Afoot in England

nd. I remember reading it with pleasure and pride on account of the author's name, Florence Merriam, seeing that, on my mother's side, I am partly a Merriam myself (of the br

ll leave it to others, for those who go a-birding are now very many and are hard put to find fresh titles to th

ts-they will not get out of your way; by and by in rural places the merciful man will have to ring his bell almost incessantly to avoid running over them. As I do not travel at a furious speed I manage to avoid most things, even the wandering loveless oil-beetle and the small rose-beetle and that slow-moving insect tortoise the tumbledung. Two or three seasons ago I was so unfortunate as to run over a large and beautifully bright grass snake near Aldermaston, once a snake sanctuary. He writhed and wriggled on the road as if I had broken his bac

my front wheel; and on the same day I came upon a green woodpecker enjoying a dust-bath in the public road. He declined to stir until I stopped to watch him, then merely flew about a dozen yards

, he would hardly have seen hundreds, and there is joy in mere numbers. It was just to get this general rapid sight of the bird life of the neighbouring hilly district of Hampshire that I was at Newbury on the last day of October. The weather was bright though very cold and windy, and towards evening I was surprised to see about twenty swallows in Northbrook Street f

of the Newbury birds I do not know, as I left on the 2nd of November-tore myself away, I may say, for, besides meeting with people I didn't know who treated a stranger with sweet friendliness, it is a town which quickly wins one's affections. It is built of bricks of a good deep rich red-not the painfully bright red so much in use now-and no person has had the bad taste to spoil the harmony by intro

nd feet above the sea and where there is a dew-pond, the highest in England, which has never dried up although a large flock of sheep drink in it every summer day, one looks down into an immense hollow, a Devil's Punch Bowl very many times magnified,-and spies, far away and far below, a few lonely houses half hidden by trees at the bottom. This is the romantic village of Coombe, and hither I went and found the vicar busy in the garden of the small old picturesque parsonage. Here a very pretty little bird comedy was in progress: a pair of stock-doves which had been taken from a rabbit-hole in the hill and reared by hand ha

ample, far up on the rim of the green basin, four hundred feet above the village; why had that memorial, that symbol of a dreadful past, been preserved for so many years and generations? and why had it been raised so high-was it because the crime of t

) was a populous hornets' nest, and having got her there he suddenly flung her against it and made off, leaving the cloud of infuriated hornets to sting her to death. That night he slept at Coombe, or stayed till a very late hour at the widow's cottage and told her what he had done. In telling her he had spoken in his ordinary voice, but by and by it occurred to him that the two boys, who were sleeping close by in the living-room, might have been awake and listening. She assured him that they were both fast asleep, but he was not satisfied, and said that if they had heard him he would kill them both, as he had no wish to swing, and he could not trust them to hold their tongues. Thereupon they got up and examined the faces of the two boys, holding a candle over them, and saw that they were in a deep sleep, as was

ed just outside their borders in the adjoining parish of Inkpen, so that they were going to enjoy seeing the wicked punished at somebody else's expense. Inkpen was furious and swore that it would not be saddle

ht the greatest concourse of people ever witnessed at that lofty spot, at all events since prehistoric times. If some of the ancient Britons had come out of their graves to look on, seated on their earthworks, they would have probably rubbed their ghostly hands together and remarked to each other that it reminded them of old times. All classes were there, from the nobility and gentry, on horseback and in great coaches in which they carried their own provisions, to the meaner sort who had trudged from all the country round on foo

in the earth, the flock recovered: it was supposed that the person who had thrown the chains in the water to poison it had done so to ruin the farmer in revenge for some injustice or grudge. But even now we are not quite done with the gibbet! Many, many years had gone by when Inkpen discovered from old documents that their little dishonest neighbour, Coombe, had taken more land than she was entitled to, that not only a part but the whole of that noble hill-top belonged to her! It was Inkpen's turn to chuckle now; but she chuckled too soon, and Coombe, running out to look, fo

had never had a day's illness in his life-he did not know what a headache was. He smoked with me, and to prove that he was not a total abstainer he drank my health in a glass of port wine-very good wine. It was Coombe that did it-its peaceful life, isolated from a distracting world in that hollow hill, and the marvellous purity of its air. "Sitting there on my lawn," he said, "you are six hundred feet above the sea, although in a hollow four hundred feet deep." It was an ideal open-air room, round and green, with the sky for a roof. In winter it was sometimes very cold, and after a heavy fall of snow the scene was strange and impressive from the tiny village set in its stupendous dazzling white

night. But it was recovered: the thief had taken it to the top of the hill and thrown it into the dewpond there, no doubt intending to take it out and dispose of it at some more convenient time. But it was found, and had ever since then been kept safe at the vicarage. Nothing of value to tempt a man to steal was kept in the church. He had never locked it, but once in his fifty years it had been locked against him by the churchwardens. This happened in the days of the Joseph Arch agitation, when the agricultural labourer's condition was being hotly discussed throughout the country. The vicar's heart was stirred, for he knew better than most how hard these conditions were at Coombe and in the surrounding parishes. He took up the subject and preached on it in his own pulpit in a way that offended the landowners and alarmed the farmers in the district. The church wardens, who were f

running along a narrow green valley, with oak and birch and bramble and thorn in their late autumn colours growing on the slopes on either hand. Probably the beauty of the scene, or the swift succession of beautiful scenes, with the low sun flaming on the "coloured shades," served to keep out of my m

here I could get a bed? No, she couldn't-it is always so; but after the third time of asking she unfroze so far as to say that perhaps they would take me in at a cottage close by. So I went, and a poor kind widow who lived there with a son consented to put me up. She made a nice fire in the sitting-room, and after warming myself before it, while watching the firelight and shadows playing on the dim walls and ceiling, it came to me that I was not in a cottage, but in a large room with an oak floor and wain

years ago when he paid his first visit to the Rookery; at all events, it is the first date he gives in Rural Rides. And he too had been delighted with the place and the beauty of the surrounding country with the trees in their late autumn colours. Writing on November 2nd, 1821, he says: "The place is commonly called Uphusband, which

two curious friends. "Lord Carnarvon," says Cobbett, "told a man, in 1820, that he did not like my politics. But what did he mean by my politics? I have no politics but such as he ought to like. To be sure I labour most as

le vigorous unadorned talk of Rural Rides. A classic, and as incongruous among classics as a farmer in his smock-frock, leggings, and stout boots would appear in a company of fine gentlemen in fashionable dress. The powerful face is the main thing, and we think little of the frock and leggings and how the hair is parted or if parted at all. Harsh and crabbed as his nature no doubt was, and bitter and spiteful at times, his conversation must yet have seemed like a perpetual feast of honeyed sweets to his farmer friend. Doubtless there was plenty of variety in it: now

fter other books is like going out from a luxurious room full of fine company into the open air to feel the wind and rain on one's face and see the green grass. But I very much regret that Cobbett tells us nothing of his farmer friend. Blount, I imagine, must have been a man of a very fine character to have won

re than half flint, but is a very good quality." Blount thought to make it better, and for many years employed all the aged poor villagers and the children in picking the flints from the ploughed land and gathering them in vast heaps. It does not appear that he made his land more productive, but his h

here, for on that third of November the greatest portion of Southern England was drowned in a cold dense white fog. In London it was dark, I heard. Early in the morning I listened to a cirl-bunting singing merrily from a bush close to the Geor

n my mind. We have heard of a work by some modest pressman entitled "Monarchs I have met", and I sometimes think that one equally interesting might be written on "Tramps I have met". As I have neither time nor s

met who could be accurately described as gorgeous. I did not cultivate his acquaintance; chance threw us together and we

one like gold in the sunlight. Had he been a mere labourer in a workman's rough clay-stained clothes, one would have stood still to look at and admire him, and say perhaps what a magnificent warrior he would have looked with sword and spear and plumed helmet, mounted on a big horse! But alas! he had the s

of some sporting young gent of loud tastes in colours; a spotted fancy waistcoat, not long enough to meet the trousers, a dirty scarlet

ere still abundant. It was a beautiful unkept hedge with scarlet and purple fru

arts, I told him, flies abroad in October to spit on the bramble bushes and spoil the fruit. It was even worse further nort

in a bitter tone, "That Devil they talk about must have a busy time, to go

of purple-red stems and coloured leaves, and scarlet fruit and silvery oldman's-beard. "An artist enjoys seeing this sort of thing, and it's nice for all those who go about just for the p

turned, with

ain, that it had been noised abroad that ten thousand men were wanted by the War Office to work in forming new camps. On arri

rt, as I had remained standing still while he, thinking me still close beh

igger than a cottage. A great house probably once existed here, as the hill has a noble avenue of limes, which it wears like a comb or crest. On the lower slope of the hill, the old u

hazel leaves, mixed with bramble and tangled with ivy and silver-grey traveller's-joy. An artist's heart would have leaped with joy at the sight, but all his skill and oriental colou

efined, standing like a vast white wall or flat-topped hill at the foot of the green sunlit slope! I had the fancy that if I had been an artist in sculpture, and rapid modeller, by using the edge of my hand as a knife I could have roughly carved out a human figure, then drawing it gently out of the mass proceeded to press and work it to a better shape, the shape, let us say, of a beautiful woman. Then, if it were done excellently, and some man-mocking deity, or power of the air, happened to be looking on, he would breathe life and intelligence into it, and send it, or her, abroad to mix wi

de simultaneously rose up with a sound as of many waters, and appeared now at last about to mount up into the blue heavens, to float circling there far above the world as they are accustomed to do on warm windless days in autumn. But in a little while their b

were the small birds in mixed flocks or hordes-finches, buntings, and larks in thousands on thousands, with a sprinkling of pipits and pied and grey wagtails, all busily feeding on the stubble and fresh plou

in such multitudes that ten thousand Frenchmen and Italians might have gorged to repletion on their small succulent bodies-and to refl

m and colour and melody had been blotted out. My clothes were hoary with clinging mist, my fingers numb with cold, and Highclere, its scattered cottages appearing like dim

dear to the ornithologist's ears-made me jump; and down into the very tree before which I was standing dropped a flock of about twenty crossbills. So excited and noisy when coming down, the instant they touched the tree they became perfectly silent and motionless. Seven of their number had settled on the outsid

he haze and went my devious way by serpentine roads through a beautiful, wooded, undulating country. And I wish that for a hundred, nay, for a thousand years to come, I could on each recurring November have such an afternoon ride, with that autumnal glory in the trees. Sometimes, seeing the road before me carpeted with pure yellow, I said to myself, now I am coming to elms; but when the road shone red and russet-gold before me I knew it was overhung by beeches. But the oak is the common tree in this place, and from every high point on the road I saw far before me and on either hand the woods and copses all a tawny yellow gold-the hue of the dying oak leaf. The tall larches were lemon-

and pillared hypocausts; the winter room with its wide beautiful floor-red and black and white and grey and yellow, with geometric pattern and twist and scroll and flower and leaf and quaint figures of man and beast and bird-all to be covered up with earth so that the plough may be driven over it again, and the wheat grow and ripen again as it has grown and ripened there above the dead city for so many centuries. The very earth within those wa