Part 4 (1/2)
Jonathan's hard head withstood even the whirl of the days when corn was at famine prices. But these careful economies, this continual saving, put more money in his purse than all that sudden flush of prosperity. Every groat thus saved was as a nail driven into an oak, fixed and stable, becoming firmer as time went on. How strangely different the farmers of to-day, with a score of machines and appliances, with expensive feeding-stuffs, with well-furnished villas!
Each one of Jonathan's beans in his quart mug, each one of the acorns in his pocket became a guinea.
Jonathan's hat was made to measure on his own special block by the hatter in Overboro' town, and it was so hard and stout that he could sit upon it without injury. His top-boots always hung near the fireplace, that they might not get mouldy; and he rode into market upon his 'short-tail horse,' as he called his crop-tail nag. A farmer was nothing thought of unless he wore top-boots, which seemed a distinguis.h.i.+ng mark, as it were, of the equestrian order of agriculture.
But his shoes were made straight; not as now one to each foot--a right and left--but each exactly alike; and he changed his shoes every morning, wearing one on one foot one day and on the other the next, that they might not get worn to either foot in particular. Shoes lasted a great length of time in those days, the leather being all tanned with oak bark only, and thoroughly seasoned before it was cut up. There is even a story of a farmer who wore his best shoes every Sunday for seven years in Sundays--fifty years--and when he died had them buried with him, still far from worn out.
A traveller once returned from America--in those days a very far-off land--and was recounting the wonders he had seen, and among them how the folk there used sleighs, not only for driving in but for the removal of heavy goods. But Jonathan did not think it strange, since when he was young wheeled vehicles were not so common. He had himself seen loads of hay drawn home on 'sleds' from English meadows, and could tell where a 'sled' had last been used. There were aged men living about the hamlet in his day--if that could be called a hamlet in which there were barely a score of people, all told--who could recollect when the first waggon came to The Idovers. At all events, they pointed out a large field, called the Conigers, where it was taken to turn it round; for it was constructed in so primitive a style that the forewheels would not pa.s.s under the body, and thus required a whole field to turn in.
At that date folk had no banking accounts, but kept their coin in a strong chest under the bed, sometimes hiding it in strange places.
Jonathan was once visiting a friend, and after they had hobn.o.bbed a while the old fellow took him, with many precautions that they should not be observed, into the pig-sty and showed him fifty guineas hid in the thatch. That was by no means all his property, but the old fellow said, with a wink, that he liked to have a little h.o.a.rd of his own that his wife knew nothing about.
Some land being put up for sale, after biddings by the well-to-do residents, an old dealer in a very small way, as was supposed, bid above them all. The company looked upon him with contempt, and his offer was regarded as mere folly; but he produced a nail-bag from under his coat and counted out the money. A nail-bag is made of the coa.r.s.est of all kinds of sacking. In this manner the former generation, eschewing outward show, collected their money coin by coin, till at last they became substantial men and owners of real estate. So few were the conveniences of life that men had often to leave the road and cross several fields out of their way to light their pipes at a burning couch-heap or lime-kiln.
They prided themselves then in that hill district that they had neither a cow nor a poor married man in the parish. There was no cow, because it was entirely a corn-growing place. The whole resident population was not much over a score, and of the labourers they boasted not one was married. For in those old times each parish kept its own poor, and consequently disliked an increase of the population.
The farmers met in vestry from time to time to arrange for the support of the surplus labour; the appearance of a fresh family would have meant a fresh tax upon them. They regarded additional human beings as an inc.u.mbrance.
The millers sent their flour round the country then on packhorses; waggons and carts were not so common as now, while the ways, when you once quitted the main road, were scarcely pa.s.sable. Even the main roads were often in such a state that foot-pa.s.sengers could not get along, but left the road and followed a footpath just inside the hedge. Such footpaths ran beside the roads for miles; here and there in country places a short section of such tracks may still be found.
'Pack-roads,' too, may be occasionally met with, retaining their designation to this day. It was the time of the great wars with the First Napoleon; and the poor people, as the wheat went up to famine prices, were often in a strait for bread. When the miller's packhorse appeared the cottagers crowded round and demanded the price: if it had risen a penny, the infuriated mob of women would sometimes pull the miller's boy off the horse and duck him in the village pond.
The memory of those old times is still vivid in farmhouses, and at Hilary's I have myself handled old Jonathan's walking-staff, which he and his father before him used in traversing on foot those perilous roads. It was about five feet long, perhaps more, an inch and a half in diameter, and shod with an iron ferrule and stout spike. With this he could prod the sloughs and ascertain their depth, or use it as a leaping-pole; and if threatened by st.u.r.dy rogues whirl it about their heads as a quarter-staff.
Wars and famines were then terrible realities--men's minds were full of them, and superst.i.tion flourished. The foggers and shepherds saw signs in the sky and read the stars. Down at Lucketts' Place one winter's night, when folk almost fancied they could hear the roar of Napoleon's cannon, the old fogger came rus.h.i.+ng in with the news that the armies could be seen fighting in the heavens. It was an aurora, the streamers shooting up towards the zenith, and great red spots among the stars, the ghastly stains of the wounded. The old fogger declared that as he went out with his lantern to attend to the cows calving he could see the blood dripping on the back of his hand as it fell down from the battling hosts above.
To us the ignorance even of such comparatively recent times is almost incredible. As Hilary was telling me of such things as we sat in his house one evening, there grew upon our ears a peculiar sound, a humming deep ba.s.s, somewhat resembling the low notes of a piano with a pressure on the pedal. It increased and became louder, coming from the road which pa.s.sed the house; it was caused by a very large flock of sheep driven slowly. The individual 'baa' of each lamb was so mixed, as it were, with the bleat of its fellow that the swelling sound took a strange, mysterious tone; a voice that seemed to speak of trouble, and perplexity, and anxiety for rest. Hilary, as a farmer, must of course go out to see whose they were, and I went with him; but before he reached the garden gate he turned back, remarking, 'It's Johnson's flock; I know the tang of his tankards.' The flat-shaped bells hung on a sheep's neck are called tankards; and Hilary could distinguish one flock from another by the varying notes of their bells.
Reclining on the sweet short sward under the hawthorn on the Down I looked over the Idover plain, and thought of the olden times. As I gazed I presently observed, far away beside some ricks, the short black funnel of an engine, and made it out to be a steam-plough waiting till the corn should be garnered to tear up the stubble. How much meaning there lay in the presence of that black funnel! There were the same broad open fields, the same beautiful crops of golden wheat, the same green hills, and the same sun ripening the grain. But how strangely changed all human affairs since old Jonathan, in his straight-made shoes, with his pike-staff, and the acorns in his pocket, trudged along the footpaths!
CHAPTER VII.
THE CUCKOO-FIELDS.
The cuckoos came so frequently to some gra.s.s-land just outside the Chace and sloping down to the brook that I gave the spot the name of the Cuckoo-fields. There were two detached copses in them of no great extent, and numerous oaks and hawthorns, while the brook below was bordered with willow-stoles. This stretch of gra.s.s was divided into two large fields by a line of decaying posts and rails, and it became a favourite resort of mine in the warm days of spring, because I could almost always see and hear the cuckoos there.
Why they should love it so much is not easy to tell, unless on account of the comparatively barren character of the soil. The earth seemed to be of a very different kind to that in the rich and fertile meadows and fields close by; for the gra.s.s was rough, short, and thin, and soon became greyish or brown as the summer advanced, burning or drying up under the sun. It may often be observed that a piece of waste, like furze, when in the midst of good land, is much frequented by all birds and animals, though where there is nothing else but waste they are often almost entirely absent.
As the oaks come out into full leaf, the time when the meadows become beautiful, the notes of the cuckoo sound like a voice crying 'Come hither' from the trees. Then, sitting on the grey and lichen-covered rail under the cover of a hawthorn, I saw sometimes two and sometimes three cuckoos following each other courting, now round the copse, now by the hedge or the brook, and presently along the rails where they constantly perched. Occasionally one would alight on the sward among the purple flowers of the meadow orchis. From the marshy meadow across the brook apeew it rose from time to time, uttering his plaintive call and wheeling to and fro on the wing. At the sound a second and a third appeared in succession, and after beating up and down for a few minutes settled again in the gra.s.s. The meadow might have been called a plovery--as we say rookery and heronry--for the green plovers or peewits always had several nests in it.
The course of the humble bees that went by could be watched for some way--their large size and darker colour made them visible--as they now went down into the gra.s.s, and now started forward again. The honey bees, small and somewhat lighter in colour, could not be seen so far.
They were busy in the suns.h.i.+ne, for the hive bee must gather most of its honey before the end of July, before the scythe has laid the gra.s.s in the last meadow low. Few if any flowers come up after the scythe has gone over, except the white clover, which almost alone shows in the aftermath, or, as country people call it, the 'lattermath.' Near me a t.i.tlark every few minutes rose from the sward, and spreading his wings came down aslant, singing with all his might.
Some sa.r.s.en stones just showed above the gra.s.s: the old folk say that these boulders grow in size and increase in number. The fact is that in some soils the boulder protrudes more and more above the surface in the course of time, and others come into view that were once hidden; while in another place the turf rises, and they seem to slowly sink into the earth. The monotonous and yet pleasing cry of the peewits, the sweet t.i.tlark singing overhead, and the cuckoos flying round, filled the place with the magic charm of spring.
Coming to these Cuckoo-fields day after day, there was always something to interest me, either in the meadows themselves or on the way thither. The very dust of the road had something to show. For under the shadowy elms a little seed or grain had jolted down through the c.h.i.n.ks in the bed of a pa.s.sing waggon, and there the chaffinches and sparrows had congregated. As they moved to and fro they had left the marks of their feet in the thick white dust, so crossed and intertangled in a maze of tracks that no one could have designed so delicate and intricate a pattern. If it was cloudy, still, glancing over the cornfields, just as you turned partly round to look, there seemed a brilliant streak of suns.h.i.+ne across them. This was a broad band of charlock: its light yellow is so gaudy and glaring in the ma.s.s that as it first catches the eye it seems as if the land were lit up by the sun. After it the b.u.t.tercups appear of a quiet colour, like dead gold in contrast.
Under-foot, almost in the very dust of the road, the silverweed opened its yellow petals, and where there was a dry bank, or by the gateways leading into the corn, the pink pimpernel grew. For some time I suspected the pimpernel of not invariably closing its petals before rain, and at last by precise observation found that it did not. Twice in a comparatively short period I noted the petals wide open within a few minutes of a shower. It appears rather to close during the atmospheric change which occurs previous to rain than to rain itself.
Once now and then a shower seems to come up in the driest weather without warning or change in the atmosphere: the cloud is over and gone almost before it seems worth while to take shelter. To the approach of such shower-clouds the pimpernel does not invariably respond, but it is perfectly accurate if anything serious be brewing.