Not far from “The White Horse” is a little town upon a stream that waves myriads of reeds and tall purple flowers of hemp agrimony. These are the last shops I am likely to pass in Wiltshire, and it occurs to me that I should like to taste lardy cakes—which I last bought in Wroughton fifteen years ago—before I leave the county. Richard Jefferies’ grandfather was “My Lord Lardy Cake” in old Swindon sixty years ago, and his memory is kept alive by those tough, sweet slabs of larded pastry which, in his generous ovens, gathered all the best essences of the other cakes, pies, tarts and joints which were permitted to be baked with them. In “Amaryllis at the Fair” they are mentioned with some indignity as a ploughboy’s delicacy. My lips water for them, and at the first bakery in —— I ask for some. The baker tells me he has sold the last one. He is a small, white-haired and white-bearded man with an expression of unctuous repose, assuredly a pillar of his chapel and possibly its treasurer, and though he himself will, by his own telling, have no more lardy cakes until the next morning, he stiffly tries to persuade me that none of his fellow-townsmen bakes them. I disbelieve the man of dough for all his conscious look of sagacity and virtue, and am rewarded for my disbelief by four lardy cakes for threepence-halfpenny not many yards from his accursed threshold. Lardy cakes, I now discover for the first time,[246] have this merit besides their excellent taste and provision of much pleasant but not finical labour for the teeth, that one is enough at a time, and that four will, therefore, take a man quite a long way upon the roads of England. At the next inn three labourers and the landlord are heated in conversation about some one not present.
“Quite right,” says one, a sober carter whose whip leans against the counter, “’tis the third time this week that a tramp has been to his door, and by the looks of them they didn’t call for naught.”
“One of them didn’t, I know,” says the landlord. “He came in here once and asked for a job and left without a drink, but after he’d been to Stegbert’s Cottage he came straight here and ordered a pint of mild. And I heard as he let a chap and a woman sleep two nights running in that rough patch behind the house. Don’t you think the parson ought to hear of that? And what does he do for a living? He looks poor enough himself.”
“I don’t know. Mr. Jones is a kind-hearted fellow. He stopped my youngest in the street the other day and gave her a penny and measured her hair, and told her she’d have a yard of it some day. They tell me he hasn’t a carpet on the floor anywhere, and no parlour, and not even a chest of drawers; and the postman says he hasn’t a watch or a clock. What does he do with himself?”
“I reckon he’s mad,” says the third, chuckling, “and I don’t mind if he is. My old dog doesn’t need feeding at home since he’s been here. He doesn’t eat no meat himself neither. The widow Nash was reckoning it up, and she says he spends four shillings a week——”
“And a shilling here regular,” interjects the landlord.
[247]
“On groceries, including one-and-six for tobacco. He has four loaves, and I know ‘Kruger’ must have more than half of them.”
“And every other week he buys a postal order for two shillings and a penny stamp——”
“Pint of mild, mister,” says a tall blear-eyed man who comes in, meekly followed by a small woman, dusty and in rags but neat, to whom he offers the tankard after nearly draining it himself.
“Nice weather,” he ventures, smacking his lips.
“Yes,” says the landlord discouragingly, and the carter leaves.
“Everybody seems to be gone to the flower show,” continues the intruder, “and that’s where I’m going” (here he looks at his boots), “but the best way for sore feet is three days in a tap-room in some good sawdust.”
The wife sighs.
“The fat woman that weighs twenty-three stone,” says her husband to the company, “is a cousin of mine twice removed, and I have done a bit in the show line myself. It’s a rum business. Better than working in a brewery stables, though. Me and my mate had to go because we got up so early that we burnt too many candles.”
The mention of the fat woman rouses the labourers, and one says—
“They say them fat women eats hardly anything at all.”
“Very small eater is Daisy. But you see her food does her good. None of it’s wasted.”
“That’s it. Her food agrees with her.”
The wife sighs.
“Now there’s my missus here,” says the husband.[248] “She was one of these pretty gallus dancing-girls who get their fifteen shillings a week. Her food don’t nourish her. Now my brother used to laugh in publics for a pint and he would laugh till they gave him a pint to stop.”
“Oh, I can laugh after a pint,” says the wife, “but then I could just as easy cry, I worries so. There’s many a aching heart goes up and down that Great Western Railway in the express trains.”
“I never worries, missus,” says a labourer with pursy mouth, short pipe, and head straight up behind from his neck.
“Quite right,” says the husband. “My old girl here lives on the fat of the land and is always thin. Her food don’t nourish her. There’s more harm done in the world by a discontented gut than anything else. I think of asking her to try living on her pipe by itself.”
“Like Mr. Jones over there,” says one of the labourers.
“Mr. Jones? What, my friend Mr. William Jones?” asks the tall man.
“Is he a friend of yours?” asks the landlord, curiosity overpowering his natural caution with a man who is selling spectacles at a shilling a pair.
“He is, and I don’t mind letting any one know it. I’m very glad to see him settled down. He’s the only one along the road who hasn’t gone to the flower show to-day.” Here the tall man calls for another tankard, which, as he is doing all the talking, he does not pass to the small neat woman behind him. Pleased to be civilly used, and warmed by the liquor, he tells the story of his friend, the little woman helping him out, and landlord and labourers adding some touches; and Mr. Jones him[249]self completed the picture during my few days in the village.
The man who fed his neighbour’s dog, and sent the beggar satisfied away, and made presents to the children, and lived on six ounces of tobacco a week, is a native of Zennor in Cornwall. “Wonderful place for pedlars is Cornwall. The towns are so few and far between that the people along the road aren’t used to pedlars, and when you do call you are sure of the best of treatment.” He was apprenticed to a shoemaker in a town in South Devon, and for a time practised his trade there as an assistant. He was very clever at boxing and wrestling, and a hard fighter, too, though unwilling to make a quarrel. But he was a queer youth and took violent likes and dislikes to men, and one day he dropped a boot and went out into the street and took a young gentleman by the arm and said to him: “Excuse me, sir, you have passed this shop for five years nearly every day and I can’t stand it any longer.” Whereupon he gave that young gentleman a beating. He was sent to prison; he lost his employment and went to sea. And at sea or else in foreign countries he stayed six years. He left the sea only because he broke an arm which had at length to be amputated above the elbow. He was a changed man and many thought then that he was mad. When he left the hospital it was December and bitter weather: he had only five shillings and it was notorious how he spent it. Every day for a week he bought three loaves of bread and went out and fed the birds with them. When that week was over he had to go into the workhouse, and there he sta............