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A Shepherd's Life: Impressions of the South Wiltshire Downs

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Title: A Shepherd's Life: Impressions of the South Wiltshire Downs

Author: W. H. Hudson


        
Release date: February 1, 2005 [eBook #7415]
                Most recently updated: February 12, 2015

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A SHEPHERD'S LIFE: IMPRESSIONS OF THE SOUTH WILTSHIRE DOWNS ***




Produced by Eric Eldred, David Garcia, Charles Franks, and
the Online Distributed Proofreading Team











A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

IMPRESSIONS OF THE SOUTH WILTSHIRE DOWNS

BY W. H. HUDSON







NOTE

I an obliged to Messrs. Longmans, Green, & Co. for permission to make
use of an article entitled "A Shepherd of the Downs," which appeared in
the October and November numbers of _Longmans' Magazine_ in 1902.
With the exception of that article, portions of which I have
incorporated in different chapters, the whole of the matter contained in
this work now appears for the first time.






CONTENTS

Chapter.

      I. SALISBURY PLAIN

     II. SALISBURY AS I SEE IT

    III. WINTERBOURNE BISHOP

     IV. A SHEPHERD OF THE DOWNS

      V. EARLY MEMORIES

     VI. SHEPHERD ISAAC BAWCOMBE

    VII. THE DEER-STEALERS

   VIII. SHEPHERDS AND POACHING

     IX. THE SHEPHERD ON FOXES

      X. BIRD LIFE ON THE DOWNS

     XI. STARLINGS AND SHEEP-BELLS

    XII. THE SHEPHERD AND THE BIBLE

   XIII. VALE OF THE WYLYE

    XIV. A SHEEP-DOG'S LIFE

     XV. THE ELLERBYS OF DOVETON

    XVI. OLD WILTSHIRE DAYS

   XVII. OLD WILTSHIRE DAYS (_continued_)

  XVIII. THE SHEPHERD'S RETURN

    XIX. THE DARK PEOPLE OF THE VILLAGE

     XX. SOME SHEEP-DOGS

    XXI. THE SHEPHERD AS NATURALIST

   XXII. THE MASTER OF THE VILLAGE

  XXIII. ISAAC'S CHILDREN

   XXIV. LIVING IN THE PAST







A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

SALISBURY PLAIN

CHAPTER I

  Introductory remarks--Wiltshire little favoured by tourists--Aspect of
  the downs--Bad weather--Desolate aspect--The bird-scarer--Fascination
  of the downs--The larger Salisbury Plain--Effect of the military
  occupation--A century's changes--Birds--Old Wiltshire sheep--Sheep-horns
  in a well--Changes wrought by cultivation--Rabbit-warrens on the
  downs--Barrows obliterated by the plough and by rabbits


Wiltshire looks large on the map of England, a great green county, yet
it never appears to be a favourite one to those who go on rambles in the
land. At all events I am unable to bring to mind an instance of a lover
of Wiltshire who was not a native or a resident, or had not been to
Marlborough and loved the country on account of early associations. Nor
can I regard myself as an exception, since, owing to a certain kind of
adaptiveness in me, a sense of being at home wherever grass grows, I am
in a way a native too. Again, listen to any half-dozen of your friends
discussing the places they have visited, or intend visiting, comparing
notes about the counties, towns, churches, castles, scenery--all that
draws them and satisfies their nature, and the chances are that they
will not even mention Wiltshire. They all know it "in a way"; they have
seen Salisbury Cathedral and Stonehenge, which everybody must go to look
at once in his life; and they have also viewed the country from the
windows of a railroad carriage as they passed through on their flight to
Bath and to Wales with its mountains, and to the west country, which
many of us love best of all--Somerset, Devon, and Cornwall. For there is
nothing striking in Wiltshire, at all events to those who love nature
first; nor mountains, nor sea, nor anything to compare with the places
they are hastening to, west or north. The downs! Yes, the downs are
there, full in sight of your window, in their flowing forms resembling
vast, pale green waves, wave beyond wave, "in fluctuation fixed"; a fine
country to walk on in fine weather for all those who regard the mere
exercise of walking as sufficient pleasure. But to those who wish for
something more, these downs may be neglected, since, if downs are
wanted, there is the higher, nobler Sussex range within an hour of
London. There are others on whom the naked aspect of the downs has a
repelling effect. Like Gilpin they love not an undecorated earth; and
false and ridiculous as Gilpin's taste may seem to me and to all those
who love the chalk, which "spoils everything" as Gilpin said, he
certainly expresses a feeling common to those who are unaccustomed to
the emptiness and silence of these great spaces.

As to walking on the downs, one remembers that the fine days are not so
many, even in the season when they are looked for--they have certainly
been few during this wet and discomfortable one of 1909. It is indeed
only on the chalk hills that I ever feel disposed to quarrel with this
English climate, for all weathers are good to those who love the open
air, and have their special attractions. What a pleasure it is to be out
in rough weather in October when the equinoctial gales are on, "the wind
Euroclydon," to listen to its roaring in the bending trees, to watch the
dead leaves flying, the pestilence-stricken multitudes, yellow and black
and red, whirled away in flight on flight before the volleying blast,
and to hear and see and feel the tempests of rain, the big silver-grey
drops that smite you like hail! And what pleasure too, in the still grey
November weather, the time of suspense and melancholy before winter, a
strange quietude, like a sense of apprehension in nature! And so on
through the revolving year, in all places in all weathers, there is
pleasure in the open air, except on these chalk hills because of their
bleak nakedness. There the wind and driving rain are not for but against
you, and may overcome you with misery. One feels their loneliness,
monotony, and desolation on many days, sometimes even when it is not
wet, and I here recall an amusing encounter with a bird-scarer during
one of these dreary spells.

It was in March, bitterly cold, with an east wind which had been blowing
many days, and overhead the sky was of a hard, steely grey. I was
cycling along the valley of the Ebble, and finally leaving it pushed up
a long steep slope and set off over the high plain by a dusty road with
the wind hard against me. A more desolate scene than the one before me
it would be hard to imagine, for the land was all ploughed and stretched
away before me, an endless succession of vast grey fields, divided by
wire fences. On all that space there was but one living thing in sight,
a human form, a boy, far away on the left side, standing in the middle
of a big field with something which looked like a gun in his hand.
Immediately after I saw him he, too, appeared to have caught sight of
me, for turning he set off running as fast as he could over the ploughed
ground towards the road, as if intending to speak to me. The distance he
would have to run was about a quarter of a mile and I doubted that he
would be there in time to catch me, but he ran fast and the wind was
against me, and he arrived at the road just as I got to that point.
There by the side of the fence he stood, panting from his race, his
handsome face glowing with colour, a boy about twelve or thirteen, with
a fine strong figure, remarkably well dressed for a bird-scarer. For
that was what he was, and he carried a queer, heavy-looking old gun. I
got off my wheel and waited for him to speak, but he was silent, and
continued regarding me with the smiling countenance of one well pleased
with himself. "Well?" I said, but there was no answer; he only kept on
smiling.

"What did you want?" I demanded impatiently.

"I didn't want anything."

"But you started running here as fast as you could the moment you caught
sight of me."

"Yes, I did."

"Well, what did you do it for--what was your object in running here?"

"Just to see you pass," he answered.

It was a little ridiculous and vexed me at first, but by and by when I
left him, after some more conversation, I felt rather pleased; for it
was a new and somewhat flattering experience to have any person run a
long distance over a ploughed field, burdened with a heavy gun, "just to
see me pass."

But it was not strange in the circumstances; his hours in that grey,
windy desolation must have seemed like days, and it was a break in the
monotony, a little joyful excitement in getting to the road in time to
see a passer-by more closely, and for a few moments gave him a sense of
human companionship. I began even to feel a little sorry for him, alone
there in his high, dreary world, but presently thought he was better off
and better employed than most of his fellows poring over miserable books
in school, and I wished we had a more rational system of education for
the agricultural districts, one which would not keep the children shut
up in a room during all the best hours of the day, when to be out of
doors, seeing, hearing, and doing, would fit them so much better for the
life-work before them. Squeers' method was a wiser one. We think less of
it than of the delightful caricature, which makes Squeers "a joy for
ever," as Mr. Lang has said of Pecksniff. But Dickens was a Londoner,
and incapable of looking at this or any other question from any other
than the Londoner's standpoint. Can you have a better system for the
children of all England than this one which will turn out the most
perfect draper's assistant in Oxford Street, or, to go higher, the most
efficient Mr. Guppy in a solicitor's office? It is true that we have
Nature's unconscious intelligence against us; that by and by, when at
the age of fourteen the boy is finally released, she will set to work to
undo the wrong by discharging from his mind its accumulations of useless
knowledge as soon as he begins the work of life. But what a waste of
time and energy and money! One can only hope that the slow intellect of
the country will wake to this question some day, that the countryman
will say to the townsman, Go on making your laws and systems of
education for your own children, who will live as you do indoors; while
I shall devise a different one for mine, one which will give them hard
muscles and teach them to raise the mutton and pork and cultivate the
potatoes and cabbages on which we all feed.

To return to the downs. Their very emptiness and desolation, which
frightens the stranger from them, only serves to make them more
fascinating to those who are intimate with and have learned to love
them. That dreary aspect brings to mind the other one, when, on waking
with the early sunlight in the room, you look out on a blue sky,
cloudless or with white clouds. It may be fancy, or the effect of
contrast, but it has always seemed to me that just as the air is purer
and fresher on these chalk heights than on the earth below, and as the
water is of a more crystal purity, and the sky perhaps bluer, so do all
colours and all sounds have a purity and vividness and intensity beyond
that of other places. I see it in the yellows of hawkweed, rock-rose,
and birds'-foot-trefoil, in the innumerable specks of brilliant
colour--blue and white and rose--of milk-wort and squinancy-wort, and in
the large flowers of the dwarf thistle, glowing purple in its green
setting; and I hear it in every bird-sound, in the trivial songs of
yellow-hammer and corn-bunting, and of dunnock and wren and whitethroat.

The pleasure of walking on the downs is not, however, a subject which
concerns me now; it is one I have written about in a former work,
"Nature in Downland," descriptive of the South Downs. The theme of the
present work is the life, human and other, of the South Wiltshire Downs,
or of Salisbury Plain. It is the part of Wiltshire which has most
attracted me. Most persons would say that the Marlborough Downs are
greater, more like the great Sussex range as it appears from the Weald:
but chance brought me farther south, and the character and life of the
village people when I came to know them made this appear the best place
to be in.

The Plain itself is not a precisely denned area, and may be made to
include as much or little as will suit the writer's purpose. If you want
a continuous plain, with no dividing valley cutting through it, you must
place it between the Avon and Wylye Rivers, a distance about fifteen
miles broad and as many long, with the village of Tilshead in its
centure; or, if you don't mind the valleys, you can say it extends from
Downton and Tollard Royal south of Salisbury to the Pewsey vale in the
north, and from the Hampshire border on the east side to Dorset and
Somerset on the west, about twenty-five to thirty miles each way. My own
range is over this larger Salisbury Plain, which includes the River
Ebble, or Ebele, with its numerous interesting villages, from Odstock
and Combe Bisset, near Salisbury and "the Chalks," to pretty Alvediston
near the Dorset line, and all those in the Nadder valley, and westward
to White Sheet Hill above Mere. You can picture this high chalk country
as an open hand, the left hand, with Salisbury in the hollow of the
palm, placed nearest the wrist, and the five valleys which cut through
it as the five spread fingers, from the Bourne (the little finger)
succeeded by Avon, Wylye, and Nadder, to the Ebble, which comes in lower
down as the thumb and has its junction with the main stream below
Salisbury.

A very large portion of this high country is now in a transitional
state, that was once a sheep-walk and is now a training ground for the
army. Where the sheep are taken away the turf loses the smooth, elastic
character which makes it better to walk on than the most perfect lawn.
The sheep fed closely, and everything that grew on the down--grasses,
clovers, and numerous small creeping herbs--had acquired the habit of
growing and flowering close to the ground, every species and each
individual plant striving, with the unconscious intelligence that is in
all growing things, to hide its leaves and pushing sprays under the
others, to escape the nibbling teeth by keeping closer to the surface.
There are grasses and some herbs, the plantain among them, which keep
down very close but must throw up a tall stem to flower and seed. Look
at the plantain when its flowering time comes; each particular plant
growing with its leaves so close down on the surface as to be safe from
the busy, searching mouths, then all at once throwing up tall, straight
stems to flower and ripen its seeds quickly. Watch a flock at this time,
and you will see a sheep walking about, rapidly plucking the flowering
spikes, cutting them from the stalk with a sharp snap, taking them off
at the rate of a dozen or so in twenty seconds. But the sheep cannot be
all over the downs at the same time, and the time is short, myriads of
plants throwing up their stems at once, so that many escape, and it has
besides a deep perennial root so that the plant keeps its own life
though it may be unable to sow any seeds for many seasons. So with other
species which must send up a tall flower stem; and by and by, the
flowering over and the seeds ripened or lost, the dead, scattered stems
remain like long hairs growing out of a close fur. The turf remains
unchanged; but take the sheep away and it is like the removal of a
pressure, or a danger: the plant recovers liberty and confidence and
casts off the old habit; it springs and presses up to get the better of
its fellows--to get all the dew and rain and sunshine that it can--and
the result is a rough surface.

Another effect of the military occupation is the destruction of the wild
life of the Plain, but that is a matter I have written about in my last
book, "Afoot in England," in a chapter on Stonehenge, and need not dwell
on here. To the lover of Salisbury Plain as it was, the sight of
military camps, with white tents or zinc houses, and of bodies of men in
khaki marching and drilling, and the sound of guns, now informs him that
he is in a district which has lost its attraction, where nature has been
dispossessed.

Meanwhile, there is a corresponding change going on in the human life of
the district. Let anyone describe it as he thinks best, as an
improvement or a deterioration, it is a great change nevertheless, which
in my case and probably that of many others is as disagreeable to
contemplate as that which we are beginning to see in the down, which was
once a sheep-walk and is so no longer. On this account I have ceased to
frequent that portion of the Plain where the War Office is in possession
of the land, and to keep to the southern side in my rambles, out of
sight and hearing of the "white-tented camps" and mimic warfare. Here is
Salisbury Plain as it has been these thousand years past, or ever since
sheep were pastured here more than in any other district in England, and
that may well date even more than ten centuries back.

Undoubtedly changes have taken place even here, some very great, chiefly
during the last, or from the late eighteenth century. Changes both in
the land and the animal life, wild and domestic. Of the losses in wild
bird life there will be something to say in another chapter; they relate
chiefly to the extermination of the finest species, the big bird,
especially the soaring bird, which is now gone out of all this wide
Wiltshire sky. As a naturalist I must also lament the loss of the old
Wiltshire breed of sheep, although so long gone. Once it was the only
breed known in Wilts, and extended over the entire county; it was a big
animal, the largest of the fine-woolled sheep in England, but for looks
it certainly compared badly with modern downland breeds and possessed,
it was said, all the points which the breeder, or improver, was against.
Thus, its head was big and clumsy, with a round nose, its legs were long
and thick, its belly without wool, and both sexes were horned. Horns,
even in a ram, are an abomination to the modern sheep-farmer in Southern
England. Finally, it was hard to fatten. On the other hand it was a
sheep which had been from of old on the bare open downs and was modified
to suit the conditions, the scanty feed, the bleak, bare country, and
the long distances it had to travel to and from the pasture ground. It
was a strong, healthy, intelligent animal, in appearance and character
like the old original breed of sheep on the pampas of South America,
which I knew as a boy, a coarse-woolled sheep with naked belly, tall and
hardy, a greatly modified variety of the sheep introduced by the Spanish
colonist three centuries ago. At all events the old Wiltshire sheep had
its merits, and when the Southdown breed was introduced during the late
eighteenth century the farmer viewed it with disfavour; they liked their
old native animal, and did not want to lose it. But it had to go in
time, just as in later times the Southdown had to go when the Hampshire
Down took its place--the breed which is now universal, in South Wilts at
all events.

A solitary flock of the pure-bred old Wiltshire sheep existed in the
county as late as 1840, but the breed has now so entirely disappeared
from the country that you find many shepherds who have never even heard
of it. Not many days ago I met with a curious instance of this ignorance
of the past. I was talking to a shepherd, a fine intelligent fellow,
keenly interested in the subjects of sheep and sheep-dogs, on the high
down above the village of Broad Chalk on the Ebble, and he told me that
his dog was of mixed breed, but on its mother's side came from a Welsh
sheep-dog, that his father had always had the Welsh dog, once common in
Wiltshire, and he wondered why it had gone out as it was so good an
animal. This led me to say something about the old sheep having gone out
too, and as he had never heard of the old breed I described the animal
to him.

What I told him, he said, explained something which had been a puzzle to
him for some years. There was a deep hollow in the down near the spot
where we were standing, and at the bottom he said there was an old well
which had been used in former times to water the sheep, but masses of
earth had fallen down from the sides, and in that condition it had
remained for no one knew how long--perhaps fifty, perhaps a hundred
years. Some years ago it came into his master's head to have this old
well cleaned out, and this was done with a good deal of labour, the
sides having first been boarded over to make it safe for the workmen
below. At the bottom of the well a vast store of rams' horns was
discovered and brought out; and it was a mystery to the fanner and the
men how so large a number of sheep's horns had been got together; for
rams are few and do not die often, and here there were hundreds of
horns. He understood it now, for if all the sheep, ewes as well as rams,
were horned in the old breed, a collection like this might easily have
been made.

The greatest change of the last hundred years is no doubt that which the
plough has wrought in the aspect of the downs. There is a certain
pleasure to the eye in the wide fields of golden corn, especially of
wheat, in July and August; but a ploughed down is a down made ugly, and
it strikes one as a mistake, even from a purely economic point of view,
that this old rich turf, the slow product of centuries, should be ruined
for ever as sheep-pasture when so great an extent of uncultivated land
exists elsewhere, especially the heavy clays of the Midlands, better
suited for corn. The effect of breaking up the turf on the high downs is
often disastrous; the thin soil which was preserved by the close, hard
turf is blown or washed away, and the soil becomes poorer year by year,
in spite of dressing, until it is hardly worth cultivating. Clover may
be grown on it but it continues to deteriorate; or the tenant or
landlord may turn it into a rabbit-warren, the most fatal policy of all.
How hideous they are--those great stretches of downland, enclosed in big
wire fences and rabbit netting, with little but wiry weeds, moss, and
lichen growing on them, the earth dug up everywhere by the disorderly
little beasts! For a while there is a profit--"it will serve me my
time," the owner says--but the end is utter barrenness.

One must lament, too, the destruction of the ancient earth-works,
especially of the barrows, which is going on all over the downs, most
rapidly where the land is broken up by the plough. One wonders if the
ever-increasing curiosity of our day with regard to the history of the
human race in the land continues to grow, what our descendants of the
next half of the century, to go no farther, will say of us and our
incredible carelessness in the matter! So small a matter to us, but one
which will, perhaps, be immensely important to them! It is, perhaps,
better for our peace that we do not know; it would not be pleasant to
have our children's and children's children's contemptuous expressions
sounding in our prophetic ears. Perhaps we have no right to complain of
the obliteration of these memorials of antiquity by the plough; the
living are more than the dead, and in this case it may be said that we
are only following the Artemisian example in consuming (in our daily
bread) minute portions of the ashes of our old relations, albeit
untearfully, with a cheerful countenance. Still one cannot but
experience a shock on seeing the plough driven through an ancient,
smooth turf, curiously marked with barrows, lynchetts, and other
mysterious mounds and depressions, where sheep have been pastured for a
thousand years, without obscuring these chance hieroglyphs scored by men
on the surface of the hills.

It is not, however, only on the cultivated ground that the destruction
is going on; the rabbit, too, is an active agent in demolishing the
barrows and other earth-works. He burrows into the mound and throws out
bushels of chalk and clay, which is soon washed down by the rains; he
tunnels it through and through and sometimes makes it his village; then
one day the farmer or keeper, who is not an archaeologist, comes along
and puts his ferrets into the holes, and one of them, after drinking his
fill of blood, falls asleep by the side of his victim, and the keeper
sets to work with pick and shovel to dig him out, and demolishes half
the barrow to recover his vile little beast.




CHAPTER II

SALISBURY AS I SEE IT

  The Salisbury of the villager--The cathedral from the meadows--Walks to
  Wilton and Old Sarum--The spire and a rainbow--Charm of Old Sarum--The
  devastation--Salisbury from Old Sarum--Leland's description--Salisbury
  and the village mind--Market-day--The infirmary--The cathedral--The
  lesson of a child's desire--In the streets again--An Apollo of the downs


To the dwellers on the Plain, Salisbury itself is an exceedingly
important place--the most important in the world. For if they have seen
a greater--London, let us say--it has left but a confused, a
phantasmagoric image on the mind, an impression of endless thoroughfares
and of innumerable people all apparently in a desperate hurry to do
something, yet doing nothing; a labyrinth of streets and wilderness of
houses, swarming with beings who have no definite object and no more to
do with realities than so many lunatics, and are unconfined because they
are so numerous that all the asylums in the world could not contain
them. But of Salisbury they have a very clear image: inexpressibly rich
as it is in sights, in wonders, full of people--hundreds of people in
the streets and market-place--they can take it all in and know its
meaning. Every man and woman, of all classes, in all that concourse, is
there for some definite purpose which they can guess and understand; and
the busy street and market, and red houses and soaring spire, are all
one, and part and parcel too of their own lives in their own distant
little village by the Avon or Wylye, or anywhere on the Plain. And that
soaring spire which, rising so high above the red town, first catches
the eye, the one object which gives unity and distinction to the whole
picture, is not more distinct in the mind than the entire Salisbury with
its manifold interests and activities.

There is nothing in the architecture of England more beautiful than that
same spire. I have seen it many times, far and near, from all points of
view, and am never in or near the place but I go to some spot where I
look at and enjoy the sight; but I will speak here of the two best
points of view.

The nearest, which is the artist's favourite point, is from the meadows;
there, from the waterside, you have the cathedral not too far away nor
too near for a picture, whether on canvas or in the mind, standing
amidst its great old trees, with nothing but the moist green meadows and
the river between. One evening, during the late summer of this wettest
season, when the rain was beginning to cease, I went out this way for my
stroll, the pleasantest if not the only "walk" there is in Salisbury. It
is true, there are two others: one to Wilton by its long, shady avenue;
the other to Old Sarum; but these are now motor-roads, and until the
loathed hooting and dusting engines are thrust away into roads of their
own there is little pleasure in them for the man on foot. The rain
ceased, but the sky was still stormy, with a great blackness beyond the
cathedral and still other black clouds coming up from the west behind
me. Then the sun, near its setting, broke out, sending a flame of orange
colour through the dark masses around it, and at the same time flinging
a magnificent rainbow on that black cloud against which the immense
spire stood wet with rain and flushed with light, so that it looked like
a spire built of a stone impregnated with silver. Never had Nature so
glorified man's work! It was indeed a marvellous thing to see, an effect
so rare that in all the years I had known Salisbury, and the many times
I had taken that stroll in all weathers, it was my first experience of
such a thing. How lucky, then, was Constable to have seen it, when he
set himself to paint his famous picture! And how brave he was and even
wise to have attempted such a subject, one which, I am informed by
artists with the brush, only a madman would undertake, however great a
genius he might be. It was impossible, we know, even to a Constable, but
we admire his failure nevertheless, even as we admire Turner's many
failures; but when we go back to Nature we are only too glad to forget
all about the picture.

The view from the meadows will not, in the future, I fear, seem so
interesting to me; I shall miss the rainbow, and shall never see again
except in that treasured image the great spire as Constable saw and
tried to paint it. In like manner, though for a different reason, my
future visits to Old Sarum will no longer give me the same pleasure
experienced on former occasions.

Old Sarum stands over the Avon, a mile and a half from Salisbury; a
round chalk hill about 300 feet high, in its round shape and isolation
resembling a stupendous tumulus in which the giants of antiquity were
buried, its steeply sloping, green sides ringed about with vast,
concentric earth-works and ditches, the work of the "old people," as
they say on the Plain, when referring to the ancient Britons, but how
ancient, whether invading Celts or Aborigines--the true Britons, who
possessed the land from neolithic times--even the anthropologists, the
wise men of to-day, are unable to tell us. Later, it was a Roman
station, one of the most important, and in after ages a great Norman
castle and cathedral city, until early in the thirteenth century, when
the old church was pulled down and a new and better one to last for ever
was built in the green plain by many running waters. Church and people
gone, the castle fell into ruin, though some believe it existed down to
the fifteenth century; but from that time onwards the site has been a
place of historical memories and a wilderness. Nature had made it a
sweet and beautiful spot; the earth over the old buried ruins was
covered with an elastic turf, jewelled with the bright little flowers of
the chalk, the ramparts and ditches being all overgrown with a dense
thicket of thorn, holly, elder, bramble, and ash, tangled up with ivy,
briony, and traveller's-joy. Once only during the last five or six
centuries some slight excavations were made when, in 1834, as the result
of an excessively dry summer, the lines of the cathedral foundations
were discernible on the surface. But it will no longer be the place it
was, the Society of Antiquaries having received permission from the Dean
and Chapter of Salisbury to work their sweet will on the site. That
ancient, beautiful carcass, which had long made their mouths water, on
which they have now fallen like a pack of hungry hyenas to tear off the
old hide of green turf and burrow down to open to the light or drag out
the deep, stony framework. The beautiful surrounding thickets, too, must
go, they tell me, since you cannot turn the hill inside out without
destroying the trees and bushes that crown it. What person who has known
it and has often sought that spot for the sake of its ancient
associations, and of the sweet solace they have found in the solitude,
or for the noble view of the sacred city from its summit, will not
deplore this fatal amiability of the authorities, this weak desire to
please every one and inability to say no to such a proposal!

But let me now return to the object which brings me to this spot; it was
not to lament the loss of the beautiful, which cannot be preserved in
our age--even this best one of all which Salisbury possessed cannot be
preserved--but to look at Salisbury from this point of view. It is not
as from "the meadows" a view of the cathedral only, but of the whole
town, amidst its circle of vast green downs. It has a beautiful aspect
from that point: a red-brick and red-tiled town, set low on that
circumscribed space, whose soft, brilliant green is in lovely contrast
with the paler hue of the downs beyond, the perennial moist green of its
water-meadows. For many swift, clear currents flow around and through
Salisbury, and doubtless in former days there were many more channels in
the town itself. Leland's description is worth quoting: "There be many
fair streates in the Cite Saresbyri, and especially the High Streate and
Castle Streate.... Al the Streates in a maner, in New Saresbyri, hath
little streamlettes and arms derivyd out of Avon that runneth through
them. The site of the very town of Saresbyri and much ground thereabout
is playne and low, and as a pan or receyvor of most part of the waters
of Wiltshire."

On this scene, this red town with the great spire, set down among
water-meadows, encircled by paler green chalk hills, I look from the top
of the inner and highest rampart or earth-work; or going a little
distance down sit at ease on the turf to gaze at it by the hour. Nor
could a sweeter resting-place be found, especially at the time of ripe
elder-berries, when the thickets are purple with their clusters and the
starlings come in flocks to feed on them, and feeding keep up a
perpetual, low musical jangle about me.

It is not, however, of "New Saresbyri" as seen by the tourist, with a
mind full of history, archaeology, and the aesthetic delight in
cathedrals, that I desire to write, but of Salisbury as it appears to
the dweller on the Plain. For Salisbury is the capital of the Plain, the
head and heart of all those villages, too many to count, scattered far
and wide over the surrounding country. It is the villager's own peculiar
city, and even as the spot it stands upon is the "pan or receyvor of
most part of the waters of Wiltshire," so is it the receyvor of all he
accomplishes in his laborious life, and thitherward flow all his
thoughts and ambitions. Perhaps it is not so difficult for me as it
would be for most persons who are not natives to identify myself with
him and see it as he sees it. That greater place we have been in, that
mighty, monstrous London, is ever present to the mind and is like a mist
before the sight when we look at other places; but for me there is no
such mist, no image so immense and persistent as to cover and obscure
all others, and no such mental habit as that of regarding people as a
mere crowd, a mass, a monstrous organism, in and on which each
individual is but a cell, a scale. This feeling troubles and confuses my
mind when I am in London, where we live "too thick"; but quitting it I
am absolutely free; it has not entered my soul and coloured me with its
colour or shut me out from those who have never known it, even of the
simplest dwellers on the soil who, to our sophisticated minds, may seem
like beings of another species. This is my happiness--to feel, in all
places, that I am one with them. To say, for instance, that I am going
to Salisbury to-morrow, and catch the gleam in the children's eye and
watch them, furtively watching me, whisper to one another that there
will be something for them, too, on the morrow. To set out betimes and
overtake the early carriers' carts on the road, each with its little
cargo of packages and women with baskets and an old man or two, to
recognize acquaintances among those who sit in front, and as I go on
overtaking and passing carriers and the half-gipsy, little "general
dealer" in his dirty, ramshackle, little cart drawn by a rough,
fast-trotting pony, all of us intent on business and pleasure, bound for
Salisbury--the great market and emporium and place of all delights for
all the great Plain. I remember that on my very last expedition, when I
had come twelve miles in the rain and was standing at a street corner,
wet to the skin, waiting for my carrier, a man in a hurry said to me, "I
say, just keep an eye on my cart for a minute or two while I run round
to see somebody. I've got some fowls in it, and if you see anyone come
poking round just ask them what they want--you can't trust every one.
I'll be back in a minute." And he was gone, and I was very pleased to
watch his cart and fowls till he came back.

Business is business and must be attended to, in fair or foul weather,
but for business with pleasure we prefer it fine on market-day. The one
great and chief pleasure, in which all participate, is just to be there,
to be in the crowd--a joyful occasion which gives a festive look to
every face. The mere sight of it exhilarates like wine. The numbers--the
people and the animals! The carriers' carts drawn up in rows on
rows--carriers from a hundred little villages on the Bourne, the Avon,
the Wylye, the Nadder, the Ebble, and from all over the Plain, each
bringing its little contingent. Hundreds and hundreds more coming by
train; you see them pouring down Fisherton Street in a continuous
procession, all hurrying market-wards. And what a lively scene the
market presents now, full of cattle and sheep and pigs and crowds of
people standing round the shouting auctioneers! And horses, too, the
beribboned hacks, and ponderous draught horses with manes and tails
decorated with golden straw, thundering over the stone pavement as they
are trotted up and down! And what a profusion of fruit and vegetables,
fish and meat, and all kinds of provisions on the stalls, where women
with baskets on their arms are jostling and bargaining! The Corn
Exchange is like a huge beehive, humming with the noise of talk, full of
brown-faced farmers in their riding and driving clothes and leggings,
standing in knots or thrusting their hands into sacks of oats and
barley. You would think that all the farmers from all the Plain were
congregated there. There is a joyful contagion in it all. Even the
depressed young lover, the forlornest of beings, repairs his wasted
spirits and takes heart again. Why, if I've seen a girl with a pretty
face to-day I've seen a hundred--and more. And she thinks they be so few
she can treat me like that and barely give me a pleasant word in a
month! Let her come to Salisbury and see how many there be!

And so with every one in that vast assemblage--vast to the dweller in
the Plain. Each one is present as it were in two places, since each has
in his or her heart the constant image of home--the little, peaceful
village in the remote valley; of father and mother and neighbours and
children, in school just now, or at play, or home to dinner--home cares
and concerns and the business in Salisbury. The selling and buying;
friends and relations to visit or to meet in the market-place, and--how
often!--the sick one to be seen at the Infirmary. This home of the
injured and ailing, which is in the mind of so many of the people
gathered together, is indeed the cord that draws and binds the city and
the village closest together and makes the two like one.

That great, comely building of warm, red brick in Fisherton Street, set
well back so that you can see it as a whole, behind its cedar and
beech-trees--how familiar it is to the villagers! In numberless humble
homes, in hundreds of villages of the Plain, and all over the
surrounding country, the "Infirmary" is a name of the deepest meaning,
and a place of many gad and tender and beautiful associations. I heard
it spoken of in a manner which surprised me at first, for I know some of
the London poor and am accustomed to their attitude towards the
metropolitan hospitals. The Londoner uses them very freely; they have
come to be as necessary to him as the grocer's shop and the
public-house, but for all the benefits he receives from them he has no
faintest sense of gratitude, and it is my experience that if you speak
to him of this he is roused to anger and demands, "What are they for?"
So far is he from having any thankful thoughts for all that has been
given him for nothing and done for him and for his, if he has anything
to say at all on the matter it is to find fault with the hospitals and
cast blame on them for not having healed him more quickly or thoroughly.

This country town hospital and infirmary is differently regarded by the
villagers of the Plain. It is curious to find how many among them are
personally acquainted with it; perhaps it is not easy for anyone, even
in this most healthy district, to get through life without sickness, and
all are liable to accidents. The injured or afflicted youth, taken
straight from his rough, hard life and poor cottage, wonders at the
place he finds himself in--the wide, clean, airy room and white, easy
bed, the care and skill of the doctors, the tender nursing by women, and
comforts and luxuries, all without payment, but given as it seems to him
out of pure divine love and compassion--all this comes to him as
something strange, almost incredible. He suffers much perhaps, but can
bear pain stoically and forget it when it is past, but the loving
kindness he has experienced is remembered.

That is one of the very great things Salisbury has for the villagers,
and there are many more which may not be spoken of, since we do not want
to lose sight of the wood on account of the trees; only one must be
mentioned for a special reason, and that is the cathedral. The villager
is extremely familiar with it as he sees it from the market and the
street and from a distance, from all the roads which lead him to
Salisbury. Seeing it he sees everything beneath it--all the familiar
places and objects, all the streets--High and Castle and Crane Streets,
and many others, including Endless Street, which reminds one of Sydney
Smith's last flicker of fun before that candle went out; and the "White
Hart" and the "Angel" and "Old George," and the humbler "Goat" and
"Green Man" and "Shoulder of Mutton," with many besides; and the great,
red building with its cedar-tree, and the knot of men and boys standing
on the bridge gazing down on the trout in the swift river below; and the
market-place and its busy crowds--all the familiar sights and scenes
that come under the spire like a flock of sheep on a burning day in
summer, grouped about a great tree growing in the pasture-land. But he
is not familiar with the interior of the great fane; it fails to draw
him, doubtless because he has no time in his busy, practical life for
the cultivation of the aesthetic faculties. There is a crust over that
part of his mind; but it need not always and ever be so; the crust is
not on the mind of the child.

Before a stall in the market-place a child is standing with her
mother--a commonplace-looking, little girl of about twelve, blue-eyed,
light-haired, with thin arms and legs, dressed, poorly enough, for her
holiday. The mother, stoutish, in her best but much-worn black gown and
a brown straw, out-of-shape hat, decorated with bits of ribbon and a few
soiled and frayed artificial flowers. Probably she is the wife of a
labourer who works hard to keep himself and family on fourteen shillings
a week; and she, too, shows, in her hard hands and sunburnt face, with
little wrinkles appearing, that she is a hard worker; but she is very
jolly, for she is in Salisbury on market-day, in fine weather, with
several shillings in her purse--a shilling for the fares, and perhaps
eightpence for refreshments, and the rest to be expended in necessaries
for the house. And now to increase the pleasure of the day she has
unexpectedly run against a friend! There they stand, the two friends,
basket on arm, right in the midst of the jostling crowd, talking in
their loud, tinny voices at a tremendous rate; while the girl, with a
half-eager, half-listless expression, stands by with her hand on her
mother's dress, and every time there is a second's pause in the eager
talk she gives a little tug at the gown and ejaculates "Mother!" The
woman impatiently shakes off the hand and says sharply, "What now,
Marty! Can't 'ee let me say just a word without bothering!" and on the
talk runs again; then another tug and "Mother!" and then, "You promised,
mother," and by and by, "Mother, you said you'd take me to the cathedral
next time."

Having heard so much I wanted to hear more, and addressing the woman I
asked her why her child wanted to go. She answered me with a
good-humoured laugh, "'Tis all because she heard 'em talking about it
last winter, and she'd never been, and I says to her, 'Never you mind,
Marty, I'll take you there the next time I go to Salisbury.'"

"And she's never forgot it," said the other woman.

"Not she--Marty ain't one to forget."

"And you been four times, mother," put in the girl.

"Have I now! Well, 'tis too late now--half-past two, and we must be't'
Goat' at four."

"Oh, mother, you promised!"

"Well, then, come along, you worriting child, and let's have it over or
you'll give me no peace"; and away they went. And I would have followed
to know the result if it had been in my power to look into that young
brain and see the thoughts and feelings there as the crystal-gazer sees
things in a crystal. In a vague way, with some very early memories to
help me, I can imagine it--the shock of pleased wonder at the sight of
that immense interior, that far-extending nave with pillars that stand
like the tall trunks of pines and beeches, and at the end the light
screen which allows the eye to travel on through the rich choir, to see,
with fresh wonder and delight, high up and far off, that glory of
coloured glass as of a window half-open to an unimaginable place
beyond--a heavenly cathedral to which all this is but a dim porch or
passage!

We do not properly appreciate the educational value of such early
experiences; and I use that dismal word not because it is perfectly
right or for want of a better one, but because it is in everybody's
mouth and understood by all. For all I know to the contrary, village
schools may be bundled in and out of the cathedral from time to time,
but that is not the right way, seeing that the child's mind is not the
crowd-of-children's mind. But I can imagine that when we have a wiser,
better system of education in the villages, in which books will not be
everything, and to be shut up six or seven hours every day to prevent
the children from learning the things that matter most--I can imagine at
such a time that the schoolmaster or mistress will say to the village
woman, "I hear you are going to Salisbury to-morrow, or next Tuesday,
and I want you to take Janie or little Dan or Peter, and leave him for
an hour to play about on the cathedral green and watch the daws flying
round the spire, and take a peep inside while you are doing your
marketing."

Back from the cathedral once more, from the infirmary, and from shops
and refreshment-houses, out in the sun among the busy people, let us
delay a little longer for the sake of our last scene.

It was past noon on a hot, brilliant day in August, and that splendid
weather had brought in more people than I had ever before seen
congregated in Salisbury, and never had the people seemed so talkative
and merry and full of life as on that day. I was standing at a busy spot
by a row of carriers' carts drawn up at the side of the pavement, just
where there are three public-houses close together, when I caught sight
of a young man of about twenty-two or twenty-three, a shepherd in a grey
suit and thick, iron-shod, old boots and brown leggings, with a soft
felt hat thrust jauntily on the back of his head, coming along towards
me with that half-slouching, half-swinging gait peculiar to the men of
the downs, especially when they are in the town on pleasure bent.
Decidedly he was there on pleasure and had been indulging in a glass or
two of beer (perhaps three) and was very happy, trolling out a song in a
pleasant, musical voice as he swung along, taking no notice of the
people stopping and turning round to stare after him, or of those of his
own party who were following and trying to keep up with him, calling to
him all the time to stop, to wait, to go slow, and give them a chance.
There were seven following him: a stout, middle-aged woman, then a
grey-haired old woman and two girls, and last a youngish, married woman
with a small boy by the hand; and the stout woman, with a red, laughing
face, cried out, "Oh, Dave, do stop, can't 'ee! Where be going so fast,
man--don't 'ee see we can't keep up with 'ee?" But he would not stop nor
listen. It was his day out, his great day in Salisbury, a very rare
occasion, and he was very happy. Then she would turn back to the others
and cry, "'Tisn't no use, he won't bide for us--did 'ee ever see such a
boy!" and laughing and perspiring she would start on after him again.

Now this incident would have been too trivial to relate had it not been
for the appearance of the man himself--his powerful and perfect physique
and marvellously handsome face--such a face as the old Greek sculptors
have left to the world to be universally regarded and admired for all
time as the most perfect. I do not think that this was my feeling only;
I imagine that the others in that street who were standing still and
staring after him had something of the same sense of surprise and
admiration he excited in me. Just then it happened that there was a
great commotion outside one of the public-houses, where a considerable
party of gipsies in their little carts had drawn up, and were all
engaged in a violent, confused altercation. Probably they, or one of
them, had just disposed of a couple of stolen ducks, or a sheepskin, or
a few rabbits, and they were quarrelling over the division of the spoil.
At all events they were violently excited, scowling at each other and
one or two in a dancing rage, and had collected a crowd of amused
lookers-on; but when the young man came singing by they all turned to
stare at him.

As he came on I placed myself directly in his path and stared straight
into his eyes--grey eyes and very beautiful; but he refused to see me;
he stared through me like an animal when you try to catch its eyes, and
went by still trolling out his song, with all the others streaming after
him.




CHAPTER III

WINTERBOURNE BISHOP

  A favourite village--Isolated situation--Appearance of the
  village--Hedge-fruit--The winterbourne--Human interest--The home
  feeling--Man in harmony with nature--Human bones thrown out by a
  rabbit--A spot unspoiled and unchanged


Of the few widely separated villages, hidden away among the lonely downs
in the large, blank spaces between the rivers, the one I love best is
Winterbourne Bishop. Yet of the entire number--I know them all
intimately--I daresay it would be pronounced by most persons the least
attractive. It has less shade from trees in summer and is more exposed
in winter to the bleak winds of this high country, from whichever
quarter they may blow. Placed high itself on a wide, unwooded valley or
depression, with the low, sloping downs at some distance away, the
village is about as cold a place to pass a winter in as one could find
in this district. And, it may be added, the most inconvenient to live in
at any time, the nearest town, or the easiest to get to, being
Salisbury, twelve miles distant by a hilly road. The only means of
getting to that great centre of life which the inhabitants possess is by
the carrier's cart, which makes the weary four-hours' journey once a
week, on market-day. Naturally, not many of them see that place of
delights oftener than once a year, and some but once in five or more
years.

Then, as to the village itself, when you have got down into its one
long, rather winding street, or road. This has a green bank, five or
six feet high, on either side, on which stand the cottages, mostly
facing the road. Real houses there are none--buildings worthy of
being called houses in these great days--unless the three small
farm-houses are considered better than cottages, and the rather
mean-looking rectory--the rector, poor man, is very poor. Just in
the middle part, where the church stands in its green churchyard,
the shadiest spot in the village, a few of the cottages are close
together, almost touching, then farther apart, twenty yards or so,
then farther still, forty or fifty yards. They are small, old cottages;
a few have seventeenth-century dates cut on stone tablets on their
fronts, but the undated ones look equally old; some thatched,
others tiled, but none particularly attractive. Certainly they are
without the added charm of a green drapery--creeper or ivy rose,
clematis, and honeysuckle; and they are also mostly without the
cottage-garden flowers, unprofitably gay like the blossoming furze,
but dear to the soul: the flowers we find in so many of the villages
along the rivers, especially in those of the Wylye valley to be
described in a later chapter.

The trees, I have said, are few, though the churchyard is shady, where
you can refresh yourself beneath its ancient beeches and its one
wide-branching yew, or sit on a tomb in the sun when you wish for warmth
and brightness. The trees growing by or near the street are mostly ash
or beech, with a pine or two, old but not large; and there are small or
dwarf yew-, holly-, and thorn-trees. Very little fruit is grown; two or
three to half a dozen apple- and damson-trees are called an orchard, and
one is sorry for the children. But in late summer and autumn they get
their fruit from the hedges. These run up towards the downs on either
side of the village, at right angles with its street; long, unkept
hedges, beautiful with scarlet haws and traveller's-joy, rich in bramble
and elder berries and purple sloes and nuts--a thousand times more nuts
than the little dormice require for their own modest wants.

Finally, to go back to its disadvantages, the village is waterless; at
all events in summer, when water is most wanted. Water is such a
blessing and joy in a village--a joy for ever when it flows throughout
the year, as at Nether Stowey and Winsford and Bourton-on-the-Water, to
mention but three of all those happy villages in the land which are
known to most of us! What man on coming to such places and watching the
rushing, sparkling, foaming torrent by day and listening to its
splashing, gurgling sounds by night, does not resolve that he will live
in no village that has not a perennial stream in it! This unblessed,
high and dry village has nothing but the winter bourne which gives it
its name; a sort of surname common to a score or two of villages in
Wiltshire, Dorset, Somerset, and Hants. Here the bed of the stream lies
by the bank on one side of the village street, and when the autumn and
early winter rains have fallen abundantly, the hidden reservoirs within
the chalk hills are filled to overflowing; then the water finds its way
out and fills the dry old channel and sometimes turns the whole street
into a rushing river, to the immense joy of the village children. They
are like ducks, hatched and reared at some upland farm where there was
not even a muddy pool to dibble in. For a season (the wet one) the
village women have water at their own doors and can go out and dip pails
in it as often as they want. When spring comes it is still flowing
merrily, trying to make you believe that it is going to flow for ever;
beautiful, green water-loving plants and grasses spring up and flourish
along the roadside, and you may see comfrey and water forget-me-not in
flower. Pools, too, have been formed in some deep, hollow places; they
are fringed with tall grasses, whitened over with bloom of
water-crowfoot, and poa grass grows up from the bottom to spread its
green tresses over the surface. Better still, by and by a couple of
stray moorhens make their appearance in the pool--strange birds,
coloured glossy olive-brown, slashed with white, with splendid scarlet
and yellow beaks! If by some strange chance a shining blue kingfisher
were to appear it could not create a greater excitement. So much
attention do they receive that the poor strangers have no peace of their
lives. It is a happy time for the children, and a good time for the busy
housewife, who has all the water she wants for cooking and washing and
cleaning--she may now dash as many pailfuls over her brick floors as she
likes. Then the clear, swift current begins to diminish, and scarcely
have you had time to notice the change than it is altogether gone! The
women must go back to the well and let the bucket down, and laboriously
turn and turn the handle of the windlass till it mounts to the top
again. The pretty moist, green herbage, the graceful grasses, quickly
wither away; dust and straws and rubbish from the road lie in the dry
channel, and by and by it is filled with a summer growth of dock and
loveless nettles which no child may touch with impunity.

No, I cannot think that any person for whom it had no association, no
secret interest, would, after looking at this village with its dried-up
winterbourne, care to make his home in it. And no person, I imagine,
wants to see it; for it has no special attraction and is away from any
road, at a distance from everywhere. I knew a great many villages in
Salisbury Plain, and was always adding to their number, but there was no
intention of visiting this one. Perhaps there is not a village on the
Plain, or anywhere in Wiltshire for that matter, which sees fewer
strangers. Then I fell in with the old shepherd whose life will be
related in the succeeding chapters, and who, away from his native place,
had no story about his past life and the lives of those he had known--no
thought in his mind, I might almost say, which was not connected with
the village of Winterbourne Bishop. And many of his anecdotes and
reflections proved so interesting that I fell into the habit of putting
them down in my notebook; until in the end the place itself, where he
had followed his "homely trade" so long, seeing and feeling so much,
drew me to it. I knew there was "nothing to see" in it, that it was
without the usual attractions; that there was, in fact, nothing but the
human interest, but that was enough. So I came to it to satisfy an idle
curiosity--just to see how it would accord with the mental picture
produced by his description of it. I came, I may say, prepared to like
the place for the sole but sufficient reason that it had been his home.
Had it not been for this feeling he had produced in me I should not, I
imagine, have cared to stay long in it. As it was, I did stay, then came
again and found that it was growing on me. I wondered why; for the mere
interest in the old shepherd's life memories did not seem enough to
account for this deepening attachment. It began to seem to me that I
liked it more and more because of its very barrenness--the entire
absence of all the features which make a place attractive, noble
scenery, woods, and waters; deer parks and old houses, Tudor,
Elizabethan, Jacobean, stately and beautiful, full of art treasures;
ancient monuments and historical associations. There were none of these
things; there was nothing here but that wide, vacant expanse, very
thinly populated with humble, rural folk--farmers, shepherds,
labourers--living in very humble houses. England is so full of riches in
ancient monuments and grand and interesting and lovely buildings and
objects and scenes, that it is perhaps too rich. For we may get into the
habit of looking for such things, expecting them at every turn, every
mile of the way.

I found it a relief, at Winterbourne Bishop, to be in a country which
had nothing to draw a man out of a town. A wide, empty land, with
nothing on it to look at but a furze-bush; or when I had gained the
summit of the down, and to get a little higher still stood on the top of
one of its many barrows, a sight of the distant village, its low, grey
or reddish-brown cottages half hidden among its few trees, the square,
stone tower of its little church looking at a distance no taller than a
milestone. That emptiness seemed good for both mind and body: I could
spend long hours idly sauntering or sitting or lying on the turf,
thinking of nothing, or only of one thing--that it was a relief to have
no thought about anything.

But no, something was secretly saying to me all the time, that it was
more than what I have said which continued to draw me to this vacant
place--more than the mere relief experienced on coming back to nature
and solitude, and the freedom of a wide earth and sky. I was not fully
conscious of what the something more was until after repeated visits. On
each occasion it was a pleasure to leave Salisbury behind and set out on
that long, hilly road, and the feeling would keep with me all the
journey, even in bad weather, sultry or cold, or with the wind hard
against me, blowing the white chalk dust into my eyes. From the time I
left the turnpike to go the last two and a half to three miles by the
side-road I would gaze eagerly ahead for a sight of my destination long
before it could possibly be seen; until, on gaining the summit of a low,
intervening down, the wished scene would be disclosed--the vale-like,
wide depression, with its line of trees, blue-green in the distance,
flecks of red and grey colour of the houses among them--and at that
sight there would come a sense of elation, like that of coming home.

This in fact was the secret! This empty place was, in its aspect,
despite the difference in configuration between down and undulating
plain, more like the home of my early years than any other place known
to me in the country. I can note many differences, but they do not
deprive me of this home feeling; it is the likenesses that hold me, the
spirit of the place, one which is not a desert with the desert's
melancholy or sense of desolation, but inhabited, although thinly and by
humble-minded men whose work and dwellings are unobtrusive. The final
effect of this wide, green space with signs of human life and labour on
it, and sight of animals--sheep and cattle--at various distances, is
that we are not aliens here, intruders or invaders on the earth, living
in it but apart, perhaps hating and spoiling it, but with the other
animals are children of Nature, like them living and seeking our
subsistence under her sky, familiar with her sun and wind and rain.

If some ostentatious person had come to this strangely quiet spot and
raised a staring, big house, the sight of it in the landscape would have
made it impossible to have such a feeling as I have described--this
sense of man's harmony and oneness with nature. From how much of England
has this expression which nature has for the spirit, which is so much
more to us than beauty of scenery, been blotted out! This quiet spot in
Wiltshire has been inhabited from of old, how far back in time the
barrows raised by an ancient, barbarous people are there to tell us, and
to show us how long it is possible for the race of men, in all stages of
culture, to exist on the earth without spoiling it.

One afternoon when walking on Bishop Down I noticed at a distance of a
hundred yards or more that a rabbit had started making a burrow in a new
place and had thrown out a vast quantity of earth. Going to the spot to
see what kind of chalk or soil he was digging so deeply in, I found that
he had thrown out a human thigh-bone and a rib or two. They were of a
reddish-white colour and had been embedded in a hard mixture of chalk
and red earth. The following day I went again, and there were more
bones, and every day after that the number increased until it seemed to
me that he had brought out the entire skeleton, minus the skull, which I
had been curious to see. Then the bones disappeared. The man who looked
after the game had seen them, and recognizing that they were human
remains had judiciously taken them away to destroy or stow them away in
some safe place. For if the village constable had discovered them, or
heard of their presence, he would perhaps have made a fuss and even
thought it necessary to communicate with the coroner of the district.
Such things occasionally happen, even in Wiltshire where the chalk hills
are full of the bones of dead men, and a solemn Crowner's quest is held
on the remains of a Saxon or Dane or an ancient Briton. When some
important person--a Sir Richard Colt Hoare, for example, who dug up 379
barrows in Wiltshire, or a General Pitt Rivers throws out human remains
nobody minds, but if an unauthorized rabbit kicks out a lot of bones the
matter should be inquired into.

But the man whose bones had been thus thrown out into the sunlight after
lying so long at that spot, which commanded a view of the distant,
little village looking so small in that immense, green space--who and
what was he, and how long ago did he live on the earth--at Winterbourne
Bishop, let us say? There were two barrows in that part of the down, but
quite a stone's-throw away from the spot where the rabbit was working,
so that he may not have been one of the people of that period. Still, it
is probable that he was buried a very long time ago, centuries back,
perhaps a thousand years, perhaps longer, and by chance there was a
slope there which prevented the water from percolating, and the soil in
which he had been deposited, under that close-knit turf which looked as
if it had never been disturbed, was one in which bones might keep
uncrumbled for ever.

The thought that occurred to me at the time was that if the man himself
had come back to life after so long a period, to stand once more on that
down surveying the scene, he would have noticed little change in it,
certainly nothing of a startling description. The village itself,
looking so small at that distance, in the centre of the vast depression,
would probably not be strange to him. It was doubtless there as far back
as history goes and probably still farther back in time. For at that
point, just where the winterbourne gushes out from the low hills, is the
spot man would naturally select to make his home. And he would see no
mansion or big building, no puff of white steam and sight of a long,
black train creeping over the earth, nor any other strange thing. It
would appear to him even as he knew it before he fell asleep--the same
familiar scene, with furze and bramble and bracken on the slope, the
wide expanse with sheep and cattle grazing in the distance, and the dark
green of trees in the hollows, and fold on fold of the low down beyond,
stretching away to the dim, farthest horizon.




CHAPTER IV

A SHEPHERD OF THE DOWNS

  Caleb Bawcombe--An old shepherd's love of his home--Fifty years'
  shepherding--Bawcombe's singular appearance--A tale of a titlark--Caleb
  Bawcombe's father--Father and son--A grateful sportsman and Isaac
  Bawcombe's pension--Death following death in old married couples--In a
  village churchyard--A farm-labourer's gravestone and his story


It is now several years since I first met Caleb Bawcombe, a shepherd of
the South Wiltshire Downs, but already old and infirm and past work. I
met him at a distance from his native village, and it was only after I
had known him a long time and had spent many afternoons and evenings in
his company, listening to his anecdotes of his shepherding days, that I
went to see his own old home for myself--the village of Winterbourne
Bishop already described, to find it a place after my own heart. But as
I have said, if I had never known Caleb and heard so much from him about
his own life and the lives of many of his fellow-villagers, I should
probably never have seen this village.

One of his memories was of an old shepherd named John, whose
acquaintance he made when a very young man--John being at that time
seventy-eight years old--on the Winterbourne Bishop farm, where he had
served for an unbroken period of close on sixty years. Though so aged he
was still head shepherd, and he continued to hold that place seven years
longer--until his master, who had taken over old John with the place,
finally gave up the farm and farming at the same time. He, too, was
getting past work and wished to spend his declining years in his native
village in an adjoining parish, where he owned some house and cottage
property. And now what was to become of the old shepherd, since the new
tenant had brought his own men with him?--and he, moreover, considered
that John, at eighty-five, was too old to tend a flock on the hills,
even of tegs. His old master, anxious to help him, tried to get him some
employment in the village where he wished to stay; and failing in this,
he at last offered him a cottage rent free in the village where he was
going to live himself, and, in addition, twelve shillings a week for the
rest of his life. It was in those days an exceedingly generous offer,
but John refused it. "Master," he said, "I be going to stay in my own
native village, and if I can't make a living the parish'll have to keep
I; but keep or not keep, here I be and here I be going to stay, where I
were borned."

From this position the stubborn old man refused to be moved, and there
at Winterbourne Bishop his master had to leave him, although not without
having first made him a sufficient provision.

The way in which my old friend, Caleb Bawcombe, told the story plainly
revealed his own feeling in the matter. He understood and had the
keenest sympathy with old John, dead now over half a century; or rather,
let us say, resting very peacefully in that green spot under the old
grey tower of Winterbourne Bishop church where as a small boy he had
played among the old gravestones as far back in time as the middle of
the eighteenth century. But old John had long survived wife and
children, and having no one but himself to think of was at liberty to
end his days where he pleased. Not so with Caleb, for, although his
undying passion for home and his love of the shepherd's calling were as
great as John's, he was not so free, and he was compelled at last to
leave his native downs, which he may never see again, to settle for the
remainder of his days in another part of the country.

Early in life he "caught a chill" through long exposure to wet and cold
in winter; this brought on rheumatic fever and a malady of the thigh,
which finally affected the whole limb and made him lame for life. Thus
handicapped he had continued as shepherd for close on fifty years,
during which time his sons and daughters had grown up, married, and gone
away, mostly to a considerable distance, leaving their aged parents
alone once more. Then the wife, who was a strong woman and of an
enterprising temper, found an opening for herself at a distance from
home where she could start a little business. Caleb indignantly refused
to give up shepherding in his place to take part in so unheard-of an
adventure; but after a year or more of life in his lonely hut among the
hills and cold, empty cottage in the village, he at length tore himself
away from that beloved spot and set forth on the longest journey of his
life--about forty-five miles--to join her and help in the work of her
new home. Here a few years later I found him, aged seventy-two, but
owing to his increasing infirmities looking considerably more. When he
considered that his father, a shepherd before him on those same
Wiltshire Downs, lived to eighty-six, and his mother to eighty-four, and
that both were vigorous and led active lives almost to the end, he
thought it strange that his own work should be so soon done. For in
heart and mind he was still young; he did not want to rest yet.

Since that first meeting nine years have passed, and as he is actually
better in health to-day than he was then, there is good reason to hope
that his staying power will equal that of his father.

I was at first struck with the singularity of Caleb's appearance, and
later by the expression of his eyes. A very tall, big-boned, lean,
round-shouldered man, he was uncouth almost to the verge of
grotesqueness, and walked painfully with the aid of a stick, dragging
his shrunken and shortened bad leg. His head was long and narrow, and
his high forehead, long nose, long chin, and long, coarse, grey
whiskers, worn like a beard on his throat, produced a goat-like effect.
This was heightened by the ears and eyes. The big ears stood out from
his head, and owing to a peculiar bend or curl in the membrane at the
top they looked at certain angles almost pointed. The hazel eyes were
wonderfully clear, but that quality was less remarkable than the unhuman
intelligence in them--fawn-like eyes that gazed steadily at you as one
may gaze through the window, open back and front, of a house at the
landscape beyond. This peculiarity was a little disconcerting at first,
when, after making his acquaintance out of doors, I went in uninvited
and sat down with him at his own fireside. The busy old wife talked of
this and that, and hinted as politely as she knew how that I was in her
way. To her practical, peasant mind there was no sense in my being
there. "He be a stranger to we, and we be strangers to he." Caleb was
silent, and his clear eyes showed neither annoyance nor pleasure but
only their native, wild alertness, but the caste feeling is always less
strong in the hill shepherd than in other men who are on the land; in
some cases it will vanish at a touch, and it was so in this one. A
canary in a cage hanging in the kitchen served to introduce the subject
of birds captive and birds free. I said that I liked the little yellow
bird, and was not vexed to see him in a cage, since he was cage-born;
but I considered that those who caught wild birds and kept them
prisoners did not properly understand things. This happened to be
Caleb's view. He had a curiously tender feeling about the little wild
birds, and one amusing incident of his boyhood which he remembered came
out during our talk. He was out on the down one summer day in charge of
his father's flock, when two boys of the village on a ramble in the
hills came and sat down on the turf by his side. One of them had a
titlark, or meadow pipit, which he had just caught, in his hand, and
there was a hot argument as to which of the two was the lawful owner of
the poor little captive. The facts were as follows. One of the boys
having found the nest became possessed with the desire to get the bird.
His companion at once offered to catch it for him, and together they
withdrew to a distance and sat down and waited until the bird returned
to sit on the eggs. Then the young birdcatcher returned to the spot, and
creeping quietly up to within five or six feet of the nest threw his hat
so that it fell over the sitting titlark; but after having thus secured
it he refused to give it up. The dispute waxed hotter as they sat there,
and at last when it got to the point of threats of cuffs on the ear and
slaps on the face they agreed to fight it out, the victor to have the
titlark. The bird was then put under a hat for safety on the smooth turf
a few feet away, and the boys proceeded to take off their jackets and
roll up their shirt-sleeves, after which they faced one another, and
were just about to begin when Caleb, thrusting out his crook, turned the
hat over and away flew the titlark.

The boys, deprived of their bird and of an excuse for a fight, would
gladly have discharged their fury on Caleb, but they durst not, seeing
that his dog was lying at his side; they could only threaten and abuse
him, call him bad names, and finally put on their coats and walk off.

That pretty little tale of a titlark was but the first of a long
succession of memories of his early years, with half a century of
shepherding life on the downs, which came out during our talks on many
autumn and winter evenings as we sat by his kitchen fire. The earlier of
these memories were always the best to me, because they took one back
sixty years or more, to a time when there was more wildness in the earth
than now, and a nobler wild animal life. Even more interesting were some
of the memories of his father, Isaac Bawcombe, whose time went back to
the early years of the nineteenth century. Caleb cherished an admiration
and reverence for his father's memory which were almost a worship, and
he loved to describe him as he appeared in his old age, when upwards of
eighty. He was erect and tall, standing six feet two in height, well
proportioned, with a clean-shaved, florid face, clear, dark eyes, and
silver-white hair; and at this later period of his life he always wore
the dress of an old order of pensioners to which he had been admitted--a
soft, broad, white felt hat, thick boots and brown leather leggings, and
a long, grey cloth overcoat with red collar and brass buttons.

According to Caleb, he must have been an exceedingly fine specimen of a
man, both physically and morally. Born in 1800, he began following a
flock as a boy, and continued as shepherd on the same farm until he was
sixty, never rising to more than seven shillings a week and nothing
found, since he lived in the cottage where he was born and which he
inherited from his father. That a man of his fine powers, a
head-shepherd on a large hill-farm, should have had no better pay than
that down to the year 1860, after nearly half a century of work in one
place, seems almost incredible. Even his sons, as they grew up to man's
estate, advised him to ask for an increase, but he would not. Seven
shillings a week he had always had; and that small sum, with something
his wife earned by making highly finished smock-frocks, had been
sufficient to keep them all in a decent way; and his sons were now all
earning their own living. But Caleb got married, and resolved to leave
the old farm at Bishop to take a better place at a distance from home,
at Warminster, which had been offered him. He would there have a cottage
to live in, nine shillings a week, and a sack of barley for his dog. At
that time the shepherd had to keep his own dog--no small expense to him
when his wages were no more than six to eight shillings a week. But
Caleb was his father's favourite son, and the old man could not endure
the thought of losing sight of him; and at last, finding that he could
not persuade him not to leave the old home, he became angry, and told
him that if he went away to Warminster for the sake of the higher wages
and barley for the dog he would disown him! This was a serious matter to
Caleb, in spite of the fact that a shepherd has no money to leave to his
children when he passes away. He went nevertheless, for, though he loved
and reverenced his father, he had a young wife who pulled the other way;
and he was absent for years, and when he returned the old man's heart
had softened, so that he was glad to welcome him back to the old home.

Meanwhile at that humble cottage at Winterbourne Bishop great things had
happened; old Isaac was no longer shepherding on the downs, but living
very comfortably in his own cottage in the village. The change came
about in this way.

The downland shepherds, Caleb said, were as a rule clever poachers; and
it is really not surprising, when one considers the temptation to a man
with a wife and several hungry children, besides himself and a dog, to
feed out of about seven shillings a week. But old Bawcombe was an
exception: he would take no game, furred or feathered, nor, if he could
prevent it, allow another to take anything from the land fed by his
flock. Caleb and his brothers, when as boys and youths they began their
shepherding, sometimes caught a rabbit, or their dog caught and killed
one without their encouragement; but, however the thing came into their
hands, they could not take it home on account of their father. Now it
happened that an elderly gentleman who had the shooting was a keen
sportsman, and that in several successive years he found a wonderful
difference in the amount of game at one spot among the hills and in all
the rest of his hill property. The only explanation the keeper could
give was that Isaac Bawcombe tended his flock on that down where
rabbits, hares, and partridges were so plentiful. One autumn day the
gentleman was shooting over that down, and seeing a big man in a
smock-frock standing motionless, crook in hand, regarding him, he called
out to his keeper, who was with him, "Who is that big man?" and was told
that it was Shepherd Bawcombe. The old gentleman pulled some money out
of his pocket and said, "Give him this half-crown, and thank him for the
good sport I've had to-day." But after the coin had been given the giver
still remained standing there, thinking, perhaps, that he had not yet
sufficiently rewarded the man; and at last, before turning away, he
shouted, "Bawcombe, that's not all. You'll get something more by and
by."

Isaac had not long to wait for the something more, and it turned out not
to be the hare or brace of birds he had half expected. It happened that
the sportsman was one of the trustees of an ancient charity which
provided for six of the most deserving old men of the parish of Bishop;
now, one of the six had recently died, and on this gentleman's
recommendation Bawcombe had been elected to fill the vacant place. The
letter from Salisbury informing him of his election and commanding his
presence in that city filled him with astonishment; for, though he was
sixty years old and the father of three sons now out in the world, he
could not yet regard himself as an old man, for he had never known a
day's illness, nor an ache, and was famed in all that neighbourhood for
his great physical strength and endurance. And now, with his own cottage
to live in, eight shillings a week, and his pensioners' garments, with
certain other benefits, and a shilling a day besides which his old
master paid him for some services at the farm-house in the village,
Isaac found himself very well off indeed, and he enjoyed his prosperous
state for twenty-six years. Then, in 1886, his old wife fell ill and
died, and no sooner was she in her grave than he, too, began to droop;
and soon, before the year was out, he followed her, because, as the
neighbours said, they had always been a loving pair and one could not
'bide without the other.

This chapter has already had its proper ending and there was no
intention of adding to it, but now for a special reason, which I trust
the reader will pardon when he hears it, I must go on to say something
about that strange phenomenon of death succeeding death in old married
couples, one dying for no other reason than that the other has died. For
it is our instinct to hold fast to life, and the older a man gets if he
be sane the more he becomes like a newborn child in the impulse to grip
tightly. A strange and a rare thing among people generally (the people
we know), it is nevertheless quite common among persons of the labouring
class in the rural districts. I have sometimes marvelled at the number
of such cases to be met with in the villages; but when one comes to
think about it one ceases to wonder that it should be so. For the
labourer on the land goes on from boyhood to the end of life in the same
everlasting round, the changes from task to task, according to the
seasons, being no greater than in the case of the animals that alter
their actions and habits to suit the varying conditions of the year.
March and August and December, and every month, will bring about the
changes in the atmosphere and earth and vegetation and in the animals,
which have been from of old, which he knows how to meet, and the old,
familiar task, lambing-time, shearing-time, root and seed crops hoeing,
haymaking, harvesting. It is a life of the extremest simplicity, without
all those interests outside the home and the daily task, the innumerable
distractions, common to all persons in other classes and to the workmen
in towns as well. Incidentally it may be said that it is also the
healthiest, that, speaking generally, the agricultural labourer is the
healthiest and sanest man in the land, if not also the happiest, as some
believe.

It is this life of simple, unchanging actions and of habits that are
like instincts, of hard labour in sun and wind and rain from day to day,
with its weekly break and rest, and of but few comforts and no luxuries,
which serves to bind man and wife so closely. And the longer their life
goes on together the closer and more unbreakable the union grows. They
are growing old: old friends and companions have died or left them;
their children have married and gone away and have their own families
and affairs, so that the old folks at home are little remembered, and to
all others they have become of little consequence in the world. But they
do not know it, for they are together, cherishing the same memories,
speaking of the same old, familiar things, and their lost friends and
companions, their absent, perhaps estranged, children, are with them
still in mind as in the old days. The past is with them more than the
present, to give an undying interest to life; for they share it, and it
is only when one goes, when the old wife gets the tea ready and goes
mechanically to the door to gaze out, knowing that her tired man will
come in no more to take his customary place and listen to all the things
she has stored up in her mind during the day to tell him; and when the
tired labourer comes in at dusk to find no old wife waiting to give him
his tea and talk to him while he refreshes himself, he all at once
realizes his position; he finds himself cut off from the entire world,
from all of his kind. Where are they all? The enduring sympathy of that
one soul that was with him till now had kept him in touch with life, had
made it seem unchanged and unchangeable, and with that soul has vanished
the old, sweet illusion as well as all ties, all common, human
affection. He is desolate, indeed, alone in a desert world, and it is
not strange that in many and many a case, even in that of a man still
strong, untouched by disease and good for another decade or two, the
loss, the awful solitude, has proved too much for him.

Such cases, I have said, are common, but they are not recorded, though
it is possible with labour to pick them out in the church registers; but
in the churchyards you do not find them, since the farm-labourer has
only a green mound to mark the spot where he lies. Nevertheless, he is
sometimes honoured with a gravestone, and last August I came by chance
on one on which was recorded a case like that of Isaac Bawcombe and his
life-mate.

The churchyard is in one of the prettiest and most secluded villages in
the downland country described in this book. The church is ancient and
beautiful and interesting in many ways, and the churchyard, too, is one
of the most interesting I know, a beautiful, green, tree-shaded spot,
with an extraordinary number of tombs and gravestones, many of them
dated in the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries, inscribed with names
of families which have long died out.

I went on that afternoon to pass an hour in the churchyard, and finding
an old man in labourer's clothes resting on a tomb, I sat down and
entered into conversation with him. He was seventy-nine, he told me, and
past work, and he had three shillings a week from the parish; but he was
very deaf and it fatigued me to talk to him, and seeing the church open
I went in. On previous visits I had had a good deal of trouble to get
the key, and to find it open now was a pleasant surprise. An old woman
was there dusting the seats, and by and by, while I was talking with
her, the old labourer came stumping in with his ponderous, iron-shod
boots and without taking off his old, rusty hat, and began shouting at
the church-cleaner about a pair of trousers he had given her to mend,
which he wanted badly. Leaving them to their arguing I went out and
began studying the inscriptions on the stones, so hard to make out in
some instances; the old man followed and went his way; then the
church-cleaner came out to where I was standing. "A tiresome old man!"
she said. "He's that deaf he has to shout to hear himself speak, then
you've got to shout back--and all about his old trousers!"

"I suppose he wants them," I returned, "and you promised to do them, so
he has some reason for going at you about it."

"Oh no, he hasn't," she replied. "The girl brought them for me to mend,
and I said, 'Leave them and I'll do them when I've time'--how did I know
he wanted them in a hurry? A troublesome old man!"

By and by, taking a pair of spectacles out of her pocket, she put them
on, and going down on her knees she began industriously picking the old,
brown, dead moss out of the lettering on one side of the tomb. "I'd like
to know what it says on this stone," she said.

"Well, you can read it for yourself, now you've got your glasses on."

"I can't read. You see, I'm old--seventy-six years, and when I were
little we were very poor and I couldn't get no schooling. I've got these
glasses to do my sewing, and only put them on to get this stuff out so's
you could read it. I'd like to hear you read it."

I began to get interested in the old dame who talked to me so freely.
She was small and weak-looking, and appeared very thin in her limp, old,
faded gown; she had a meek, patient expression on her face, and her
voice, too, like her face, expressed weariness and resignation.

"But if you have always lived here you must know what is said on this
stone?"

"No, I don't; nobody never read it to me, and I couldn't read it because
I wasn't taught to read. But I'd like to hear you read it."

It was a long inscription to a person named Ash, gentleman, of this
parish, who departed this life over a century ago, and was a man of a
noble and generous disposition, good as a husband, a father, a friend,
and charitable to the poor. Under all were some lines of verse, scarcely
legible in spite of the trouble she had taken to remove the old moss
from the letters.

She listened with profound interest, then said, "I never heard all that
before; I didn't know the name, though I've known this stone since I was
a child. I used to climb on to it then. Can you read me another?"

I read her another and several more, then came to one which she said she
knew--every word of it, for this was the grave of the sweetest, kindest
woman that ever lived. Oh, how good this dear woman had been to her in
her young married life more'n fifty years ago! If that dear lady had
only lived it would not have been so hard for her when her trouble come!

"And what was your trouble?"

"It was the loss of my poor man. He was such a good man, a thatcher; and
he fell from a rick and injured his spine, and he died, poor fellow, and
left me with our five little children." Then, having told me her own
tragedy, to my surprise she brightened up and begged me to read other
inscriptions to her.

I went on reading, and presently she said, "No, that's wrong. There
wasn't ever a Lampard in this parish. That I know."

"You don't know! There certainly was a Lampard or it would not be stated
here, cut in deep letters on this stone."

"No, there wasn't a Lampard. I've never known such a name and I've lived
here all my life."

"But there were people living here before you came on the scene. He died
a long time ago, this Lampard--in 1714, it says. And you are only
seventy-six, you tell me; that is to say, you were born in 1835, and
that would be one hundred and twenty-one years after he died."

"That's a long time! It must be very old, this stone. And the church
too. I've heard say it was once a Roman Catholic church. Is that true?"

"Why, of course it's true--all the old churches were, and we were all of
that faith until a King of England had a quarrel with the Pope and
determined he would be Pope himself as well as king in his own country.
So he turned all the priests and monks out, and took their property and
churches and had his own men put in. That was Henry VIII."

"I've heard something about that king and his wives. But about Lampard,
it do seem strange I've never heard that name before."

"Not strange at all; it was a common name in this part of Wiltshire in
former days; you find it in dozens of churchyards, but you'll find very
few Lampards living in the villages. Why, I could tell you a dozen or
twenty surnames, some queer, funny names, that were common in these
parts not more than a century ago which seem to have quite died out."

"I should like to hear some of them if you'll tell me."

"Let me think a moment: there was Thorr, Pizzie, Gee, Every, Pottle,
Kiddle, Toomer, Shergold, and--"

Here she interrupted to say that she knew three of the names I had
mentioned. Then, pointing to a small, upright gravestone about twenty
feet away, she added, "And there's one."

"Very well," I said, "but don't keep putting me out--I've got more names
in my mind to tell you. Maidment, Marchmont, Velvin, Burpitt, Winzur,
Rideout, Cullurne."

Of these she only knew one--Rideout.

Then I went over to the stone she had pointed to and read the
inscription to John Toomer and his wife Rebecca. She died first, in
March 1877, aged 72; he in July the same year, aged 75.

"You knew them, I suppose?"

"Yes, they belonged here, both of them."

"Tell me about them."

"There's nothing to tell; he was only a labourer and worked on the same
farm all his life."

"Who put a stone over them--their children?"

"No, they're all poor and live away. I think it was a lady who lived
here; she'd been good to them, and she came and stood here when they put
old John in the ground."

"But I want to hear more."

"There's no more, I've said; he was a labourer, and after she died he
died."

"Yes? go on."

"How can I go on? There's no more. I knew them so well; they lived in
the little thatched cottage over there, where the Millards live now."

"Did they fall ill at the same time?"

"Oh no, he was as well as could be, still at work, till she died, then
he went on in a strange way. He would come in of an evening and call his
wife. 'Mother! Mother, where are you?' you'd hear him call, 'Mother, be
you upstairs? Mother, ain't you coming down for a bit of bread and
cheese before you go to bed?' And then in a little while he just died."

"And you said there was nothing to tell!"

"No, there wasn't anything. He was just one of us, a labourer on the
farm."

I then gave her something, and to my surprise after taking it she made
me an elaborate curtsy. It rather upset me, for I had thought we had got
on very well together and were quite free and easy in our talk, very
much on a level. But she was not done with me yet. She followed to the
gate, and holding out her open hand with that small gift in it, she said
in a pathetic voice, "Did you think, sir, I was expecting this? I had no
such thought and didn't want it."

And I had no thought of saying or writing a word about her. But since
that day she has haunted me--she and her old John Toomer, and it has
just now occurred to me that by putting her in my book I may be able to
get her out of my mind.




CHAPTER V

EARLY MEMORIES

  A child shepherd--Isaac and his children--Shepherding in boyhood--Two
  notable sheep-dogs--Jack, the adder-killer--Sitting on an adder--Rough
  and the drovers--The Salisbury coach--A sheep-dog suckling a lamb


Caleb's shepherding began in childhood; at all events he had his first
experience of it at that time. Many an old shepherd, whose father was
shepherd before him, has told me that he began to go with the flock very
early in life, when he was no more than ten to twelve years of age.
Caleb remembered being put in charge of his father's flock at the tender
age of six. It was a new and wonderful experience, and made so vivid and
lasting an impression on his mind that now, when he is past eighty, he
speaks of it very feelingly as of something which happened yesterday.

It was harvesting time, and Isaac, who was a good reaper, was wanted in
the field, but he could find no one, not even a boy, to take charge of
his flock in the meantime, and so to be able to reap and keep an eye on
the flock at the same time he brought his sheep down to the part of the
down adjoining the field. It was on his "liberty," or that part of the
down where he was entitled to have his flock. He then took his very
small boy, Caleb, and placing him with the sheep told him they were now
in his charge; that he was not to lose sight of them, and at the same
time not to run about among the furze-bushes for fear of treading on an
adder. By and by the sheep began straying off among the furze-bushes,
and no sooner would they disappear from sight than he imagined they were
lost for ever, or would be unless he quickly found them, and to find
them he had to run about among the bushes with the terror of adders in
his mind, and the two troubles together kept him crying with misery all
the time. Then, at intervals, Isaac would leave his reaping and come to
see how he was getting on, and the tears would vanish from his eyes, and
he would feel very brave again, and to his father's question he would
reply that he was getting on very well.

Finally his father came and took him to the field, to his great relief;
but he did not carry him in his arms; he strode along at his usual pace
and let the little fellow run after him, stumbling and falling and
picking himself up again and running on. And by and by one of the women
in the field cried out, "Be you not ashamed, Isaac, to go that pace and
not bide for the little child! I do b'lieve he's no more'n seven
year--poor mite!"

"No more'n six," answered Isaac proudly, with a laugh.

But though not soft or tender with his children he was very fond of
them, and when he came home early in the evening he would get them round
him and talk to them, and sing old songs and ballads he had learnt in
his young years--"Down in the Village," "The Days of Queen Elizabeth,"
"The Blacksmith," "The Gown of Green," "The Dawning of the Day," and
many others, which Caleb in the end got by heart and used to sing, too,
when he was grown up.

Caleb was about nine when he began to help regularly with the flock;
that was in the summer-time, when the flock was put every day on the
down and when Isaac's services were required for the haymaking and later
for harvesting and other work. His best memories of this period relate
to his mother and to two sheepdogs, Jack at first and afterwards Rough,
both animals of original character. Jack was a great favourite of his
master, who considered him a "tarrable good dog." He was rather
short-haired, like the old Welsh sheepdog once common in Wiltshire, but
entirely black instead of the usual colour--blue with a sprinkling of
black spots. This dog had an intense hatred of adders and never failed
to kill every one he discovered. At the same time he knew that they were
dangerous enemies to tackle, and on catching sight of one his hair would
instantly bristle up, and he would stand as if paralysed for some
moments, glaring at it and gnashing his teeth, then springing like a cat
upon it he would seize it in his mouth, only to hurl it from him to a
distance. This action he would repeat until the adder was dead, and
Isaac would then put it under a furze-bush to take it home and hang it
on a certain gate. The farmer, too, like the dog, hated adders, and paid
his shepherd sixpence for every one his dog killed.

One day Caleb, with one of his brothers, was out with the flock, amusing
themselves in their usual way on the turf with nine morris-men and the
shepherd's puzzle, when all at once their mother appeared unexpectedly
on the scene. It was her custom, when the boys were sent out with the
flock, to make expeditions to the down just to see what they were up to;
and hiding her approach by keeping to a hedge-side or by means of the
furze-bushes, she would sometimes come upon them with disconcerting
suddenness. On this occasion just where the boys had been playing there
was a low, stout furze-bush, so dense and flat-topped that one could use
it as a seat, and his mother taking off and folding her shawl placed it
on the bush, and sat down on it to rest herself after her long walk. "I
can see her now," said Caleb, "sitting on that furze-bush, in her smock
and leggings, with a big hat like a man's on her head--for that's how
she dressed." But in a few moments she jumped up, crying out that she
felt a snake under her, and snatched off the shawl, and there, sure
enough, out of the middle of the flat bush-top appeared the head of an
adder, flicking out its tongue. The dog, too, saw it, dashed at the
bush, forcing his muzzle and head into the middle of it, seized the
serpent by its body and plucked it out and threw it from him, only to
follow it up and kill it in the usual way.

Rough was a large, shaggy, grey-blue bobtail bitch with a white collar.
She was a clever, good all-round dog, but had originally been trained
for the road, and one of the shepherd's stories about her relates of her
intelligence in her own special line--the driving of sheep.

One day he and his smaller brother were in charge of the flock on the
down, and were on the side where it dips down to the turnpike-road about
a mile and a half from the village, where a large flock, driven by two
men and two dogs, came by. They were going to the Britford sheep-fair
and were behind time; Isaac had started at daylight that morning with
sheep for the same fair, and that was the reason of the boys being with
the flock. As the flock on the down was feeding quietly the boys
determined to go to the road to watch the sheep and men pass, and
arriving at the roadside they saw that the dogs were too tired to work
and the men were getting on with great difficulty. One of them, looking
intently at Rough, asked if she would work. "Oh, yes, she'll work," said
the boy proudly, and calling Rough he pointed to the flock moving very
slowly along the road and over the turf on either side of it. Rough knew
what was wanted; she had been looking on and had taken the situation in
with her professional eye; away she dashed, and running up and down,
first on one side then on the other, quickly put the whole flock,
numbering 800, into the road and gave them a good start.

"Why, she be a road dog!" exclaimed the drover delightedly. "She's
better for me on the road than for you on the down; I'll buy her of
you."

"No, I mustn't sell her," said Caleb.

"Look here, boy," said the other, "I'll give 'ee a sovran and this young
dog, an' he'll be a good one with a little more training."

"No, I mustn't," said Caleb, distressed at the other's persistence.

"Well, will you come a little way on the road with us?" asked the
drover.

This the boys agreed to and went on for about a quarter of a mile, when
all at once the Salisbury coach appeared on the road, coming to meet
them. This new trouble was pointed out to Rough, and at once when her
little master had given the order she dashed barking into the midst of
the mass of sheep and drove them furiously to the side from end to end
of the extended flock, making a clear passage for the coach, which was
not delayed a minute. And no sooner was the coach gone than the sheep
were put back into the road.

Then the drover pulled out his sovereign once more and tried to make the
boy take it.

"I mustn't," he repeated, almost in tears. "What would father say?"

"Say! He won't say nothing. He'll think you've done well."

But Caleb thought that perhaps his father would say something, and when
he remembered certain whippings he had experienced in the past he had an
uncomfortable sensation about his back. "No, I mustn't," was all he
could say, and then the drovers with a laugh went on with their sheep.

When Isaac came home and the adventure was told to him he laughed and
said that he meant to sell Rough some day. He used to say this
occasionally to tease his wife because of the dog's intense devotion to
her; and she, being without a sense of humour and half thinking that he
meant it, would get up out of her seat and solemnly declare that if he
ever sold Rough she would never again go out to the down to see what the
boys were up to.

One day she visited the boys when they had the flock near the turnpike,
and seating herself on the turf a few yards from the road got out her
work and began sewing. Presently they spied a big, singular-looking man
coming at a swinging pace along the road. He was in shirt-sleeves,
barefooted, and wore a straw hat without a rim. Rough eyed the strange
being's approach with suspicion, and going to her mistress placed
herself at her side. The man came up and sat down at a distance of three
or four yards from the group, and Rough, looking dangerous, started up
and put her forepaws on her mistress's lap and began uttering a low
growl.

"Will that dog bite, missus?" said the man.

"Maybe he will," said she. "I won't answer for he if you come any
nearer."

The two boys had been occupied cutting a faggot from a furze-bush with a
bill-hook, and now held a whispered consultation as to what they would
do if the man tried to "hurt mother," and agreed that as soon as Rough
had got her teeth in his leg they would attack him about the head with
the bill-hook. They were not required to go into action; the stranger
could not long endure Rough's savage aspect, and very soon he got up and
resumed his travels.

The shepherd remembered another curious incident in Rough's career. At
one time when she had a litter of pups at home she was yet compelled to
be a great part of the day with the flock of ewes as they could not do
without her. The boys just then were bringing up a motherless lamb by
hand and they would put it with the sheep, and to feed it during the day
were obliged to catch a ewe with milk. The lamb trotted at Caleb's heels
like a dog, and one day when it was hungry and crying to be fed, when
Rough happened to be sitting on her haunches close by, it occurred to
him that Rough's milk might serve as well as a sheep's. The lamb was put
to her and took very kindly to its canine foster-mother, wriggling its
tail and pushing vigorously with its nose. Rough submitted patiently to
the trial, and the result was that the lamb adopted the sheep-dog as its
mother and sucked her milk several times every day, to the great
admiration of all who witnessed it.




CHAPTER VI

SHEPHERD ISAAC BAWCOMBE

  A noble shepherd--A fighting village blacksmith--Old Joe the collier--A
  story of his strength--Donkeys poisoned by yew--The shepherd without his
  sheep--How the shepherd killed a deer


To me the most interesting of Caleb's old memories were those relating
to his father, partly on account of the man's fine character, and partly
because they went so far back, beginning in the early years of the last
century.

Altogether he must have been a very fine specimen of a man, both
physically and morally. In Caleb's mind he was undoubtedly the first
among men morally, but there were two other men supposed to be his
equals in bodily strength, one a native of the village, the other a
periodical visitor. The first was Jarvis the blacksmith, a man of an
immense chest and big arms, one of Isaac's greatest friends, and very
good-tempered except when in his cups, for he did occasionally get
drunk, and then he quarrelled with anyone and every one.

One afternoon he had made himself quite tipsy at the inn, and when going
home, swaying about and walking all over the road, he all at once caught
sight of the big shepherd coming soberly on behind. No sooner did he see
him than it occurred to his wild and muddled mind that he had a quarrel
with this very man, Shepherd Isaac, a quarrel of so pressing a nature
that there was nothing to do but to fight it out there and then. He
planted himself before the shepherd and challenged him to fight. Isaac
smiled and said nothing.

"I'll fight thee about this," he repeated, and began tugging at his
coat, and after getting it off again made up to Isaac, who still smiled
and said no word. Then he pulled his waistcoat off, and finally his
shirt, and with nothing but his boots and breeches on once more squared
up to Isaac and threw himself into his best fighting attitude.

"I doan't want to fight thee," said Isaac at length, "but I be thinking
'twould be best to take thee home." And suddenly dashing in he seized
Jarvis round the waist with one arm, grasped him round the legs with the
other, and flung the big man across his shoulder, and carried him off,
struggling and shouting, to his cottage. There at the door, pale and
distressed, stood the poor wife waiting for her lord, when Isaac
arrived, and going straight in dropped the smith down on his own floor,
and with the remark, "Here be your man," walked off to his cottage and
his tea.

The other powerful man was Old Joe the collier, who flourished and was
known in every village in the Salisbury Plain district during the first
thirty-five years of the last century. I first heard of this once famous
man from Caleb, whose boyish imagination had been affected by his
gigantic figure, mighty voice, and his wandering life over all that wide
world of Salisbury Plain. Afterwards when I became acquainted with a
good many old men, aged from 75 to 90 and upwards, I found that Old
Joe's memory is still green in a good many villages of the district,
from the upper waters of the Avon to the borders of Dorset. But it is
only these ancients who knew him that keep it green; by and by when they
are gone Old Joe and his neddies will be remembered no more.

In those days--down to about 1840, it was customary to burn peat in the
cottages, the first cost of which was about four and sixpence the
wagon-load--as much as I should require to keep me warm for a month in
winter; but the cost of its conveyance to the villages of the Plain was
about five to six shillings per load, as it came from a considerable
distance, mostly from the New Forest. How the labourers at that time,
when they were paid seven or eight shillings a week, could afford to buy
fuel at such prices to bake their rye bread and keep the frost out of
their bones is a marvel to us. Isaac was a good deal better off than
most of the villagers in this respect, as his master--for he never had
but one--allowed him the use of a wagon and the driver's services for
the conveyance of one load of peat each year. The wagon-load of peat and
another of faggots lasted him the year with the furze obtained from his
"liberty" on the down. Coal at that time was only used by the
blacksmiths in the villages, and was conveyed in sacks on ponies or
donkeys, and of those who were engaged in this business the best known
was Old Joe. He appeared periodically in the villages with his eight
donkeys, or neddies as he called them, with jingling bells on their
headstalls and their burdens of two sacks of small coal on each. In
stature he was a giant of about six feet three, very broad-chested, and
invariably wore a broad-brimmed hat, a slate-coloured smock-frock, and
blue worsted stockings to his knees. He walked behind the donkeys, a
very long staff in his hand, shouting at them from time to time, and
occasionally swinging his long staff and bringing it down on the back of
a donkey who was not keeping up the pace. In this way he wandered from
village to village from end to end of the Plain, getting rid of his
small coal and loading his animals with scrap iron which the blacksmiths
would keep for him, and as he continued his rounds for nearly forty
years he was a familiar figure to every inhabitant throughout the
district.

There are some stories still told of his great strength, one of which is
worth giving. He was a man of iron constitution and gave himself a hard
life, and he was hard on his neddies, but he had to feed them well, and
this he often contrived to do at some one else's expense. One night at a
village on the Wylye it was discovered that he had put his eight donkeys
in a meadow in which the grass was just ripe for mowing. The enraged
farmer took them to the village pound and locked them up, but in the
morning the donkeys and Joe with them had vanished and the whole village
wondered how he had done it. The stone wall of the pound was four feet
and a half high and the iron gate was locked, yet he had lifted the
donkeys up and put them over and had loaded them and gone before anyone
was up.

Once Joe met with a very great misfortune. He arrived late at a village,
and finding there was good feed in the churchyard and that everybody was
in bed, he put his donkeys in and stretched himself out among the
gravestones to sleep. He had no nerves and no imagination; and was
tired, and slept very soundly until it was light and time to put his
neddies out before any person came by and discovered that he had been
making free with the rector's grass. Glancing round he could see no
donkeys, and only when he stood up he found they had not made their
escape but were there all about him, lying among the gravestones, stone
dead every one! He had forgotten that a churchyard was a dangerous place
to put hungry animals in. They had browsed on the luxuriant yew that
grew there, and this was the result.

In time he recovered from his loss and replaced his dead neddies with
others, and continued for many years longer on his rounds.

To return to Isaac Bawcombe. He was born, we have seen, in 1800, and
began following a flock as a boy and continued as shepherd on the same
farm for a period of fifty-five years. The care of sheep was the one
all-absorbing occupation of his life, and how much it was to him appears
in this anecdote of his state of mind when he was deprived of it for a
time. The flock was sold and Isaac was left without sheep, and with
little to do except to wait from Michaelmas to Candlemas, when there
would be sheep again at the farm. It was a long time to Isaac, and he
found his enforced holiday so tedious that he made himself a nuisance to
his wife in the house. Forty times a day he would throw off his hat and
sit down, resolved to be happy at his own fireside, but after a few
minutes the desire to be up and doing would return, and up he would get
and out he would go again. One dark cloudy evening a man from the farm
put his head in at the door. "Isaac," he said, "there be sheep for 'ee
up't the farm--two hunderd ewes and a hunderd more to come in dree days.
Master, he sent I to say you be wanted." And away the man went.

Isaac jumped up and hurried forth without taking his crook from the
corner and actually without putting on his hat! His wife called out
after him, and getting no response sent the boy with his hat to overtake
him. But the little fellow soon returned with the hat--he could not
overtake his father!

He was away three or four hours at the farm, then returned, his hair
very wet, his face beaming, and sat down with a great sigh of pleasure.
"Two hunderd ewes," he said, "and a hunderd more to come--what d'you
think of that?"

"Well, Isaac," said she, "I hope thee'll be happy now and let I alone."

After all that had been told to me about the elder Bawcombe's life and
character, it came somewhat as a shock to learn that at one period
during his early manhood he had indulged in one form of poaching--a
sport which had a marvellous fascination for the people of England in
former times, but was pretty well extinguished during the first quarter
of the last century. Deer he had taken; and the whole tale of the
deer-stealing, which was a common offence in that part of Wiltshire down
to about 1834, sounds strange at the present day.

Large herds of deer were kept at that time at an estate a few miles from
Winterbourne Bishop, and it often happened that many of the animals
broke bounds and roamed singly and in small bands over the hills. When
deer were observed in the open, certain of the villagers would settle on
some plan of action; watchers would be sent out not only to keep an eye
on the deer but on the keepers too. Much depended on the state of the
weather and the moon, as some light was necessary; then, when the
conditions were favourable and the keepers had been watched to their
cottages, the gang would go out for a night's hunting. But it was a
dangerous sport, as the keepers also knew that deer were out of bounds,
and they would form some counter-plan, and one peculiarly nasty plan
they had was to go out about three or four o'clock in the morning and
secrete themselves somewhere close to the village to intercept the
poachers on their return.

Bawcombe, who never in his life associated with the village idlers and
frequenters of the alehouse, had no connexion with these men. His
expeditions were made alone on some dark, unpromising night, when the
regular poachers were in bed and asleep. He would steal away after
bedtime, or would go out ostensibly to look after the sheep, and, if
fortunate, would return in the small hours with a deer on his back.
Then, helped by his mother, with whom he lived (for this was when he was
a young unmarried man, about 1820), he would quickly skin and cut up the
carcass, stow the meat away in some secret place, and bury the head,
hide, and offal deep in the earth; and when morning came it would find
Isaac out following his flock as usual, with no trace of guilt or
fatigue in his rosy cheeks and clear, honest eyes.

This was a very astonishing story to hear from Caleb, but to suspect him
of inventing or of exaggerating was impossible to anyone who knew him.
And we have seen that Isaac Bawcombe was an exceptional man--physically
a kind of Alexander Selkirk of the Wiltshire Downs. And he, moreover,
had a dog to help him--one as superior in speed and strength to the
ordinary sheep-dog as he himself was to the rack of his fellow-men. It
was only after much questioning on my part that Caleb brought himself to
tell me of these ancient adventures, and finally to give a detailed
account of how his father came to take his first deer. It was in the
depth of winter--bitterly cold, with a strong north wind blowing on the
snow-covered downs--when one evening Isaac caught sight of two deer out
on his sheep-walk. In that part of Wiltshire there is a famous monument
of antiquity, a vast mound-like wall, with a deep depression or fosse
running at its side. Now it happened that on the highest part of the
down, where the wall or mound was most exposed to the blast, the snow
had been blown clean off the top, and the deer were feeding here on the
short turf, keeping to the ridge, so that, outlined against the sky,
they had become visible to Isaac at a great distance.

He saw and pondered. These deer, just now, while out of bounds, were no
man's property, and it would be no sin to kill and eat one--if he could
catch it!--and it was a season of bitter want. For many many days he had
eaten his barley bread, and on some days barley-flour dumplings, and had
been content with this poor fare; but now the sight of these animals
made him crave for meat with an intolerable craving, and he determined
to do something to satisfy it.

He went home and had his poor supper, and when it was dark set forth
again with his dog. He found the deer still feeding on the mound.
Stealing softly along among the furze-bushes, he got the black line of
the mound against the starry sky, and by and by, as he moved along, the
black figures of the deer, with their heads down, came into view. He
then doubled back and, proceeding some distance, got down into the fosse
and stole forward to them again under the wall. His idea was that on
taking alarm they would immediately make for the forest which was their
home, and would probably pass near him. They did not hear him until he
was within sixty yards, and then bounded down from the wall, over the
dyke, and away, but in almost opposite directions--one alone making for
the forest; and on this one the dog was set. Out he shot like an arrow
from the bow, and after him ran Isaac "as he had never runned afore in
all his life." For a short space deer and dog in hot pursuit were
visible on the snow, then the darkness swallowed them up as they rushed
down the slope; but in less than half a minute a sound came back to
Isaac, flying, too, down the incline--the long, wailing cry of a deer in
distress. The dog had seized his quarry by one of the front legs, a
little above the hoof, and held it fast, and they were struggling on the
snow when Isaac came up and flung himself upon his victim, then thrust
his knife through its windpipe "to stop its noise." Having killed it, he
threw it on his back and went home, not by the turnpike, nor by any road
or path, but over fields and through copses until he got to the back of
his mother's cottage. There was no door on that side, but there was a
window, and when he had rapped at it and his mother opened it, without
speaking a word he thrust the dead deer through, then made his way round
to the front.

That was how he killed his first deer. How the others were taken I do
not know; I wish I did, since this one exploit of a Wiltshire shepherd
has more interest for me than I find in fifty narratives of elephants
slaughtered wholesale with explosive bullets, written for the delight
and astonishment of the reading public by our most glorious Nimrods.




CHAPTER VII

THE DEER-STEALERS

  Deer-stealing on Salisbury Plain--The head-keeper Harbutt--Strange
  story of a baby--Found as a surname--John Barter the village
  carpenter--How the keeper was fooled--A poaching attack planned--The
  fight--Head-keeper and carpenter--The carpenter hides his son--The
  arrest--Barter's sons forsake the village


There were other memories of deer-taking handed down to Caleb by his
parents, and the one best worth preserving relates to the head-keeper of
the preserves, or chase, and to a great fight in which he was engaged
with two brothers of the girl who was afterwards to be Isaac's wife.

Here it may be necessary to explain that formerly the owner of
Cranbourne Chase, at that time Lord Rivers, claimed the deer and the
right to preserve and hunt deer over a considerable extent of country
outside of his own lands. On the Wiltshire side these rights extended
from Cranbourne Chase over the South Wiltshire Downs to Salisbury, and
the whole territory, about thirty miles broad, was divided into beats or
walks, six or eight in number, each beat provided with a keeper's lodge.
This state of things continued to the year 1834, when the chase was
"disfranchised" by Act of Parliament.

The incident I am going to relate occurred about 1815 or perhaps two or
three years later. The border of one of the deer walks was at a spot
known as Three Downs Place, two miles and a half from Winterbourne
Bishop. Here in a hollow of the downs there was an extensive wood, and
just within the wood a large stone house, said to be centuries old but
long pulled down, called Rollston House, in which the head-keeper lived
with two under-keepers. He had a wife but no children, and was a
middle-aged, thick-set, very dark man, powerful and vigilant, a
"tarrable" hater and persecutor of poachers, feared and hated by them in
turn, and his name was Harbutt.

It happened that one morning, when he had unbarred the front door to go
out, he found a great difficulty in opening it, caused by a heavy object
having been fastened to the door-handle. It proved to be a basket or
box, in which a well-nourished, nice-looking boy baby was sleeping, well
wrapped up and covered with a cloth. On the cloth a scrap of paper was
pinned with the following lines written on it:

  Take me in and treat me well,
  For in this house my father dwell.


Harbutt read the lines and didn't even smile at the grammar; on the
contrary, he appeared very much upset, and was still standing holding
the paper, staring stupidly at it, when his wife came on the scene.
"What be this?" she exclaimed, and looked first at the paper, then at
him, then at the rosy child fast asleep in its cradle; and instantly,
with a great cry, she fell on it and snatched it up in her arms, and
holding it clasped to her bosom, began lavishing caresses and endearing
expressions on it, tears of rapture in her eyes! Not one word of inquiry
or bitter, jealous reproach--all that part of her was swallowed up and
annihilated in the joy of a woman who had been denied a child of her own
to love and nourish and worship. And now one had come to her and it
mattered little how. Two or three days later the infant was baptized at
the village church with the quaint name of Moses Found.

Caleb was a little surprised at my thinking it a laughable name. It was
to his mind a singularly appropriate one; he assured me it was not the
only case he knew of in which the surname Found had been bestowed on a
child of unknown parentage, and he told me the story of one of the
Founds who had gone to Salisbury as a boy and worked and saved and
eventually become quite a prosperous and important person. There was
really nothing funny in it.

The story of Moses Found had been told him by his old mother; she, he
remarked significantly, had good cause to remember it. She was herself a
native of the village, born two or three years later than the mysterious
Moses; her father, John Barter by name was a carpenter and lived in an
old, thatched house which still exists and is very familiar to me. He
had five sons; then, after an interval of some years, a daughter was
born, who in due time was to be Isaac's wife. When she was a little girl
her brothers were all grown up or on the verge of manhood, and Moses,
too, was a young man--"the spit of his father" people said, meaning the
head-keeper--and he was now one of Harbutt's under-keepers.

About this time some of the more ardent spirits in the village, not
satisfied with an occasional hunt when a deer broke out and roamed over
the downs, took to poaching them in the woods. One night, a hunt having
been arranged, one of the most daring of the men secreted himself close
to the keeper's house, and having watched the keepers go in and the
lights put out, he actually succeeded in fastening up the doors from the
outside with screws and pieces of wood without creating an alarm. He
then met his confederates at an agreed spot and the hunting began,
during which one deer was chased to the house and actually pulled down
and killed on the lawn.

Meanwhile the inmates were in a state of great excitement; the
under-keepers feared that a force it would be dangerous to oppose had
taken possession of the woods, while Harbutt raved and roared like a
maddened wild beast in a cage, and put forth all his strength to pull
the doors open. Finally he smashed a window and leaped out, gun in hand,
and calling the others to follow rushed into the wood. But he was too
late; the hunt was over and the poachers had made good their escape,
taking the carcasses of two or three deer they had succeeded in killing.

The keeper was not to be fooled in the same way a second time, and
before very long he had his revenge. A fresh raid was planned, and on
this occasion two of the five brothers were in it, and there were four
more, the blacksmith of Winterbourne Bishop, their best man, two famous
shearers, father and son, from a neighbouring village, and a young farm
labourer.

They knew very well that with the head-keeper in his present frame of
mind it was a risky affair, and they made a solemn compact that if
caught they would stand by one another to the end. And caught they were,
and on this occasion the keepers were four.

At the very beginning the blacksmith, their ablest man and virtual
leader, was knocked down senseless with a blow on his head with the butt
end of a gun. Immediately on seeing this the two famous shearers took to
their heels and the young labourer followed their example. The brothers
were left but refused to be taken, although Harbutt roared at them in
his bull's voice that he would shoot them unless they surrendered. They
made light of his threats and fought against the four, and eventually
were separated. By and by the younger of the two was driven into a
brambly thicket where his opponents imagined that it would be impossible
for him to escape. But he was a youth of indomitable spirit, strong and
agile as a wild cat; and returning blow for blow he succeeded in tearing
himself from them, then after a running fight through the darkest part
of the wood for a distance of two or three hundred yards they at length
lost him or gave him up and went back to assist Harbutt and Moses
against the other man. Left to himself he got out of the wood and made
his way back to the village. It was long past midnight when he turned up
at his father's cottage, a pitiable object covered with mud and blood,
hatless, his clothes torn to shreds, his face and whole body covered
with bruises and bleeding wounds.

The old man was in a great state of distress about his other son, and
early in the morning went to examine the ground where the fight had
been. It was only too easily found; the sod was trampled down and
branches broken as though a score of men had been engaged. Then he found
his eldest son's cap, and a little farther away a sleeve of his coat;
shreds and rags were numerous on the bramble bushes, and by and by he
came on a pool of blood. "They've kill 'n!" he cried in despair,
"they've killed my poor boy!" and straight to Rollston House he went to
inquire, and was met by Harbutt himself, who came out limping, one boot
on, the other foot bound up with rags, one arm in a sling and a cloth
tied round his head. He was told that his son was alive and safe indoors
and that he would be taken to Salisbury later in the day. "His clothes
be all torn to pieces," added the keeper. "You can just go home at once
and git him others before the constable comes to take him."

"You've tored them to pieces yourself and you can git him others,"
retorted the old man in a rage.

"Very well," said the keeper. "But bide a moment--I've something more
to say to you. When your son comes out of jail in a year or so you tell
him from me that if he'll just step up this way I'll give him five
shillings and as much beer as he likes to drink. I never see'd a better
fighter!"

It was a great compliment to his son, but the old men was troubled in
his mind. "What dost mean, keeper, by a year or so?" he asked.

"When I said that," returned the other, with a grin, "I was just
thinking what 'twould be he deserves to git."

"And you'd agot your deserts, by God," cried the angry father, "if that
boy of mine hadn't a-been left alone to fight ye!"

Harbutt regarded him with a smile of gratified malice.

"You can go home now," he said. "If you'd see your son you'll find'n in
Salisbury jail. Maybe you'll be wanting new locks on your doors; you can
git they in Salisbury too--you've no blacksmith in your village now. No,
your boy weren't alone and you know that damned well."

"I know naught about that," he returned, and started to walk home with a
heavy heart. Until now he had been clinging to the hope that the other
son had not been identified in the dark wood. And now what could he do
to save one of the two from hateful imprisonment? The boy was not in a
fit condition to make his escape; he could hardly get across the room
and could not sit or lie down without groaning. He could only try to
hide him in the cottage and pray that they would not discover him. The
cottage was in the middle of the village and had but little ground to
it, but there was a small, boarded-up cavity or cell at one end of an
attic, and it might be possible to save him by putting him in there.
Here, then, in a bed placed for him on the floor, his bruised son was
obliged to lie, in the close, dark hole, for some days.

One day, about a week later, when he was recovering from his hurts, he
crawled out of his box and climbed down the narrow stairs to the ground
floor to see the light and breathe a better air for a short time, and
while down he was tempted to take a peep at the street through the
small, latticed window. But he quickly withdrew his head and by and by
said to his father, "I'm feared Moses has seen me. Just now when I was
at the window he came by and looked up and see'd me with my head all
tied up, and I'm feared he knew 'twas I."

After that they could only wait in fear and trembling, and on the next
day quite early there came a loud rap at the door, and on its being
opened by the old man the constable and two keepers appeared standing
before him.

"I've come to take your son," said the constable.

The old man stepped back without a word and took down his gun from its
place on the wall, then spoke: "It you've got a search-warrant you may
come in; if you haven't got 'n I'll blow the brains out of the first man
that puts a foot inside my door."

They hesitated a few moments then silently withdrew. After consulting
together the constable went off to the nearest magistrate, leaving the
two keepers to keep watch on the house: Moses Found was one of them.
Later in the day the constable returned armed with a warrant and was
thereupon admitted, with the result that the poor youth was soon
discovered in his hiding-place and carried off. And that was the last he
saw of his home, his young sister crying bitterly and his old father
white and trembling with grief and impotent rage.

A month or two later the two brothers were tried and sentenced each to
six months' imprisonment. They never came home. On their release they
went to Woolwich, where men were wanted and the pay was good. And by and
by the accounts they sent home induced first one then the other brother
to go and join them, and the poor old father, who had been very proud of
his five sons, was left alone with his young daughter--Isaac's destined
wife.




CHAPTER VIII

SHEPHERDS AND POACHING

  General remarks on poaching--Farmer, shepherd, and dog--A sheep-dog
  that would not hunt--Taking a partridge from a hawk--Old Gaarge and
  Young Gaarge--Partridge-poaching--The shepherd robbed of his
  rabbits--Wisdom of Shepherd Gathergood--Hare-trapping on the
  down--Hare-taking with a crook


When Caleb was at length free from his father's tutelage, and as an
under-shepherd practically independent, he did not follow Isaac's strict
example with regard to wild animals, good for the pot, which came by
chance in his way; he even allowed himself to go a little out of his way
on occasion to get them.

We know that about this matter the law of the land does not square with
the moral law as it is written in the heart of the peasant. A wounded
partridge or other bird which he finds in his walks abroad or which
comes by chance to him is his by a natural right, and he will take and
eat or dispose of it without scruple. With rabbits he is very free--he
doesn't wait to find a distressed one with a stoat on its track--stoats
are not sufficiently abundant; and a hare, too, may be picked up at any
moment; only in this case he must be very sure that no one is looking.
Knowing the law, and being perhaps a respectable, religious person, he
is anxious to abstain from all appearance of evil. This taking a hare or
rabbit or wounded partridge is in his mind a very different thing from
systematic poaching; but he is aware that to the classes above him it is
not so--the law has made them one. It is a hard, arbitrary, unnatural
law, made by and for them, his betters, and outwardly he must conform to
it. Thus you will find the best of men among the shepherds and labourers
freely helping themselves to any wild creature that falls in their way,
yet sharing the game-preserver's hatred of the real poacher. The village
poacher as a rule is an idle, dissolute fellow, and the sober,
industrious, righteous shepherd or ploughman or carter does not like to
be put on a level with such a person. But there is no escape from the
hard and fast rule in such things, and however open and truthful he may
be in everything else, in this one matter he is obliged to practise a
certain amount of deception. Here is a case to serve as an illustration;
I have only just heard it, after putting together the material I had
collected for this chapter, in conversation with an old shepherd friend
of mine.

He is a fine old man who has followed a flock these fifty years, and
will, I have no doubt, carry his crook for yet another ten. Not only is
he a "good shepherd," in the sense in which Caleb uses that phrase, with
a more intimate knowledge of sheep and all the ailments they are subject
to than I have found in any other, but he is also a truly religious man,
one that "walks with God." He told me this story of a sheep-dog he owned
when head-shepherd on a large farm on the Dorsetshire border with a
master whose chief delight in life was in coursing hares. They abounded
on his land, and he naturally wanted the men employed on the farm to
regard them as sacred animals. One day he came out to the shepherd to
complain that some one had seen his dog hunting a hare.

The shepherd indignantly asked who had said such a thing.

"Never mind about that," said the farmer. "Is it true?"

"It is a lie," said the shepherd. "My dog never hunts a hare or anything
else. 'Tis my belief the one that said that has got a dog himself that
hunts the hares and he wants to put the blame on some one else."

"May be so," said the farmer, unconvinced.

Just then a hare made its appearance, coming across the field directly
towards them, and either because they never moved or it did not smell
them it came on and on, stopping at intervals to sit for a minute or so
on its haunches, then on again until it was within forty yards of where
they were standing. The farmer watched it approach and at the same time
kept an eye on the dog sitting at their feet and watching the hare too,
very steadily. "Now, shepherd," said the farmer, "don't you say one word
to the dog and I'll see for myself." Not a word did he say, and the hare
came and sat for some seconds near them, then limped away out of sight,
and the dog made not the slightest movement. "That's all right," said
the farmer, well pleased. "I know now 'twas a lie I heard about your
dog. I've seen for myself and I'll just keep a sharp eye on the man that
told me."

My comment on this story was that the farmer had displayed an almost
incredible ignorance of a sheepdog--and a shepherd. "How would it have
been if you had said, 'Catch him, Bob,' or whatever his name was?" I
asked.

He looked at me with a twinkle in his eye and replied, "I do b'lieve
he'd ha' got 'n, but he'd never move till I told 'n."

It comes to this: the shepherd refuses to believe that by taking a hare
he is robbing any man of his property, and if he is obliged to tell a
lie to save himself from the consequences he does not consider that it
is a lie.

When he understood that I was on his side in this question, he told me
about a good sheep-dog he once possessed which he had to get rid of
because he would not take a hare!

A dog when broken is made to distinguish between the things he must and
must not do. He is "feelingly persuaded" by kind words and caresses in
one case and hard words and hard blows in the other. He learns that if
he hunts hares and rabbits it will be very bad for him, and in due time,
after some suffering, he is able to overcome this strongest instinct of
a dog. He acquires an artificial conscience. Then, when his education is
finished, he must be made to understand that it is not quite finished
after all--that he must partially unlearn one of the saddest of the
lessons instilled in him. He must hunt a hare or rabbit when told by his
master to do so. It is a compact between man and dog. Thus, they have
got a law which the dog has sworn to obey; but the man who made it is
above the law and can when he thinks proper command his servant to break
it. The dog, as a rule, takes it all in very readily and often allows
himself more liberty than his master gives him; the most highly
accomplished animal is one that, like my shepherd's dog in the former
instance, will not stir till he is told. In the other case the poor
brute could not rise to the position; it was too complex for him, and
when ordered to catch a rabbit he could only put his tail between his
legs and look in a puzzled way at his master. "Why do you tell me to do
a thing for which I shall be thrashed?"

It was only after Caleb had known me some time, when we were fast
friends, that he talked with perfect freedom of these things and told me
of his own small, illicit takings without excuse or explanation.

One day he saw a sparrowhawk dash down upon a running partridge and
struggle with it on the ground. It was in a grass field, divided from
the one he was walking in by a large, unkept hedge without a gap in it
to let him through. Presently the hawk rose up with the partridge still
violently struggling in its talons, and flew over the hedge to Caleb's
side, but was no sooner over than it came down again and the struggle
went on once more on the ground. On Caleb running to the spot the hawk
flew off, leaving his prey behind. He had grasped it in its sides,
driving his sharp claws well in, and the partridge, though unable to
fly, was still alive. The shepherd killed it and put it in his pocket,
and enjoyed it very much when he came to eat it.

From this case, a most innocent form of poaching, he went on to relate
how he had once been able to deprive a cunning poacher and bad man, a
human sparrowhawk, of his quarry.

There were two persons in the village, father and son, he very heartily
detested, known respectively as Old Gaarge and Young Gaarge, inveterate
poachers both. They were worse than the real reprobate who haunted the
public-house and did no work and was not ashamed of his evil ways, for
these two were hypocrites and were outwardly sober, righteous men, who
kept themselves a little apart from their neighbours and were very
severe in their condemnation of other people's faults.

One Sunday morning Caleb was on his way to his ewes folded at a distance
from the village, walking by a hedgerow at the foot of the down, when he
heard a shot fired some way ahead, and after a minute or two a second
shot. This greatly excited his curiosity and caused him to keep a sharp
look-out in the direction the sounds had come from, and by and by he
caught sight of a man walking towards him. It was Old Gaarge in his long
smock-frock, proceeding in a leisurely way towards the village, but
catching sight of the shepherd he turned aside through a gap in the
hedge and went off in another direction to avoid meeting him. No doubt,
thought Caleb, he has got his gun in two pieces hidden under his smock.
He went on until he came to a small field of oats which had grown badly
and had only been half reaped, and here he discovered that Old Gaarge
had been lying in hiding to shoot at the partridges that came to feed.
He had been screened from the sight of the birds by a couple of hurdles
and some straw, and there were feathers of the birds he had shot
scattered about. He had finished his Sunday morning's sport and was
going back, a little too late on this occasion as it turned out.

Caleb went on to his flock, but before getting to it his dog discovered
a dead partridge in the hedge; it had flown that far and then dropped,
and there was fresh blood on its feathers. He put it in his pocket and
carried it about most of the day while with his sheep on the down. Late
in the afternoon he spied two magpies pecking at something out in the
middle of a field and went to see what they had found. It was a second
partridge which Old Gaarge had shot in the morning and had lost, the
bird having flown to some distance before dropping. The magpies had
probably found it already dead, as it was cold; they had begun tearing
the skin at the neck and had opened it down to the breast-bone. Caleb
took this bird, too, and by and by, sitting down to examine it, he
thought he would try to mend the torn skin with the needle and thread he
always carried inside his cap. He succeeded in stitching it neatly up,
and putting back the feathers in their place the rent was quite
concealed. That evening he took the two birds to a man in the village
who made a livelihood by collecting bones, rags, and things of that
kind; the man took the birds in his hand, held them up, felt their
weight, examined them carefully, and pronounced them to be two good, fat
birds, and agreed to pay two shillings for them.

Such a man may be found in most villages; he calls himself a "general
dealer," and keeps a trap and pony--in some cases he keeps the
ale-house--and is a useful member of the small, rural community--a sort
of human carrion-crow.

The two shillings were very welcome, but more than the money was the
pleasing thought that he had got the bird shot by the hypocritical old
poacher for his own profit. Caleb had good cause to hate him. He, Caleb,
was one of the shepherds who had his master's permission to take rabbits
on the land, and having found his snares broken on many occasions he
came to the conclusion that they were visited in the night time by some
very cunning person who kept a watch on his movements. One evening he
set five snares in a turnip field and went just before daylight next
morning in a dense fog to visit them. Every one was broken! He had just
started on his way back, feeling angry and much puzzled at such a thing,
when the fog all at once passed away and revealed the figures of two men
walking hurriedly off over the down. They were at a considerable
distance, but the light was now strong enough to enable him to identify
Old Gaarge and Young Gaarge. In a few moments they vanished over the
brow. Caleb was mad at being deprived of his rabbits in this mean way,
but pleased at the same time in having discovered who the culprits were;
but what to do about it he did not know.

On the following day he was with his flock on the down and found himself
near another shepherd, also with his sheep, one he knew very well, a
quiet but knowing old man named Joseph Gathergood. He was known to be a
skilful rabbit-catcher, and Caleb thought he would go over to him and
tell him about how he was being tricked by the two Gaarges and ask him
what to do in the matter.

The old man was very friendly and at once told him what to do. "Don't
you set no more snares by the hedges and in the turmots," he said. "Set
them out on the open down where no one would go after rabbits and
they'll not find the snares." And this was how it had to be done. First
he was to scrape the ground with the heel of his boot until the fresh
earth could be seen through the broken turf; then he was to sprinkle a
little rabbit scent on the scraped spot, and plant his snare. The scent
and smell of the fresh earth combined would draw the rabbits to the
spot; they would go there to scratch and would inevitably get caught if
the snare was properly placed.

Caleb tried this plan with one snare, and on the following morning found
that he had a rabbit. He set it again that evening, then again, until he
had caught five rabbits on five consecutive nights, all with the same
snare. That convinced him that he had been taught a valuable lesson and
that old Gathergood was a very wise man about rabbits; and he was very
happy to think that he had got the better of his two sneaking enemies.

But Shepherd Gathergood was just as wise about hares, and, as in the
other case, he took them out on the down in the most open places. His
success was due to his knowledge of the hare's taste for blackthorn
twigs. He would take a good, strong blackthorn stem or shoot with twigs
on it, and stick it firmly down in the middle of a large grass field or
on the open down, and place the steel trap tied to the stick at a
distance of a foot or so from it, the trap concealed under grass or moss
and dead leaves. The smell of the blackthorn would draw the hare to the
spot, and he would move round and round nibbling the twigs until caught.

Caleb never tried this plan, but was convinced that Gathergood was right
about it.

He told me of another shepherd who was clever at taking hares in another
way, and who was often chaffed by his acquaintances on account of the
extraordinary length of his shepherd's crook. It was like a lance or
pole, being twice the usual length. But he had a use for it. This
shepherd used to make hares' forms on the downs in all suitable places,
forming them so cunningly that no one seeing them by chance would have
believed they were the work of human hands. The hares certainly made use
of them. When out with his flock he would visit these forms, walking
quietly past them at a distance of twenty to thirty feet, his dog
following at his heels. On catching sight of a hare crouching in a form
he would drop a word, and the dog would instantly stand still and remain
fixed and motionless, while the shepherd went on but in a circle so as
gradually to approach the form. Meanwhile the hare would keep his eyes
fixed on the dog, paying no attention to the man, until by and by the
long staff would be swung round and a blow descend on the poor, silly
head from the opposite side, and if the blow was not powerful enough to
stun or disable the hare, the dog would have it before it got many yards
from the cosy nest prepared for its destruction.




CHAPTER IX

THE SHEPHERD ON FOXES

  A fox-trapping shepherd--Gamekeepers and foxes--Fox and stoat--A
  gamekeeper off his guard--Pheasants and foxes--Caleb kills a fox--A
  fox-hunting sheep-dog--Two varieties of foxes--Rabbits playing with
  little foxes--How to expel foxes--A playful spirit in the
  fox--Fox-hunting a danger to sheep


Caleb related that his friend Shepherd Gathergood was a great fox-killer
and, as with hares, he took them in a way of his own. He said that the
fox will always go to a heap of ashes in any open place, and his plan
was to place a steel trap concealed among the ashes, made fast to a
stick about three feet high, firmly planted in the middle of the heap,
with a piece of strong-smelling cheese tied to the top. The two
attractions of an ash-heap and the smell of strong cheese was more than
any fox could resist. When he caught a fox he killed and buried it on
the down and said "nothing to nobody" about it. He killed them to
protect himself from their depredations; foxes, like Old Gaarge and his
son in Caleb's case, went round at night to rob him of the rabbits he
took in his snares.

Caleb never blamed him for this; on the contrary, he greatly admired him
for his courage, seeing that if it had been found out he would have been
a marked man. It was perhaps intelligence or cunning rather than
courage; he did not believe that he would be found out, and he never
was; he told Caleb of these things because he was sure of his man. Those
who were interested in the hunt never suspected him, and as to
gamekeepers, they hardly counted. He was helping them; no one hates a
fox more than they do. The farmer gets compensation for damage, and the
hen-wife is paid for her stolen chickens by the hunt, The keeper is
required to look after the game, and at the same time to spare his chief
enemy, the fox. Indeed, the keeper's state of mind with regard to foxes
has always been a source of amusement to me, and by long practice I am
able to talk to him on that delicate subject in a way to make him
uncomfortable and self-contradictory. There are various, quite innocent
questions which the student of wild life may put to a keeper about foxes
which have a disturbing effect on his brain. How to expel foxes from a
covert, for example; and here is another: Is it true that the fox
listens for the distressed cries of a rabbit pursued by a stoat and that
he will deprive the stoat of his captive? Perhaps; Yes; No, I don't
think so, because one hunts by night, the other by day, he will answer,
but you see that the question troubles him. One keeper, off his guard,
promptly answered, "I've no doubt of it; I can always bring a fox to me
by imitating the cry of a rabbit hunted by a stoat." But he did not say
what his object was in attracting the fox.

I say that the keeper was off his guard in this instance, because the
fiction that foxes were preserved on the estate was kept up, though as a
fact they were systematically destroyed by the keepers. As the
pheasant-breeding craze appears to increase rather than diminish,
notwithstanding the disastrous effect it has had in alienating the
people from their lords and masters, the conflict of interest between
fox-hunter and pheasant-breeder will tend to become more and more acute,
and the probable end will be that fox-hunting will have to go. A
melancholy outlook to those who love the country and old country sports,
and who do not regard pheasant-shooting as now followed as sport at all.
It is a delusion of the landlords that the country people think most
highly of the great pheasant-preserver who has two or three big shoots
in a season, during which vast numbers of birds are slaughtered--every
bird "costing a guinea," as the saying is. It brings money into the
country, he or his apologist tells you, and provides employment for the
village poor in October and November, when there is little doing. He
does not know the truth of the matter. A certain number of the poorer
people of the village are employed as beaters for the big shoots at a
shilling a day or so, and occasionally a labourer, going to or from his
work, finds a pheasant's nest and informs the keeper and receives some
slight reward. If he "keeps his eyes open" and shows himself anxious at
all times to serve the keeper he will sometimes get a rabbit for his
Sunday dinner.

This is not a sufficient return for the freedom to walk on the land and
in woods, which the villager possessed formerly, even in his worst days
of his oppression, a liberty which has now been taken from him. The
keeper is there now to prevent him; he was there before, and from of
old, but the pheasant was not yet a sacred bird, and it didn't matter
that a man walked on the turf or picked up a few fallen sticks in a
wood. The keeper is there to tell him to keep to the road and sometimes
to ask him, even when he is on the road, what is he looking over the
hedge for. He slinks obediently away; he is only a poor labourer with
his living to get, and he cannot afford to offend the man who stands
between him and the lord and the lord's tenant. And he is inarticulate;
but the insolence and injustice rankle in his heart, for he is not
altogether a helot in soul; and the result is that the sedition-mongers,
the Socialists, the furious denouncers of all landlords, who are now
quartering the country, and whose vans I meet in the remotest villages,
are listened to, and their words--wild and whirling words they may
be--are sinking into the hearts of the agricultural labourers of the new
generation.

To return to foxes and gamekeepers. There are other estates where the
fiction of fox-preserving is kept up no longer, where it is notorious
that the landlord is devoted exclusively to the gun and to
pheasant-breeding. On one of the big estates I am familiar with in
Wiltshire the keepers openly say they will not suffer a fox, and every
villager knows it and will give information of a fox to the keepers, and
looks to be rewarded with a rabbit. All this is undoubtedly known to the
lord of the manor; his servants are only carrying out his own wishes,
although he still subscribes to the hunt and occasionally attends the
meet. The entire hunt may unite in cursing him, but they must do so
below their breath; it would have a disastrous effect to spread it
abroad that he is a persecutor of foxes.

Caleb disliked foxes, too, but not to the extent of killing them. He did
once actually kill one, when a young under-shepherd, but it was accident
rather than intention.

One day he found a small gap in a hedge, which had been made or was
being used by a hare, and, thinking to take it, he set a trap at the
spot, tying it securely to a root and covering it over with dead leaves.
On going to the place the next morning he could see nothing until his
feet were on the very edge of the ditch, when with startling suddenness
a big dog fox sprang up at him with a savage snarl. It was caught by a
hind-leg, and had been lying concealed among the dead leaves close under
the bank. Caleb, angered at finding a fox when he had looked for a hare,
and at the attack the creature had made on him, dealt it a blow on the
head with his heavy stick--just one blow given on the impulse of the
moment, but it killed the fox! He felt very bad at what he had done and
began to think of consequences. He took it from the trap and hid it away
under the dead leaves beneath the hedge some yards from the gap, and
then went to his work. During the day one of the farm hands went out to
speak to him. He was a small, quiet old man, a discreet friend, and
Caleb confided to him what he had done. "Leave it to me," said his old
friend, and went back to the farm. In the afternoon Caleb was standing
on the top of the down looking towards the village, when he spied at a
great distance the old man coming out to the hills, and by and by he
could make out that he had a sack on his back and a spade in his hand.
When half-way up the side of the hill he put his burden down and set to
work digging a deep pit. Into this he put the dead fox, and threw in and
trod down the earth, then carefully put back the turf in its place,
then, his task done, shouldered the spade and departed. Caleb felt
greatly relieved, for now the fox was buried out on the downs, and no
one would ever know that he had wickedly killed it.

Subsequently he had other foxes caught in traps set for hares, but was
always able to release them. About one he had the following story. The
dog he had at that time, named Monk, hated foxes as Jack hated adders,
and would hunt them savagely whenever he got a chance. One morning Caleb
visited a trap he had set in a gap in a hedge and found a fox in it. The
fox jumped up, snarling and displaying his teeth, ready to fight for
dear life, and it was hard to restrain Monk from flying at him. So
excited was he that only when his master threatened him with his crook
did he draw back and, sitting on his haunches, left him to deal with the
difficult business in his own way. The difficulty was to open the steel
trap without putting himself in the way of a bite from those "tarrable
sharp teeth." After a good deal of manoeuvring he managed to set the
butt end of his crook on the handle of the gin, and forcing it down
until the iron teeth relaxed their grip, the fox pulled his foot out,
and darting away along the hedge side vanished into the adjoining copse.
Away went Monk after him, in spite of his master's angry commands to him
to come back, and fox and dog disappeared almost together among the
trees. Sounds of yelping and of crashing through the undergrowth came
back fainter and fainter, and then there was silence. Caleb waited at
the spot full twenty minutes before the disobedient dog came back,
looking very pleased. He had probably succeeded in overtaking and
killing his enemy.

About that same Monk a sad story will have to be told in another
chapter.

When speaking of foxes Caleb always maintained that in his part of the
country there were two sorts: one small and very red, the larger one of
a lighter colour with some grey in it. And it is possible that the hill
foxes differed somewhat in size and colour from those of the lower
country. He related that one year two vixens littered at one spot, a
deep bottom among the downs, so near together that when the cubs were
big enough to come out they mixed and played in company; the vixens
happened to be of the different sorts, and the difference in colour
appeared in the little ones as well.

Caleb was so taken with the pretty sight of all these little foxes,
neighbours and playmates, that he went evening after evening to sit for
an hour or longer watching them. One thing he witnessed which will
perhaps be disbelieved by those who have not closely observed animals
for themselves, and who still hold to the fable that all wild creatures
are born with an inherited and instinctive knowledge and dread of their
enemies. Rabbits swarmed at that spot, and he observed that when the old
foxes were not about the young, half-grown rabbits would freely mix and
play with the little foxes. He was so surprised at this, never having
heard of such a thing, that he told his master of it, and the farmer
went with him on a moonlight night and the two sat for a long time
together, and saw rabbits and foxes playing, pursuing one another round
and round, the rabbits when pursued often turning very suddenly and
jumping clean over their pursuer.

The rabbits at this place belonged to the tenant, and the farmer, after
enjoying the sight of the little ones playing together, determined to
get rid of the foxes in the usual way by exploding a small quantity of
gunpowder in the burrows. Four old foxes with nine cubs were too many
for him to have. The powder was duly burned, and the very next day the
foxes had vanished.

In Berkshire I once met with that rare being, an intelligent gamekeeper
who took an interest in wild animals and knew from observation a great
deal about their habits. During an after-supper talk, kept up till past
midnight, we discussed the subject of strange, erratic actions in
animals, which in some cases appear contrary to their own natures. He
gave an instance of such behaviour in a fox that had its earth at a spot
on the border of a wood where rabbits were abundant. One evening he was
at this spot, standing among the trees and watching a number of rabbits
feeding and gambolling on the green turf, when the fox came trotting by
and the rabbits paid no attention. Suddenly he stopped and made a dart
at a rabbit; the rabbit ran from him a distance of twenty to thirty
yards, then suddenly turning round went for the fox and chased it back
some distance, after which the fox again chased the rabbit, and so they
went on, turn and turn about, half a dozen times. It was evident, he
said, that the fox had no wish to catch and kill a rabbit, that it was
nothing but play on his part, and that the rabbits responded in the same
spirit, knowing that there was nothing to fear.

Another instance of this playful spirit of the fox with an enemy, which
I heard recently, is of a gentleman who was out with his dog, a
fox-terrier, for an evening walk in some woods near his house. On his
way back he discovered on coming out of the woods that a fox was
following him, at a distance of about forty yards. When he stood still
the fox sat down and watched the dog. The dog appeared indifferent to
its presence until his master ordered him to go for the fox, whereupon
he charged him and drove him back to the edge of the wood, but at that
point the fox turned and chased the dog right back to its master, then
once more sat down and appeared very much at his ease. Again the dog was
encouraged to go for him and hunted him again back to the wood, and was
then in turn chased back to its master, After several repetitions of
this performance, the gentleman went home, the fox still following, and
on going in closed the gate behind him, leaving the fox outside, sitting
in the road as if waiting for him to come out again to have some more
fun.

This incident serves to remind me of an experience I had one evening in
King's Copse, an immense wood of oak and pine in the New Forest near
Exbury. It was growing dark when I heard on or close to the ground, some
twenty to thirty yards before me, a low, wailing cry, resembling the
hunger-cry of the young, long-eared owl. I began cautiously advancing,
trying to see it, but as I advanced the cry receded, as if the bird was
flitting from me. Now, just after I had begun following the sound, a fox
uttered his sudden, startlingly loud scream about forty yards away on my
right hand, and the next moment a second fox screamed on my left, and
from that time I was accompanied, or shadowed, by the two foxes, always
keeping abreast of me, always at the same distance, one screaming and
the other replying about every half-minute. The distressful bird-sound
ceased, and I turned and went off in another direction, to get out of
the wood on the side nearest the place where I was staying, the foxes
keeping with me until I was out.

What moved them to act in such a way is a mystery, but it was perhaps
play to them.

Another curious instance of foxes playing was related to me by a
gentleman at the little village of Inkpen, near the Beacon, in
Berkshire. He told me that when it happened, a good many years ago, he
sent an account of it to the "Field." His gamekeeper took him one day
"to see a strange thing," to a spot in the woods where a fox had a
litter of four cubs, near a long, smooth, green slope. A little distance
from the edge of the slope three round swedes were lying on the turf.
"How do you think these swedes came here?" said the keeper, and then
proceeded to say that the old fox must have brought them there from the
field a long distance away, for her cubs to play with. He had watched
them of an evening, and wanted his master to come and see too.
Accordingly they went in the evening, and hiding themselves among the
bushes near waited till the young foxes came out and began rolling the
swedes about and jumping at and tumbling over them. By and by one rolled
down the slope, and the young foxes went after it all the way down, and
then, when they had worried it sufficiently, they returned to the top
and played with another swede until that was rolled down, then with the
third one in the same way. Every morning, the keeper said, the swedes
were found back on top of the ground, and he had no doubt that they were
taken up by the old fox again and left there for her cubs to play with.

Caleb was not so eager after rabbits as Shepherd Gathergood, but he
disliked the fox for another reason. He considered that the hunted fox
was a great danger to sheep when the ewes were heavy with lambs and when
the chase brought the animal near if not right into the flock. He had
one dreadful memory of a hunted fox trying to lose itself in his flock
of heavy-sided ewes and the hounds following it and driving the poor
sheep mad with terror. The result was that a large number of lambs were
cast before their time and many others were poor, sickly things; many of
the sheep also suffered in health. He had no extra money from the lambs
that year. He received but a shilling (half a crown is often paid now)
for every lamb above the number of ewes, and as a rule received from
three to six pounds a year from this source.




CHAPTER X

BIRD LIFE ON THE DOWNS

  Great bustard--Stone curlew--Big hawks--Former abundance of the
  raven--Dogs fed on carrion--Ravens fighting--Ravens' breeding-places
  in Wilts--Great Ridge Wood ravens--Field-fare breeding in
  Wilts--Pewit--Mistle-thrush--Magpie and turtledove--Gamekeepers and
  magpies--Rooks and farmers--Starling, the shepherd's favourite
  bird--Sparrowhawk and "brown thrush"


Wiltshire, like other places in England, has long been deprived of its
most interesting birds--the species that were best worth preserving. Its
great bustard, once our greatest bird--even greater than the golden and
sea eagles and the "giant crane" with its "trumpet sound" once heard in
the land--is now but a memory. Or a place name: Bustard Inn, no longer
an inn, is well known to the many thousands who now go to the mimic wars
on Salisbury Plain; and there is a Trappist monastery in a village on
the southernmost border of the county, which was once called, and is
still known to old men as, "Bustard Farm." All that Caleb Bawcombe knew
of this grandest bird is what his father had told him; and Isaac knew of
it only from hearsay, although it was still met with in South Wilts when
he was a young man.

The stone curlew, our little bustard with the long wings, big, yellow
eyes, and wild voice, still frequents the uncultivated downs, unhappily
in diminishing numbers. For the private collector's desire to possess
British-taken birds' eggs does not diminish; I doubt if more than one
clutch in ten escapes the searching eyes of the poor shepherds and
labourers who are hired to supply the cabinets. One pair haunted a
flinty spot at Winterbourne Bishop until a year or two ago; at other
points a few miles away I watched other pairs during the summer of 1909,
but in every instance their eggs were taken.

The larger hawks and the raven, which bred in all the woods and forests
of Wiltshire, have, of course, been extirpated by the gamekeepers. The
biggest forest in the county now affords no refuge to any hawk above the
size of a kestrel. Savernake is extensive enough, one would imagine, for
condors to hide in, but it is not so. A few years ago a buzzard made its
appearance there--just a common buzzard, and the entire surrounding
population went mad with excitement about it, and every man who
possessed a gun flew to the forest to join in the hunt until the
wretched bird, after being blazed at for two or three days, was brought
down. I heard of another case at Fonthill Abbey. Nobody could say what
this wandering hawk was--it was very big, blue above with a white breast
barred with black--a "tarrable" fierce-looking bird with fierce, yellow
eyes. All the gamekeepers and several other men with guns were in hot
pursuit of it for several days, until some one fatally wounded it, but
it could not be found where it was supposed to have fallen. A fortnight
later its carcass was discovered by an old shepherd, who told me the
story. It was not in a fit state to be preserved, but he described it to
me, and I have no doubt that it was a goshawk.

The raven survived longer, and the Shepherd Bawcombe talks about its
abundance when he was a boy, seventy or more years ago. His way of
accounting for its numbers at that time and its subsequent, somewhat
rapid disappearance greatly interested me.

We have seen his account of deer-stealing, by the villagers in those
brave, old, starvation days when Lord Rivers owned the deer and hunting
rights over a large part of Wiltshire, extending from Cranborne Chase to
Salisbury, and when even so righteous a man as Isaac Bawcombe was
tempted by hunger to take an occasional deer, discovered out of bounds.
At that time, Caleb said, a good many dogs used for hunting the deer
were kept a few miles from Winterbourne Bishop and were fed by the
keepers in a very primitive manner. Old, worn-out horses were bought and
slaughtered for the dogs. A horse would be killed and stripped of his
hide somewhere away in the woods, and left for the hounds to batten on
its flesh, tearing at and fighting over it like so many jackals. When
only partially consumed the carcass would become putrid; then another
horse would be killed and skinned at another spot perhaps a mile away,
and the pack would start feeding afresh there. The result of so much
carrion lying about was that ravens were attracted in numbers to the
place and were so numerous as to be seen in scores together. Later, when
the deer-hunting sport declined in the neighbourhood, and dogs were no
longer fed on carrion, the birds decreased year by year, and when Caleb
was a boy of nine or ten their former great abundance was but a memory.
But he remembers that they were still fairly common, and he had much to
say about the old belief that the raven "smells death," and when seen
hovering over a flock, uttering its croak, it is a sure sign that a
sheep is in a bad way and will shortly die.

One of his recollections of the bird may be given here. It was one of
those things seen in boyhood which had very deeply impressed him. One
fine day he was on the down with an elder brother, when they heard the
familiar croak and spied three birds at a distance engaged in a fight in
the air. Two of the birds were in pursuit of the third, and rose
alternately to rush upon and strike at their victim from above. They
were coming down from a considerable height, and at last were directly
over the boys, not more than forty or fifty feet from the ground; and
the youngsters were amazed at their fury, the loud, rushing sound of
their wings, as of a torrent, and of their deep, hoarse croaks and
savage, barking cries. Then they began to rise again, the hunted bird
trying to keep above his enemies, they in their turn striving to rise
higher still so as to rush down upon him from overhead; and in this way
they towered higher and higher, their barking cries coming fainter and
fainter back to earth, until the boys, not to lose sight of them, cast
themselves down flat on their backs, and, continuing to gaze up, saw
them at last no bigger than three "leetle blackbirds." Then they
vanished; but the boys, still lying on their backs, kept their eyes
fixed on the same spot, and by and by first one black speck reappeared,
then a second, and they soon saw that two birds were swiftly coming down
to earth. They fell swiftly and silently, and finally pitched upon the
down not more than a couple of hundred yards from the boys. The hunted
bird had evidently succeeded in throwing them off and escaping. Probably
it was one of their own young, for the ravens' habit is when their young
are fully grown to hunt them out of the neighbourhood, or, when they
cannot drive them off, to kill them.

There is no doubt that the carrion did attract ravens in numbers to this
part of Wiltshire, but it is a fact that up to that date--about
1830--the bird had many well-known, old breeding-places in the county.
The Rev. A. C. Smith, in his "Birds of Wiltshire," names twenty-three
breeding-places, no fewer than nine of them on Salisbury Plain; but at
the date of the publication of his work, 1887, only three of all these
nesting-places were still in use: South Tidworth, Wilton Park, and
Compton Park, Compton Chamberlain. Doubtless there were other ancient
breeding-places which the author had not heard of: one was at the Great
Ridge Wood, overlooking the Wylye valley, where ravens bred down to
about thirty-five or forty years ago. I have found many old men in that
neighbourhood who remember the birds, and they tell that the raven tree
was a great oak which was cut down about sixty years ago, after which
the birds built their nest in another tree not far away. A London friend
of mine, who was born in the neighbourhood of the Great Ridge Wood,
remembers the ravens as one of the common sights of the place when he
was a boy. He tells of an unlucky farmer in those parts whose sheep fell
sick and died in numbers, year after year, bringing him down to the
brink of ruin, and how his old head-shepherd would say, solemnly shaking
his head, "'Tis not strange--master, he shot a raven."

There was no ravens' breeding-place very near Winterbourne Bishop. Caleb
had "never heared tell of a nestie"; but he had once seen the nest of
another species which is supposed never to breed in this country. He was
a small boy at the time, when one day an old shepherd of the place going
out from the village saw Caleb, and calling to him said, "You're the boy
that likes birds; if you'll come with me, I'll show 'ee what no man ever
seed afore"; and Caleb, fired with curiosity, followed him away to a
distance from home, out from the downs, into the woods and to a place
where he had never been, where there were bracken and heath with birch
and thorn-trees scattered about. On cautiously approaching a clump of
birches they saw a big, thrush-like bird fly out of a large nest about
ten feet from the ground, and settle on a tree close by, where it was
joined by its mate. The old man pointed out that it was a felt or
fieldfare, a thrush nearly as big as the mistle-thrush but different in
colour, and he said that it was a bird that came to England in flocks in
winter from no man knows where, far off in the north, and always went
away before breeding-time. This was the only felt he had ever seen
breeding in this country, and he "didn't believe that no man had ever
seed such a thing before." He would not climb the tree to see the eggs,
or even go very near it, for fear of disturbing the birds.

This man, Caleb said, was a great one for birds: he knew them all, but
seldom said anything about them; he watched and found out a good deal
about them just for his private pleasure.

The characteristic species of this part of the down country, comprising
the parish of Winterbourne Bishop, are the pewit, magpie, turtledove,
mistle-thrush, and starling. The pewit is universal on the hills, but
will inevitably be driven away from all that portion of Salisbury Plain
used for military purposes. The mistle-thrush becomes common in summer
after its early breeding season is ended, when the birds in small flocks
resort to the downs, where they continue until cold weather drives them
away to the shelter of the wooded, low country.

In this neighbourhood there are thickets of thorn, holly, bramble, and
birch growing over hundreds of acres of down, and here the hill-magpie,
as it is called, has its chief breeding-ground, and is so common that
you can always get a sight of at least twenty birds in an afternoon's
walk. Here, too, is the metropolis of the turtledove, and the low sound
of its crooning is heard all day in summer, the other most common sound
being that of magpies--their subdued, conversational chatter and their
solo-singing, the chant or call which a bird will go on repeating for a
hundred times. The wonder is how the doves succeed in such a place in
hatching any couple of chalk-white eggs, placed on a small platform of
sticks, or of rearing any pair of young, conspicuous in their blue skins
and bright yellow down!

The keepers tell me they get even with these kill-birds later in the
year, when they take to roosting in the woods, a mile away in the
valley. The birds are waited for at some point where they are accustomed
to slip in at dark, and one keeper told me that on one evening alone
assisted by a friend he had succeeded in shooting thirty birds.

On Winterbourne Bishop Down and round the village the magpies are not
persecuted, probably because the gamekeepers, the professional
bird-killers, have lost heart in this place. It is a curious and rather
pretty story. There is no squire, as we have seen; the farmers have the
rabbits, and for game the shooting is let, or to let, by some one who
claims to be lord of the manor, who lives at a distance or abroad. At
all events he is not known personally to the people, and all they know
about the overlordship is that, whereas in years gone by every villager
had certain rights in the down--to cut furze and keep a cow, or pony, or
donkey, or half a dozen sheep or goats--now they have none; but how and
why and when these rights were lost nobody knows. Naturally there is no
sympathy between the villagers and the keepers sent from a distance to
protect the game, so that the shooting may be let to some other
stranger. On the contrary, they religiously destroy every nest they can
find, with the result that there are too few birds for anyone to take
the shooting, and it remains year after year unlet.

This unsettled state of things is all to the advantage of the black and
white bird with the ornamental tail, and he flourishes accordingly and
builds his big, thorny nests in the roadside trees about the village.

The one big bird on these downs, as in so many other places in England,
is the rook, and let us humbly thank the gods who own this green earth
and all the creatures which inhabit it that they have in their goodness
left us this one. For it is something to have a rook, although he is not
a great bird compared with the great ones lost--bustard and kite and
raven and goshawk, and many others. His abundance on the cultivated
downs is rather strange when one remembers the outcry made against him
in some parts on account of his injurious habits; but here it appears
the sentiment in his favour is just as strong in the farmer, or in a
good many farmers, as in the great landlord. The biggest rookery I know
on Salisbury Plain is at a farm-house where the farmer owns the land
himself and cultivates about nine hundred acres. One would imagine that
he would keep his rooks down in these days when a boy cannot be hired to
scare the birds from the crops.

One day, near West Knoyle, I came upon a vast company of rooks busily
engaged on a ploughed field where everything short of placing a
bird-scarer on the ground had been done to keep the birds off. A score
of rooks had been shot and suspended to long sticks planted about the
field, and there were three formidable-looking men of straw and rags
with hats on their heads and wooden guns under their arms. But the rooks
were there all the same; I counted seven at one spot, prodding the earth
close to the feet of one of the scarecrows. I went into the field to see
what they were doing, and found that it was sown with vetches, just
beginning to come up, and the birds were digging the seed up.

Three months later, near the same spot, on Mere Down, I found these
birds feasting on the corn, when it had been long cut but could not be
carried on account of the wet weather. It was a large field of fifty to
sixty acres, and as I walked by it the birds came flying leisurely over
my head to settle with loud cawings on the stocks. It was a magnificent
sight--the great, blue-black bird-forms on the golden wheat, an animated
group of three or four to half a dozen on every stock, while others
walked about the ground to pick up the scattered grain, and others were
flying over them, for just then the sun was shining on the field and
beyond it the sky was blue. Never had I witnessed birds so manifestly
rejoicing at their good fortune, with happy, loud caw-caw. Or rather
haw-haw! what a harvest, what abundance! was there ever a more perfect
August and September! Rain, rain, by night and in the morning; then sun
and wind to dry our feathers and make us glad, but never enough to dry
the corn to enable them to carry it and build it up in stacks where it
would be so much harder to get at. Could anything be better!

But the commonest bird, the one which vastly outnumbers all the others I
have named together, is the starling. It was Caleb Bawcombe's favourite
bird, and I believe it is regarded with peculiar affection by all
shepherds on the downs on account of its constant association with sheep
in the pasture. The dog, the sheep, and the crowd of starlings--these
are the lonely man's companions during his long days on the hills from
April or May to November. And what a wise bird he is, and how well he
knows his friends and his enemies! There was nothing more beautiful to
see, Caleb would say, than the behaviour of a flock of starlings when a
hawk was about. If it was a kestrel they took little or no notice of it,
but if a sparrowhawk made its appearance, instantly the crowd of birds
could be seen flying at furious speed towards the nearest flock of
sheep, and down into the flock they would fall like a shower of stones
and instantly disappear from sight. There they would remain on the
ground, among the legs of the grazing sheep, until the hawk had gone on
his way and passed out of sight.

The sparrowhawk's victims are mostly made among the young birds that
flock together in summer and live apart from the adults during the
summer months after the breeding season is over.

When I find a dead starling on the downs ranged over by sparrowhawks, it
is almost always a young bird--a "brown thrush" as it used to be called
by the old naturalists. You may know that the slayer was a sparrowhawk
by the appearance of the bird, its body untouched, but the flesh picked
neatly from the neck and the head gone. That was swallowed whole, after
the beak had been cut off. You will find the beak lying by the side of
the body. In summertime, when birds are most abundant, after the
breeding season, the sparrowhawk is a fastidious feeder.




CHAPTER XI

STARLINGS AND SHEEP-BELLS

  Starlings' singing--Native and borrowed sounds--Imitations of
  sheep-bells--The shepherd on sheep-bells--The bells for pleasure,
  not use--A dog in charge of the flock--Shepherd calling his
  sheep--Richard Warner of Bath--Ploughmen singing to their oxen
  in Cornwall--A shepherd's loud singing


The subject of starlings associating with sheep has served to remind me
of something I have often thought when listening to their music. It
happens that I am writing this chapter in a small village on Salisbury
Plain, the time being mid-September 1909, and that just outside my door
there is a group of old elder-bushes laden just now with clusters of
ripe berries on which the starlings come to feed, filling the room all
day with that never-ending medley of sounds which is their song. They
sing in this way not only when they sing--that is to say, when they make
a serious business of it, standing motionless and a-shiver on the tiles,
wings drooping and open beak pointing upwards, but also when they are
feasting on fruit--singing and talking and swallowing elderberries
between whiles to wet their whistles. If the weather is not too cold you
will hear this music daily, wet or dry, all the year round. We may say
that of all singing birds they are most vocal, yet have no set song. I
doubt if they have more than half a dozen to a dozen sounds or notes
which are the same in every individual and their very own. One of them
is a clear, soft, musical whistle, slightly inflected; another a kissing
sound, usually repeated two or three times or oftener, a somewhat
percussive smack; still another, a sharp, prolonged hissing or sibilant
but at the same time metallic note, compared by some one to the sound
produced by milking a cow into a tin pail--a very good description.
There are other lesser notes: a musical, thrush-like chirp, repeated
slowly, and sometimes rapidly till it runs to a bubbling sound; also
there is a horny sound, which is perhaps produced by striking upon the
edges of the lower mandible with those of the upper. But it is quite
unlike the loud, hard noise made by the stork; the poor stork being a
dumb bird has made a sort of policeman's rattle of his huge beak. These
sounds do not follow each other; they come from time to time, the
intervals being filled up with others in such endless variety, each bird
producing its own notes, that one can but suppose that they are
imitations. We know, in fact, that the starling is our greatest mimic,
and that he often succeeds in recognizable reproductions of single
notes, of phrases, and occasionally of entire songs, as, for instance,
that of the blackbird. But in listening to him we are conscious of his
imitations; even when at his best he amuses rather than delights--he is
not like the mocking-bird. His common starling pipe cannot produce
sounds of pure and beautiful quality, like the blackbird's "oboe-voice,"
to quote Davidson's apt phrase: he emits this song in a strangely
subdued tone, producing the effect of a blackbird heard singing at a
considerable distance. And so with innumerable other notes, calls, and
songs--they are often to their originals what a man's voice heard on a
telephone is to his natural voice. He succeeds best, as a rule, in
imitations of the coarser, metallic sounds, and as his medley abounds in
a variety of little, measured, tinkling, and clinking notes, as of
tappings on a metal plate, it has struck me at times that these are
probably borrowed from the sheep-bells of which the bird hears so much
in his feeding-grounds. It is, however, not necessary to suppose that
every starling gets these sounds directly from the bells; the birds
undoubtedly mimic one another, as is the case with mocking-birds, and
the young might easily acquire this part of their song language from the
old birds without visiting the flocks in the pastures.

The sheep-bell, in its half-muffled strokes, as of a small hammer
tapping on an iron or copper plate, is, one would imagine, a sound well
within the starling's range, easily imitated, therefore specially
attractive to him.

But--to pass to another subject--what does the shepherd himself think or
feel about it; and why does he have bells on his sheep?

He thinks a great deal of his bells. He pipes not like the shepherd of
fable or of the pastoral poets, nor plays upon any musical instrument,
and seldom sings, or even whistles--that sorry substitute for song; he
loves music nevertheless, and gets it in his sheep-bells; and he likes
it in quantity. "How many bells have you got on your sheep--it sounds as
if you had a great many?" I asked of a shepherd the other day, feeding
his flock near Old Sarum, and he replied, "Just forty, and I wish there
were eighty." Twenty-five or thirty is a more usual number, but only
because of their cost, for the shepherd has very little money for bells
or anything else. Another told me that he had "only thirty," but he
intended getting more. The sound cheers him; it is not exactly
monotonous, owing to the bells being of various sizes and also greatly
varying in thickness, so that they produce different tones, from the
sharp tinkle-tinkle of the smallest to the sonorous klonk-klonk of the
big, copper bell. Then, too, they are differently agitated, some quietly
when the sheep are grazing with heads down, others rapidly as the animal
walks or trots on; and there are little bursts or peals when a sheep
shakes its head, all together producing a kind of rude harmony--a music
which, like that of bagpipes or of chiming church-bells, heard from a
distance, is akin to natural music and accords with rural scenes.

As to use, there is little or none. A shepherd will sometimes say, when
questioned on the subject, that the bells tell him just where the flock
is or in which direction they are travelling; but he knows better. The
one who is not afraid to confess the simple truth of the matter to a
stranger will tell you that he does not need the bells to tell him where
the sheep are or in which direction they are grazing. His eyes are good
enough for that. The bells are for his solace or pleasure alone. It may
be that the sheep like the tinkling too--it is his belief that they do
like it. A shepherd said to me a few days ago: "It is lonesome with the
flock on the downs; more so in cold, wet weather, when you perhaps don't
see a person all day--on some days not even at a distance, much less to
speak to. The bells keep us from feeling it too much. We know what we
have them for, and the more we have the better we like it. They are
company to us."

Even in fair weather he seldom has anyone to speak to. A visit from an
idle man who will sit down and have a pipe and talk with him is a day to
be long remembered and even to date events from. "'Twas the month--May,
June, or October--when the stranger came out to the down and talked to I."

One day, in September, when sauntering over Mere Down, one of the most
extensive and loneliest-looking sheep-walks in South Wilts--a vast,
elevated plain or table-land, a portion of which is known as White Sheet
Hill--I passed three flocks of sheep, all with many bells, and noticed
that each flock produced a distinctly different sound or effect, owing
doubtless to a different number of big and little bells in each; and it
struck me that any shepherd on a dark night, or if taken blindfolded
over the downs, would be able to identify his own flock by the sound. At
the last of the three flocks a curious thing occurred. There was no
shepherd with it or anywhere in sight, but a dog was in charge; I found
him lying apparently asleep in a hollow, by the side of a stick and an
old sack. I called to him, but instead of jumping up and coming to me,
as he would have done if his master had been there, he only raised his
head, looked at me, then put his nose down on his paws again. I am on
duty--in sole charge--and you must not speak to me, was what he said.
After walking a little distance on, I spied the shepherd with a second
dog at his heels, coming over the down straight to the flock, and I
stayed to watch. When still over a hundred yards from the hollow the dog
flew ahead, and the other jumping up ran to meet him, and they stood
together, wagging their tails as if conversing. When the shepherd had
got up to them he stood and began uttering a curious call, a somewhat
musical cry in two notes, and instantly the sheep, now at a considerable
distance, stopped feeding and turned, then all together began running
towards him, and when within thirty yards stood still, massed together,
and all gazing at him. He then uttered a different call, and turning
walked away, the dogs keeping with him and the sheep closely following.
It was late in the day, and he was going to fold them down at the foot
of the slope in some fields half a mile away.

As the scene I had witnessed appeared unusual I related it to the very
next shepherd I talked with.

"Oh, there was nothing in that," he said. "Of course the dog was behind
the flock."

I said, "No, the peculiar thing was that both dogs were with their
master, and the flock followed."

"Well, my sheep would do the same," he returned. "That is, they'll do it
if they know there's something good for them--something they like in the
fold. They are very knowing." And other shepherds to whom I related the
incident said pretty much the same, but they apparently did not quite
like to hear that any shepherd could control his sheep with his voice
alone; their way of receiving the story confirmed me in the belief that
I had witnessed something unusual.

Before concluding this short chapter I will leave the subject of the
Wiltshire shepherd and his sheep to quote a remarkable passage about men
singing to their cattle in Cornwall, from a work on that county by
Richard Warner of Bath, once a well-known and prolific writer of
topographical and other books. They are little known now, I fancy, but
he was great in his day, which lasted from about the middle of the
eighteenth to about the middle of the nineteenth century--at all events,
he died in 1857, aged ninety-four. But he was not great at first, and
finding when nearing middle age that he was not prospering, he took to
the Church and had several livings, some of them running concurrently,
as was the fashion in those dark days. His topographical work included
Walks in Wales, in Somerset, in Devon, Walks in many places, usually
taken in a stage-coach or on horseback, containing nothing worth
remembering except perhaps the one passage I have mentioned, which is as
follows:--

"We had scarcely entered Cornwall before our attention was agreeably
arrested by a practice connected with the agriculture of the people,
which to us was entirely novel. The farmers judiciously employ the fine
oxen of the country in ploughing, and other processes of husbandry, to
which the strength of this useful animal can be employed"--the Rev.
Richard Warner is tedious, but let us be patient and see what
follows--"to which the strength of this useful animal can be employed;
and while the hinds are thus driving their patient slaves along the
furrows, they continually cheer them with conversation, denoting
approbation and pleasure. This encouragement is conveyed to them in a
sort of chaunt, of very agreeable modulation, which, floating through
the air from different distances, produces a striking effect both on the
ear and imagination. The notes are few and simple, and when delivered by
a clear, melodious voice, have something expressive of that tenderness
and affection which man naturally entertains for the companions of his
labours, in a _pastoral state_ of society, when, feeling more
forcibly his dependence upon domesticated animals for support, he gladly
reciprocates with them kindness and protection for comfort and
subsistence. This wild melody was to me, I confess, peculiarly
affecting. It seemed to draw more closely the link of friendship between
man and the humbler tribes of _fellow mortals_. It solaced my heart
with the appearance of humanity, in a world of violence and in times of
universal hostile rage; and it gladdened my fancy with the contemplation
of those days of heavenly harmony, promised in the predictions of
eternal truth, when man, freed at length from prejudice and passion,
shall seek his happiness in cultivating the mild, the benevolent, and
the merciful sensibilities of his nature; and when the animal world,
catching the virtues of its lord and master, shall soften into
gentleness and love; when the wolf"....

And so on, clause after clause, with others to be added, until the whole
sentence becomes as long as a fishing-rod. But apart from the
fiddlededee, is the thing he states believable? It is a charming
picture, and one would like to know more about that "chaunt," that "wild
melody." The passage aroused my curiosity when in Cornwall, as it had
appeared to me that in no part of England are the domestic animals so
little considered by their masters. The R.S.P.C.A. is practically
unknown there, and when watching the doings of shepherds or drovers with
their sheep the question has occurred to me, What would my Wiltshire
shepherd friends say of such a scene if they had witnessed it? There is
nothing in print which I can find to confirm Warner's observations, and
if you inquire of very old men who have been all their lives on the soil
they will tell you that there has never been such a custom in their
time, nor have they ever heard of it as existing formerly. Warner's Tour
through Cornwall is dated 1808.

I take it that he described a scene he actually witnessed, and that he
jumped to the conclusion that it was a common custom for the ploughman
to sing to his oxen. It is not unusual to find a man anywhere singing to
his oxen, or horses, or sheep, if he has a voice and is fond of
exercising it. I remember that in a former book--"Nature in Downland"--I
described the sweet singing of a cow-boy when tending his cows on a
heath near Trotton, in West Sussex; and here in Wiltshire it amused me
to listen, at a vast distance, to the robust singing of a shepherd while
following his flock on the great lonely downs above Chitterne. He was a
sort of Tamagno of the downs, with a tremendous voice audible a mile
away.




CHAPTER XII

THE SHEPHERD AND THE BIBLE

  Dan'l Burdon, the treasure-seeker--The shepherd's feeling for the
  Bible--Effect of the pastoral life--The shepherd's story of Isaac's
  boyhood--The village on the Wylye


One of the shepherd's early memories was of Dan'l Burdon, a labourer on
the farm where Isaac Bawcombe was head-shepherd. He retained a vivid
recollection of this person, who had a profound gravity and was the most
silent man in the parish. He was always thinking about hidden treasure,
and all his spare time was spent in seeking for it. On a Sunday morning,
or in the evening after working hours, he would take a spade or pick and
go away over the hills on his endless search after "something he could
not find." He opened some of the largest barrows, making trenches six to
ten feet deep through them, but found nothing to reward him. One day he
took Caleb with him, and they went to a part of the down where there
were certain depressions in the turf of a circular form and six to seven
feet in circumference. Burdon had observed these basin-like depressions
and had thought it possible they marked the place where things of value
had been buried in long-past ages. To begin he cut the turf all round
and carefully removed it, then dug and found a thick layer of flints.
These removed, he came upon a deposit of ashes and charred wood. And
that was all. Burdon without a word set to work to put it all back in
its place again--ashes and wood, and earth and flints--and having trod
it firmly down he carefully replaced the turf, then leaning on his spade
ga

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