three hundred yards of straight, hedged cart track. It had spruce firs on the left, on the right[93] some beeches and a long barn roof stained ochre by lichens.

Then I came to Holybourne. It is a village built in a parallelogram formed by a short section of the main road, two greater lengths of parallel by-roads, and a cross road connecting these two. Froyle was of an equally distinct type, lying entirely on a by-road parallel to the main road, near the church and great house, as Bentley lay entirely on one side of the main road, half a mile from its church. Holybourne Church—Holy Rood—stands at the corner where the short cross road joins one of the side roads; where it joins the other is the Manor Farm. I turned up by the “White Hart” and the smithy and chestnut with which the village begins, and found the church. It is a flint and stone one, with a moderately sharp shingled spire that spreads out at the base. On the side away from the main road, that is northward, lies ploughland mixed with copse rising to the horizon, but, near by, a hop garden, an oast-house, a respectable, square, ivy-mantled farm-house possessing a fruit wall, a farmyard occupied by black pigs, and a long expanse of corrugated iron, roofing old whitestone sheds and outbuildings. Southward is a chalk-bottomed pond of clear water, containing two sallow islets, and bordered, where it touches the road, by[94] chestnuts, a lime, and an ivy-strangled spruce fir. This pond is not cut off in any way from the churchyard and all its tombstones of Lillywhites, Warners, Mays, Fidlers, Knights, Inwoods, and Burninghams. In the church I saw chiefly two things: the wall tablet to “George Penton, Brassfounder, Member of the Worshipful Company of Drapers, who resided in New Street Square, and whose remains were deposited in St. Bride’s parish church, London,” and a slender window decorated with tiny flowered discs of alternating blue and orange.

Holybourne’s shrubberies, and the beeches and elms of an overhanging rookery, shadowed and quieted the main road as if it had been private. Moreover, there was still some sun to help dapple the dust with light as well as leaf shadow. Nor was the wind strong, and what there was helped me.

Before the village had certainly ended, Alton had begun. Its grandest building was its first—the workhouse. It is an oblong brick building lying back behind its gardens, with a flat ivied front which is pierced by thirty-three windows, including dormers, placed symmetrically about a central door, and an oval stone tablet bearing the figures “1795.” It smacked of 1795 pure and simple; of the Eng[95]land which all the great men of the nineteenth century were born in and nearly all hated. Its ivy, its plain, honest face, and substantial body of mellow red brick, and that date, 1795, gave the workhouse a genial tranquillity which no doubt was illusory. From there to the end of Alton is one not quite straight or quite level street—Normandy Street and High Street—altogether a mile of houses and of shops (including the “Hop Poles,” the “Barley Mow,” and the “French Horn”) that supply everything a man needs, with the further advantage that if a man wants his hair cut he can have it done by Julius C?sar: the town brews beer, and even makes paper. It is a long and a low town, and the main street has no church in it until it begins to emerge on to the concluding green, called Robin Hood Butts.

I could have gone as well through Medstead as through Ropley to Alresford, but I went by the Ropley way, and first of all through Chawton. Here the road forks at a smithy, among uncrowded thatched cottages and chestnuts and beeches. The village is well aware of the fact that Jane Austen once dwelt in a house at the fork there, opposite the “Grey Friar.” I took the right hand road and had a climb of two miles, from 368 feet above sea level to 642 feet. This road ascended, parallel[96] to the railway, in a straight, narrow groove, and was fringed on both sides for some distance, up to and past the highest point, by hedgeless copses of oak and beech, hazel, thorn, and ivy. An old chalk pit among the trees had been used for depositing pots and pans, but otherwise the copses might never have been entered except by the chiffchaff that sang there, and seemed to own them. Once out in the open at Four Marks, I had spread out around me a high but not hilly desolation of gray grass, corrugated iron bungalows, and chicken-runs. I glided as fast as possible away from this towards the Winchester Downs beyond, not pausing even at the tenth milestone from Winchester to enjoy again that brief broadening on either hand of the rough wayside turf, sufficient to make a fair ground. Past the “Chequers” at Ropley Dean, and again past the “Anchor” towards Bishop’s Sutton, there are similar and longer broadenings; and on one of these two tramps were lying asleep, the one hid by hat and clothes, the other with clear outstanding pale profile, hands clasped over the fifth rib, and feet stuck up, like a carved effigy. I was as glad to see them sleeping in the sun as to hear the larks singing. I would have done the same if I had been somebody else.

Bishop’s Sutton, the next village, resembles Holy[97]bourne in the shrubberies with which it hushes the road. Passing the “Plough” and the “Ship” (kept by a man with the great Hampshire name of Port), I went into the church, which was decorated by the memorial tablets of people named Wright and an eighteenth century physician named William Cowper, and by daffodils and primroses arranged in moss and jam jars. Many dead flowers were littered about the floor. The churchyard was better, for it had a tree taller than the tower, and another lying prone alongside the road for children to play on, and very few tombstones. Of these few, one recorded the deaths of three children in 1827–1831, and furthermore thus boldly baffled the infidel,—
“Bold infidelity, turn pale and die.
Beneath this sod three infants’ ashes lie.
Say, are they lost or sav’d?
If Death’s by sin, they sinn’d, for they lie here:
If Heaven’s by works, in Heaven they can’t appear.
Ah, reason, how depraved!
Revere the Bible’s sacred page, for there the knot’s untied.”

The children were Oakshotts, a Hampshire name borne by a brook and a hanger near Hawkley.

The telegraph wires were whining as if for rain as I neared Alresford, having on my right hand the willowy course of the young Alre, and before me its sedgy, wide waters, Old Alresford pond. The road became Alresford by being lined for a third[98] of a mile downhill by cottages, inns, and shops. This is the whole town, except for one short, very broad turning half way along at the highest point, and opposite where the church stands bathed in cottages.

Alresford is an excellent little town, sad-coloured but not cold, and very airy. For not only does the main street descend from this point steeply west towards Winchester, but the broad street also descends northward, so that over the tops of the houses crossing the bottom of it and over the hidden Alre, are seen the airy highlands of Abbotsstone, Swarraton, and Godsfield. The towered flint church and the churchyard make almost as much of a town as Alresford itself, so numerous are the tombs of all the Wools, Keanes, Corderoys, Privetts, Cameses, Whitears, Norgetts, Dykeses, scattered among many small yew trees. At one side stand many headstones of French officers who had served Napoleon, but died in England about the time of Waterloo—Lhuille, Lavan, Garnier, Riouffe, and Fournier. Inside the church one of the most noticeable things is a tablet to one John Lake, who was born in 1691, died in 1759, and lies near that spot, waiting for the day of judgment. “Qualis erat,” says the inscription, “dies iste indicabit:” (“What manner of man he was that day will make[99] known.”) The writer of these words saved himself from lies and from trouble.

I looked in vain for any one bearing the name of the poet who praised Alresford pond—George Wither. Or, rather, he praised it as it was in the days when Thetis resorted thither and played there with her attendant fishes, and received crowns of flowers and beech leaves from the land nymphs at eve:—
“For pleasant was that pool, and near it then
Was neither rotten marsh nor boggy fen.
It was not overgrown with boist’rous sedge,
Nor grew there rudely then along the edge
A bending willow nor a prickly bush,
Nor broad-leaf’d flag, nor reed, nor knotty rush;
But here, well order’d, was a grove with bowers:
There grassy plots set round about with flowers.
Here you might through the water see the land
Appear, strow’d o’er with white or yellow sand.
Yon, deeper was it; and the wind by whiffs
Would make it rise and wash the little cliffs,
On which oft pluming sat, unfrightened than,
The gaggling wildgoose and the snow-white swan:
With all those flocks of fowls that to this day
Upon those quiet waters breed and play.
For though those excellences wanting be
Which once it had, it is the same that we
By transposition name the Ford of Arle;
And out of which along a chalky marl
That river trills, whose waters wash the fort
In which brave Arthur kept his royal court.”

[100]

—Which, being interpreted, means Camelot, or Winchester.

Yet Wither is one of the poets whom we can connect with a district of England and often cannot sunder from it without harm. Many other poets are known to have resided for a long or a short time in certain places; but of these a great many did not obviously owe much to their surroundings, and some of those that did, like Wordsworth, possessed a creative power which made it unnecessary that the reader should see the places, whatever the railway companies may say. Wordsworth at his best is rarely a local poet, and his earth is an “insubstantial fairy place.” But if you know the pond at Alresford before this poem, you add a secondary but very real charm to Wither; while, if you read the poem first, you are charmed, if at all, partly because you see that the pond exists, and you taste something of the human experience and affection which must precede the mention. To have met the poet’s name here would have been to furbish the charm a little.

The name of Norgett on a stone called up Oldhurst into my mind, a thatched house built of flints in the middle of oak woods not far off—ancient woods where the leaves of many Autumns whirled and rustled even in June. It was three miles from the hard road, and it used to seem that I had travelled[101] three centuries when at last I emerged from the oaks and came in sight of that little humped gray house and within sound of the pines that shadowed it. It had a face like an owl; it was looking at me. Norgett must have heard me coming from somewhere among the trees, for, as I stepped into the clearing at one side, he was at the other. I thought of Herne the Hunter on catching sight of him. He was a long, lean, gray man with a beard like dead gorse, buried gray eyes, and a step that listened. He hardly talked at all, and only after questions that he could answer quite simply. Speech was an interruption of his thoughts, and never sprang from them; as soon as he ceased talking they were resumed with much low murmuring and whistling—like that of the pine trees—to himself, which seemed the sound of their probings in the vast of himself and Nature. His was a positive, an active silence. It did me good to be with him, especially after I had learned to share it with him, instead of trying to get him to join in gossip. I say I shared it, but what I did and enjoyed was, apparently, to sleep as we walked. It was unpleasant to wake up, to go away from that cold, calm presence. Then, perhaps, I sneaked back for a talk with Mrs. Norgett, who was a little, busy woman with black needle eyes and a needle voice[102] like a wren’s, as thin and lively as a cricket; she knew everything that happened, and much that did not. But with him she also was silent.

These two had two daughters—and, in fact, I got to know them by staying with a friend three miles away, where one of the girls was a servant: she said that there were always woodcocks round Oldhurst, and her father would introduce me. It was several years since I had seen Norgett and Oldhurst, but a letter concerning these daughters brought them again before me,—

“Martha Norgett is dead. I suppose you remember her just as a stout, nervous girl, with uncomfortable manners, tow hair, face always as red as if she had been making toast, gray eyes rather scared but alarmingly frank, always rushing about the house noisily and apologetically at the same time; willing to do anything at any time for almost anybody, but especially for you, perhaps, when you stayed with us in Summer holidays. I am sure you could not tell me offhand how old she was. I can hear you saying, ‘Well, the country girls always look much older than you said they were. I suppose it is the responsibility, and they belong to an older, more primitive type. So I always have an instinct to treat them deferentially.... She might be twenty-three or -four—say,[103] eighteen. But then she was just the same fifteen years ago.... Thirty—thirty-five. That is absurd. I give it up.’...

“I will not tell you her age, but I want to give you something of Martha’s history, though it is now too late for the development of that instinct for treating her deferentially.

“The family has been in the parish since the beginning of the parish register, in 1597. I should say that 597 would be much nearer the date when they settled in that clearing among the oaks. Fifteen centuries is not much to a temperament like theirs, perhaps. But they will hardly see another fifteen: they have not adapted themselves. Martha and her sister Mary were old Norgett’s only children. I don’t think you ever saw Mary. You would have treated her deferentially. As bright and sweet as a chaffinch was Mary. She had small, warm brown eyes that seemed to be dissolving in a glow of amused pleasure at everything. Everybody and everything as a rule conspired to preserve the glow; but now and then—cruelly and very easily—drawing tears from them because then they were softer than ever, and one could not help smiling as one wiped the tears away, as if she had only cried for craft and prettiness. That was when she was seven or eight. For a year or so she[104] was always either laughing or crying. Visitors used to take delight in converting one into the other. They treated her like a bird. She had very thick and long, fine and dark brown hair—such beautiful and lustrous hair! I remember treating it as if it were alive, apart from her life, as if it were a wild creature living on her shoulders.

“She was considered rather a stupid child. Some people seem to regard animals as rather stupid human beings never blessed with spectacles and baldness—it was they who called her stupid. She never said anything wise. Usually she laughed when she spoke, and you could hardly make out the words: to try to read a meaning of an accustomed sort into her speech was little better than making a translation from a brook’s song or a bird’s song; for in her case also it really meant translating from an unknown tongue. Everybody gave her presents. She had as many dolls as the cat had kittens. She was fond of people, but she seemed fonder of these, and, seeing her, I used to smile and think of the words: ‘Ye shall serve gods the work of men’s hands, wood and stone, which neither see, nor hear, not eat, nor smell.’

“There were a hundred differences between her and Martha. Martha had but one doll. It was an old stiff wooden doll, cut by the keeper for his[105] first-born, and never clothed. Martha kept it in the wood-lodge, and would not have it in the house, but went to look at it just once at morning and once at night, and never missed doing so. She did not play with Mary’s, though as maid-of-all-work, bustling about seriously and untidily, often breaking and upsetting things, she treated them with immense reverence, putting them safely away in a sitting posture when their mistress was tired of them and left them on chairs, in the hearth, or on the table—anywhere. Nobody supposed that Martha cared anything for her solitary wooden idol, and if you inquired after it she only looked awkwardly into your face with those pale eyes and said nothing, or perhaps asked you if you would like to see Mary’s newest one. She was always busy, they could not keep her from work; she was strong, and never ailed or complained. If a baby was brought to the house, to see Mary’s delicate ways with it was worth a journey; surrounding it with dolls, and giving herself up to it and taking good care of it, while Martha slipped away and was not to be seen. Mary was tenderest hearted, and could never pass carelessly by anything like a calf’s head thrust out of a hole in a dark shed into the sun. As for Martha she was too busy, though of course she would run to the town, if need were, to fetch a vet.

[106]

“Mary was not nearly so strong, but she continued to grow in grace and charm. At seventeen I think she was the loveliest human being of her sex that I ever saw. I say of her sex, because she was so absolutely and purely a woman that she seemed a species apart, even to me a mystery; every position of her, every attitude, action, everything she did and did not do, proclaimed her a woman newly created out of the elements which but yesterday made her a child, an animal or bird in human form. Many would have liked to marry her. Her round soft chin, her rather long, and not too thin, smiling mouth, her living hair, her wild eyes, won her lovers wherever she was seen. And yet I had a feeling that she would not marry.... However, I came back from Italy one year to find her married to a young farmer near Alton.

“Martha had already been with us for some years. When Mary began to have babies Martha was over at the farm as often as possible. Mary grew paler and thinner, but not less beautiful, and hardly less gay and childlike. She did as she pleased—always perfectly dressed, while others, and, above all, Martha, busied themselves in a hundred ways for her and her baby. Now that she was obviously delicate as well as beautiful, her hair looked more than ever like a wild life of some kind[107] affectionately attached to her. Martha worked harder for her, if that were possible, than for us. I have heard her panting away as she swept the stairs and sometimes sighing, too, but never stopping for that luxury, and her sister would call out and laughingly chide her for it, to which she replied with another laugh, not ceasing to pant or to sweep. Mary was adored by her husband.

“Few men, I should say, took notice of Martha. She was very abrupt with them, and had nothing to say if they spoke out of a wish to be agreeable. Now and then she reported some advance—a soldier, for example, offered to carry her parcels home for her at night; but as soon as they turned from the high road into our dark lane she found an excuse, swept up all the parcels into her arms and was off without a word. Another time she allowed herself to be taken home on several evenings by a young man whose real sweetheart was away for a time: he had told her the fact, and politely asked if she would like him to take her home in the interval. What Martha wanted was a baby. She was the laughing-stock of the kitchen for confessing it. She did not mind: she stitched away at baby’s underclothing which all went for her sister’s infants, but was meant for her own. She once bought a cradle at an auction sale—do you[108] feel deferential now? Yet one man she put off by telling him she already had a lover.

“Did you ever hear of her one dream? She came in and told us in great excitement that she had had a dream. She said, ‘It was as plain as plain, and all the family were eating boiled potatoes with their fingers except me. Law, mum, that ever I should have dreamed such a thing.’... She blushed that the family should have been put to shame in a dream of hers.

“At last we heard that she had a lover. Her fellow servants accused her of doing the courting, and he was younger than she. She was not impatient, even now. When she heard that we were to move in a year’s time, she made up her mind that she must go to the new house and see what it was like living there. ‘He’s not so bad,’ she said quietly. ‘Father and mother think the world of him. It’s not love. Oh, no! I’m too old for that, and I won’t have any nonsense. But he says he’ll marry me. We shall love after that, maybe; but if not, there’ll be the children. We shall have a nice little home. Charley has bought a mirror, and he is saving up for a ring with a real stone in it.’ And so she went on soberly, yet perhaps madly.

“We moved, and Martha with us. She had to wait still longer, because Mary was expecting[109] another child. Mary was not so well as usual. She was very thin, and yet looked in a way younger than ever. Martha left us to devote herself to her sister. I went over once or twice: I wish now it had been oftener. Martha looked the same as ever. Mary grew still more frail, until, in a ghastly way, you could not see her body for her soul, as the poet says. Her husband being called away left her confidently in Martha’s hands.

“The nearest doctor was five miles off. She had to go for him suddenly in a night of winter thunder. The whole night was up in arms, the black clouds and the woods, the noises of a great wind and thunder trying to get the better of one another, and the rain drowning the lightning as if it had been no more than an eel in a dirty pond, and drowning thunder and the wind at last. When Martha reached the doctor’s house he was out. She found another, and having meekly delivered her message was gone before the man could offer to drive her back with him; but the horse was so helpless in the stormy, steep, crooked roads among the woods that he expected to find her there before him. When he arrived Mary was delirious, speaking of her sister, whom she seemed to see approaching and at last coming into the room; she cried out, ‘Martha!’ and never spoke again. Martha had not returned.[110] The cowman found her lying on her face in the mire by a gateway, stopped in her swift, clumsy running by heart-failure, dead. Poor old Martha! but I have no doubt she was quite happy making for that green blind upstairs in her sister’s house, hastening half asleep, and only waking up as she stumbled over the stile. The world misses her—and her children.”

I had never met the surname before, and here upon a stranger’s tombstone it called up Martha like a mysterious incantation.

The tune of the telegraph wires became sadder, and I pushed on with the purpose of getting as far as possible before the rain fell. The road out of Alresford is dignified by a long avenue of elms, with a walk between, lining it on the right as far as the gate of Arlebury House. Opposite the last of the trees it was a pleasure to see on a wayside plot, where elms mingled with telegraph posts, a board advertising building sites, but leaning awry, mouldy, and almost illegible. Then the road went under the railway and bent south-westwards, while I turned to the right to follow a byway along the right bank of the Itchen, where there was a village every two or three miles, and I could be sure of shelter. The valley, a flat-bottomed marshy one, was full of drab-tufted grasses and new-leafed[111] willows, and pierced by straight, shining drains. The opposite bank rose up rather steeply, and was sometimes covered with copse, sometimes carved by a chalk pit; tall trees with many mistletoe boughs grew on top. I got to Itchen Abbas, its bridge, mill, church, and “Plough,” all in a group, when the rain was beginning. I had not gone much further when it became clear that the rain was to be heavy and lasting, and I took shelter in a cart-lodge. There I was joined by a thatcher and a deaf and dumb labourer. The thatcher would talk of nothing but the other man, having begun by explaining that he could not be expected to say “Good-afternoon.” The deaf man sat on the straw and watched us. He was the son of a well-to-do farmer, but had left home because he did not get enough money and was in other ways imposed on. He had now been at the same farm thirty years. He was a good workman, understanding by signs what he had to do. Moreover, he could read the lips, though how he learnt—for he could neither read nor write—I do not know! Probably, said the thatcher, he knows what we are saying now. At half-past three the horses came in for the day. They had begun at half-past six; so, said the thatcher, “they don’t do a man’s work.” So we talked while the horses were stabled, and rain fell[112] and it thundered, if not to the tune of “Greensleeves,” at least to that of blackbirds’ songs.

The sky was full and sagging, but actually rained little, when I started soon after four, and went on through the four Worthys,—on my left the low sweep of Easton Down, and the almost windowless high church wall among elms between it and the river; and on my right, arable country and pewits tumbling over it. Worthy Park, a place of lawns and of elms and chestnuts, adorned the road with an avenue of very branchy elms. At King’s Worthy, just beyond, I might have crossed over and taken the shortest way to Salisbury, that is to say, by Stockbridge. But, except at Stockbridge itself, there is hardly a house on the twenty miles of road, and either one inn or two. Evidently the sky could not long contain itself, and as I knew enough of English inns to prefer not arriving at one wet through, I determined to take the Roman road through Headbourne Worthy to Winchester. This brought me through a region of biggish houses, shrubberies, rookeries, motor cars, and carriages, but also down to a brook and a withy bed, and Headbourne Worthy’s little church and blunt shingled spire beside it. The blackbirds were singing their best in the hawthorns as I was passing, and in the puddles they were bathing before singing.[113] Winchester Cathedral appeared and disappeared several times, and above it, slightly to the left, St. Catherine’s smooth hill and beechen crown. In one of these views I saw what I had never before noticed, that the top of the cathedral tower is apparently higher than the top of St. Catherine’s Hill.

Through the crowd of Winchester High Street I walked, and straight out by the West Gate and the barracks uphill. I meant to use the Romsey road as far as Ampfield, and thence try to reach Dunbridge. The sky was full of rain, though none was falling. It was a mile before I could mount, and then, for some way, the road was accompanied on the right by yew trees. Between these trees I could see the low, half-wooded Downs crossed by the Roman road to Sarum and by hardly any other road. The most insistent thing there was the Farley Tower, perched on a barrow at one of the highest points, to commemorate not the unknown dead but a horse called Beware Chalkpit, who won a race in 1734 after having leaped into a chalkpit in 1733. The eastern scene was lovelier: the clear green Downs above Twyford, Morestead, and Owslebury, four or five miles away; and then the half wooded green wall of Nan Trodd’s Hill which the road curves under to Hursley. But, first, I[114] had to dip down to Pitt Village, which is a small cluster of thatched cottages, mud walls, and beech trees, with a pond and a bright white chalk pit, all at the bottom of a deep hollow. I climbed out of it and glided down under Nan Trodd’s Hill and its black yews, divided from the road only by a gentle rise of arable; and so, betwixt a similar but slighter yew-crowned rise and the oaks of Hursley Park, I approached Hursley. The first thing was a disused pump on the right, with an ivy-covered shelter and a fixed lamp; but before the first house there was a beech copse, and after that a farm and its attendant ricks and cottages, and at length the village. A single row of houses faced the park and its rookery beeches through a parallel row of pollard limes; but the centre was a double row of neat brick and timber houses, both old and new, a smithy, a doctor’s, and a “King’s Head” and “Dolphin.” Here also stood the spired church, opposite a branching of roads. At the beginning, middle, and end of the village, gates led into Hursley Park. And I think it was here that I saw the last oast-house in Hampshire.

Immediately after passing the fifth milestone from Winchester I turned with the Romsey road south-west instead of keeping on southward to Otterbourne. It was now darkening and still. I[115] was on a low moist road overhung by oak trees, through which I saw, on the right, a mile away, the big many-windowed Hursley House among its trees. The road had obviously once had wide grassy margins. The line of the old hedge was marked, several yards within a field on the right, by the oaks, the primroses, and the moss, growing there and not beyond: in a wood that succeeded, it was equally clear. The primroses glimmered in the dank shadow of the trees, where the old hedge had been, and round the water standing in old wayside pits. In one place on the left, by Ratlake, the fern and gorse looked like common. Nobody was using the road except the blackbirds and robins. Hardly a house was to be seen. It might have been the edge of the New Forest. If the road could have gone on so, with no more rise and fall, for ever, I think I should have been content. The new church and its pine, and cypress, and laurel, intruded but did not break the charm. More to my taste was the pond on the other side; gorse came to its edge, oaks stood about it, and dabchicks were diving in its unrippled surface. The “White Hart” farther on tempted me. It lay rather below the road on the left, behind the yellow courtyard and the signboard, forming a quadrangle with the stables and sheds on either side. The pale walls[116] and the broad bay window on the ground floor offered “Accommodation for Cyclists.” But I did not stop, perhaps because Ampfield House on the other side took away my thoughts from inns. This was an ivy-mantled brick house, like two houses side by side, not very far back from the road; its high blossoming fruit wall bounded the road. Travelling so easily, I was loth to dismount, and on the signpost on the right, near the third milestone from Romsey, I read MSBURY without thinking of Timsbury, which lay on my way to Dunbridge. I glided on for half a mile before thinking better of it, and turning back, discovered my mistake. Here I entered a gravelly, soft road among trees. I should have done well to put up in one of the woodmen’s shelters here under the oaks. These huts were frames of stout green branches thatched with hazel peelings and walled with fagots. One was built so that an oak divided its entrance in two, and against the tree was fastened a plain wooden contrivance for gripping and bending wood. Inside, it had other hurdlemaker’s implements—a high wooden horse for gripping and bending, and a low wooden table. White peelings were thickly strewn around the huts. The floor showed likewise such signs of life as cigarette ends, match-boxes, and a lobster’s claw. On Saturday evening[117] a marsh-tit and a robin alone seemed to have anything to do with them. Nevertheless I went contentedly on between mossy banks, hedges of beech, rhododendrons, and woodlands of oak, beech, and larch, which opened out in one place to show me the fern and pine of Ganger Common. The earth was quiet, dark, and beautiful. The owl was beginning to hunt over the fields, while the blackbird finished his song. Pleasant were the yellow road, the roadside bramble and brier hoops, the gravel pits and gorse at corners. But the sky was wild, threatening the earth both with dark clouds impending and with momentary wan gleams between them, angrier than the clouds. Some rain sprinkled as I dipped down between roadside oaks and a narrow orchard to Brook Farm. Here the road forded a brook, and a lane turned off, with a gravelly bluff on one side, farmyard and ricks on the other. Up in the pale spaces overhead Venus glared like a madman’s eye. Yet the rain came to nothing, and for a little longer the few scattered house lights appearing and disappearing in the surrounding country were mysteriously attractive. And then arrived complete darkness and rain together, as I reached the turning where I could see the chimney stack of Michelmersh. I tried the “Malt House” on the left. They could not give me a bed because[118] “the missus was expecting some friends.” I pushed on against wind and rain to the “Bear and Ragged Staff,” a bigger inn behind a triangle of rushy turf and a walnut tree. “Accommodation for Cyclists” was announced, which I always used to assume meant that there was a bed; but it does not. It was raining, hailing, and blowing furiously, but they could not give me a bed because they were six in family: no, not any sort of a bed. They directed me to the “Mill Arms” at Dunbridge. Crossing the Test by Kim Bridge Mill, the half-drowned fields smelt like the sea. The mill-house windows shone above the double water plunging away into blackness. Then, for a space, when I had turned sharply north-westward the wind helped me. Actually I was now at the third inn. They were polite and even smiling, but they informed me that I could by no means have a bed, seeing that the lady and gentleman from somewhere had all the beds. Nor could they tell me of a bed anywhere, because it was Easter and people with a spare room mostly had friends. Luckily a train was just starting which would bear me away from Dunbridge to Salisbury. I boarded it, and by eight o’clock I was among the people who were buying and selling fish and oranges to the accompaniment of much chaffing, but no bad temper, in Fish Row. And,[119] soon, though not at once, I found a bed and a place to sit and eat in, and to listen to the rain breaking over gutters and splashing on to stones, and pipes swallowing rain to the best of their ability, and signboards creaking in the wind; and to reflect on the imperfection of inns and life, and on the spirit’s readiness to grasp at all kinds of unearthly perfection such, for instance, as that which had encompassed me this evening before the rain. At that point a man entered whom I slowly recognized as the liberator of the chaffinch on Good Friday. At first I did not grasp the connection between this dripping, indubitably real man and the wraith of the day before. But he was absurdly pleased to recognize me, bowing with a sort of uncomfortable graciousness and a trace of a cockney accent. His expression changed in those few moments from a melancholy and too yielding smile to a pale, thin-lipped rigidity. I did not know whether to be pleased or not with the reincarnation, when he departed to change his clothes.

This Other Man, as I shall call him, ate his supper in silence, and then adjusted himself in the armchair, stretching himself out so that all of him was horizontal except his head. He was smoking a cigarette dejectedly, for he had left his pipe behind at Romsey. I offered him a clay pipe. No;[120] he would not have it. They stuck to his lips, he said. But he volunteered to talk about clay pipes, and the declining industry of manufacturing them. He seemed to know all about ten-inch and fifteen-inch pipes, from the arrival of the clay out of Cornwall in French gray blocks to the wetting of the clay and the beating of it up with iron rods; the rough first moulding of the pipes by hand, and the piercing of the stems; the baking in moulds, the scraping of rough edges by girls, down to the sale of the pipes in the two months round about Christmas to Aldershot, Portsmouth, and such places. These longer pipes, at any rate, have become chiefly ceremonious and convivial, though personally I have hardly ever seen them smoked except by literary people under thirty. No wonder that in one of the principal factories only one artist is left, as the Other Man declared, to pierce the stems with unerring thrust. It seemed to him wonderful that even one man could be found to push a wire up the core of a long thin stick of clay. He had never himself been able to avoid running the wire out at the side before reaching the end. The great man who always succeeded had once made him a pipe with five bowls.

He could not tell me why the industry is decaying. But two causes seem at least to have contributed.[121] First, a great many of the men who used to smoke clays smoke cheap cigarettes. Second, those who have not taken to cigarettes smoke briar pipes. Cigarettes appear to give less trouble than pipes. Any one, drunk or sober, can light them and keep them alight. They can be put out at any moment and returned to the cigarette case or tucked behind the ear. Also, it is held by snobs as well as by haters of foul pipes that cigarettes are more genteel, or whatever the name is of our equivalent vice. But if a pipe is to be smoked, the briar is believed to cast some sort of faint credit on the smoker which the clay does not. That Tennyson used clays probably now only influences a small number of young men—and that but for a year or two—of a class that would not take to clays as a matter of course. A few others of the same class begin in imitation of labourer, sailor, or gamekeeper, with whom they have come in exhilarating contact; and, in turn, others imitate them. The habit so gained, however, is not likely to endure. Nearly every one sheds it, either because he really does not enjoy it, or he has for some reason to keep it in abeyance too long for it to be resumed, or he supposes himself to be conspicuous and prefers not to be.

In the first place he may have been moved partly by a desire to be conspicuous, to signalize his[122] individuality by a visible symbol, but such can seldom be a conscious motive with the most self-conscious of men. For some years I met plenty of youths of my own age who were experimenting with clay pipes, nervously colouring small thorny ones, or lying back and making of themselves cushions for long churchwardens, or carrying the bowl of a two-inch pipe upside down like a navvy. But I was never much tempted myself until I went to live permanently in the country. As I was pretty frequently walking at lunch time I took that meal at an inn, and one day remembering that as a child I had got clays from a publican for nothing I asked for one with my beer, and got it. I shall not pretend that this pipe was in any way remarkable, for I have no recollection of it. All I know is that it was not the last. Most, if not all, of my briar pipes at the time were foul. I took more and more to smoking clay pipes when I was alone or where it would not attract attention.

It was not long before I made the discovery that there are clays and clays. Those given away or sold for a halfpenny by innkeepers between the North and South Downs were usually thin and straight, sometimes embellished with a design in relief, particularly with a horned head and the initial letters of the Royal Antediluvian Order of[123] Buffaloes. Many and many a one of these mere smoking utensils was broken very soon in my teeth or in my pocket, or discarded because I did not like the feel or look of it, or simply because it was an unnecessary addition to my supply. For a time I could and did smoke almost anything, fortified possibly by a feeling (though I cannot recall it) that the custom was worth persisting in. At any rate it was persisted in.

If I pursued singularity I was not blindfold. Not many weeks were occupied in learning that thin clays were useless, or were not for me. They began by burning my tongue, and they were very soon bitten through. On the other hand, thickness alone was not sufficient. For example, Irish pipes up to a third of an inch thick were as rapidly bitten through as the harder thin clays. It was necessary to fit them with mouth-pieces connected by a tin band, and since these would corrode, I refused them. Even a clay that was hard as well as thick was not therefore faultless. I kept one for several years, at intervals trying to make terms with it on account of its good shape—the bowl set at more than a right angle to the stem, and adorned with a conventional ribbed leaf underneath—but always in vain; the clay, being hard after the manner of flint, gritted on the teeth[124] and was no sweeter at the tenth than at the first pipe.

Wherever I went I bought a clay pipe or two. The majority were indifferent. Only after a time was the goodness of the good ones manifest, and by then I might be a hundred miles away from the shop, if I had not forgotten where it came from. These I did everything to preserve. Some of them went through the purification of fire a score of times before they came to an end by falling or, which was rare, by being worn too short. They had the great virtue of being hard, without being stony. They resembled bone in their close grain, sometimes being as smooth as if glazed. But I had little to do with the glazed “colouring” clays. They stank, and I was not ambitious except of achieving a cool, everlasting, and perfectly shaped pipe.

How to use the fire on a foul pipe was learnt by very slow degrees. Many a good pipe cracked or flaked in the flames. They had, I was at last to discover, been too suddenly submitted to great heat. If it was done gradually, the fiercest heat could be and should be imposed on them: they lay pinkish white in the heart of the fire until they possessed more than their original purity. A few of the best would emerge with almost an old ivory hue all over. Some I remember breaking when they had come[125] safely out and were nearly cool, by tapping them to shake out the fur. Most of them were toughened as well as sweetened in the process.

How very rare were those good pipes! Probably I did not find more than one in twelve months, though I bought scores. I was continually trying Irish clays in a stupid hope that they would not be bitten through. The best pipe in the majority of shops was merely one that was not bad. It did not burn much; it was not bitten through until it was just reaching its ripeness.

Perhaps I should have remembered more varieties of goodness and badness had I not twelve months ago met a perfect clay pipe. It is so hard that I have only once bitten one through, yet it is soft to the teeth and tongue. Nor is it very thick; the bowl in particular I should have been inclined at first sight to condemn as too thin. It is smooth, in fact polished. Its shape is graceful; the stem slightly curved, slightly flattened, but thickening and developing roundness where it becomes rather than joins the bowl, into which it flows so as to form something like a calabash. There are other shapes of this excellent material.

This perfect clay pipe came from a shop at Oxford. A month later I bought some of the same kind, but an inferior shape, at Melksham.[126] Everywhere else I have looked in vain for them. I have never seen any one else smoking them who had not got them from me.

Tastes differ, but in this matter I cannot believe that any one capable of distinguishing one clay from another would deny this one’s excellence.

The Other Man cared nothing for the matter. He awoke from the stupor to which he had been reduced by listening, and asked,—

“Did you see that weather-vane at Albury in the shape of a pheasant? or the fox-shaped one by the ford at Butts Green? or the pub with the red shield and the three tuns and three pairs of wheatsheaves for a sign?”

“No,” I answered, adding what I could remember about the horse’s head over the corn chandler’s at Epsom. The Other Man had seen this, and also a similar one of white wood over a saddler’s at Dorking. He reminded me also of what I was engaged in forgetting—that Shalford had an inn called the “Sea-Horse,” and a signboard of a sea-horse with a white head and a fish-like body covered in azure scales. He said it was a better sea-horse than those over the Admiralty gates in Whitehall. Continuing, he asked me why it was that the chief inn of a town was so frequently the “Swan.” It was at Leatherhead. It was at[127] Charing in Kent—I knew that. It was at a score of other places which I have forgotten. Nor could I remember a sufficient number of “Lions,” “Eagles,” and “Dolphins” to oppose him. Had I, was his next question, seen the “Ship” at Bishop’s Sutton, which had a signboard with a steamer on one side and a sailing ship on the other? And not long after this I was asleep.