Chapter 35

AUTUMN.

I.

It is in the autumn that life in an old manor house on the Cotswolds has its greatest charm; for one of the chief characteristics of a house in the depths of the country surrounded by a broad manor is the game. The whole atmosphere of such a place savours of rabbits and hares and partridges. There may be no pheasant-rearing and comparatively little game of any kind, yet the place is, nevertheless, associated with sport with the gun. Ten to one there are guns, old and new, hanging up in the hall or the smoking-room, and perhaps fishing-rods too. There is a bond between the house and the fields around, and the connecting link is the game. Time was when the squire in these English villages lived on the produce of the estate: game, fish, and fowl, and the stock at the farm supplied his simple wants throughout the year. Huge game larders are yet to be seen in the lower regions of the manor house; you must pass through them to reach the still more ample wine cellars. Nearer London there is not much connection nowadays between the house and the land--you must walk on the roads; but away in the country it is over the broad fields that you roam. Even on a small manor of two thousand acres you may walk a dozen miles in an afternoon and not pass the boundary fence.

It is very surprising that there is not more demand for country houses in England when one considers that an extensive demesne may be rented at a price which is paid for a small flat in unfashionable Kensington. The local term in Gloucestershire for renting a manor is "holding the liberty"--the old Saxon word. The term is singularly expressive of the freedom possessed by the man who exchanges the life of the town or the villa for a manor in one of the remote counties. He who enjoys the sporting rights, with license (as the leases run) to hunt, fish, course, hawk, or sport without the labour and loss of farming the land, possesses all the pleasures of the squire's existence with few of its drawbacks and responsibilities. Yet many a fine old house in the country remains unlet because the life is considered a dull one by those who have not been brought up to it. With nature's book spread so amply before our eyes, the country is never dull. At no time of life is it too late to commence the study of this book of nature. The faculty of observation is one that is easily acquired. It is not a case of _nascitur non fit_. With tolerably good eyesight and a determination to learn, a man soon

"Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything."

And the habit of observing once acquired, we can never lose it till we die.

Of course those who rent a place in preference to purchasing it miss one of the greatest and most useful privileges the country can confer--that of following in the footsteps of him who

"Strove for sixty widow'd years to help his homelier brother man, Served the poor and built the cottage, rais'd the school and drained the fen."

These are the true delights of a country existence; and it is, I think, incumbent on the really rich men of England, if they have the welfare of the nation at heart, to hold a stake, however small, in the land, even at a sacrifice of income. I refer to men with incomes ranging from ten to a hundred thousand pounds per annum, who would not feel the loss of interest that would possibly accrue on an exchange of investment from "the elegant simplicity of the three per cents." to an agricultural estate in the country. They may be giving gold for silver in the transaction, but will be amply repaid in a thousand different ways. How infinitely preferable the existence of the poor countryman, even though times be hard, to that of the misguided being of whom it may be said:

"Through life's dark road his sordid way he wends-- An incarnation of fat dividends "!

C. SPRAGUE.

It is probable that the bicycle will cause a larger demand for remote country houses. To the writer, who, previous to this summer, had never experienced the poetry of motion which a bicycle coasting downhill, with a smooth road and a favourable wind, undoubtedly constitutes, the invention seems of the greatest utility. It brings places sixty miles apart within our immediate neighbourhood. Let the south wind blow, and we can be at quaint old Tewkesbury, thirty miles away, in less than three hours. A northerly gale will land us at the "Blowing-stone" and the old White House of Berkshire with less labour than it takes to walk a mile. Yet in the old days these twenty miles were a great gulf fixed between the Gloucestershire natives and the "chaw-bacons" over the boundary. Their very language is as different as possible. To this day the villagers who went to the last "scouring of the horse" and saw the old-fashioned backsword play, talk of the expedition with as much pride as if they had made a pilgrimage to the Antipodes.

As September draws nigh and the days rapidly shorten, the merry hum of the thrashing machine is heard all day long. The sound comes from the homestead across the road, and buzzes in my ears as I sit and write by the open window. How wonderful the evolution of the thrashing machine! How rough-and-ready the primitive methods of our forefathers! First of all there was the Eastern method of spreading the sheaves on a floor of clay, and allowing horses and oxen to trample on the wheat and tread out the corn. Not less ancient was the use of the old-fashioned flail--an instrument only discarded within the memory of living man. Yet what a wonderful difference there is between the work accomplished in a day with the flails and the daily output of the modern thrashing machine!

In the porch of the manor house, amid an accumulation of old traps and other curious odds and ends there hangs an ancient and much-worn flail. Two stout sticks, the handstaff and the swingle, attached to each other by a strong band of gut, constitute its simple mechanism. The wheat having been strewn on the barn floor, the labourer held the handstaff in both hands, swung it over his head, and brought the swingle down horizontally on to the heads of ripe corn. Contrast this fearfully laborious process with the bustling, hurrying machine of to-day. And yet with all this improvement the corn can scarcely be thrashed out at a profit. So out of joint are the times and seasons that the foreigner is allowed to cut out the home producer. Half the life of the country-side has gone, and no man dare whisper "Protection."

Even in these bad times the man with a head on his shoulders above the average of his neighbours comes forth to show what can be done with energy and pluck. Twenty years ago a labouring man, who "by crook or by hook" had saved a hundred pounds, bought a thrashing machine (probably second-hand) He took it round to the various farms, and did the thrashing at so much per day. By and by he had saved enough money to take a farm. A few years later he had two thrashing machines travelling the country, and in this poor district is now esteemed a wealthy man. I always found him an excellent game-preserver and a most straightforward fellow. Another farming neighbour of mine, however, was always talking about his ignorance and lack of caste. All classes, from the peer to the peasant, seem to resent a man's pushing his way from what they are pleased to consider a lower station into their own.

In the autumn gipsies are to be seen travelling the roads, or sitting round the camp fire, on their way to the various "feasts" or harvest festivals. "Have you got the old gipsy blood in your veins?" I asked the other day of a gang I met on their way to Quenington feast "Always gipsies, ever since we can remember," was the reply. Fathers, grandfathers were just the same,--always living in the open air, winter and summer, and always moving about with the vans. In the winter hawking is their occupation. "Oh no! they never felt the cold in winter; they could light the fire in the van if they wanted it."

Although many of the farmers here have given up treating their men to a spread after the harvest is gathered in, there is still a certain amount of rejoicing. The villagers have a little money over from extra pay during the harvest, so that the gipsies do not do badly by going the round of the villages at this time. The village churches are decorated in a very delightful manner for these feasts: such huge apples, carrots, and turnips in the windows and strewn about in odd places; lots of golden barley all round the pulpit and the font; and perhaps there will be bunches of grapes, such as grow wild on the cottage walls, hung round the pulpit. Then what could look prettier against the white carved stone than the russet and gold leaves of the Virginia creeper? and these they freely use in the decorations. If one wants to see good taste displayed in these days, one must go to simple country places to find it. At Christmas the old Gothic fane is hung with festoons of ivy and of yew in the old fashion of our forefathers.

I paid a visit to my old friend John Brown the other day, as I thought he would be able to tell me something about the harvest feasts of bygone days. He is a dear old man of some seventy-eight summers, though somewhat of the _laudator temporis acti_ school; but what good-nature and sense of humour there is in the good, honest face!

"Fifty year ago 'twere all mirth and jollity," he replied to our enquiry as to the old times. "There was four feasts in the year for us folk. First of all there was the sower's feast,--that would be about the end of April; then came the sheep-shearer's feast,--there'd be about fifteen of us as would sit down after sheep-shearing, and we'd be singing best part of the night, and plenty to eat and drink; next came the feast for the reapers, when the corn was cut about August; and, last of all, the harvest home in September. Ah! those were good times fifty years ago. My father and I have rented this cottage eighty-six years come Michaelmas; and my father's grandfather lived in that 'ere housen, up that 'tuer' there, nigh on a hundred years afore that. I planted them ash trees in the grove, and I mind when those firs was put in, near seventy years ago. Ah! there _was_ some foxes about in those days; trout, too, in the 'bruk'--it were full of them. You'll have very few 'lets' for hunting this season; 'twill be a mild time again. Last night were Hollandtide eve, and where the wind is at Hollandtide there it will stick best part of the winter. I've minded it every year, and never was wrong yet The wind is south-west to-day, and you'll have no 'lets' for hunting this time."

"Lets" appear to be hindrances to hunting in the shape of frosts. It is an Anglo-Saxon word, seldom used nowadays, though it is found in the dictionary; and our English Prayer Book has the words "we are sore let and hindered in running the race," etc. Shakespeare too employs it to signify a "check" with the hounds.

As I left, and thanked John Brown for his information, he handed me a little bit of paper, whereon was written: "to John Brown 1 day minding the edge at the picked cloos 2s three days doto," etc. I found that this was his little account for mending the hedge at the "picket close."

A fine stamp of humanity is the Cotswold labourer; and may his shadow never grow less.

"Princes and lords may flourish or may fade, A breath can make them, as a breath has made; But a bold peasantry, their country's pride, When once destroyed can never be supplied."

Fresh and health-giving is the breeze on the wolds in autumn, like the driest and oldest iced champagne. In the rough grass fields tough, wiry bents, thistles with purple flowers, and the remnants of oxeye daisies on brittle stalks rise almost to the height of your knees. Lovely blue bell-flowers grow in patches; golden ragwort, two sorts of field scabious, yellow toad-flax, and occasionally some white campion remain almost into winter. Where the grass is shorter masses of shrivelled wild thyme may be seen. The charlock brightens the landscape with its mass of colour among the turnips until the end of November, if the season be fairly mild. But the hedges and trees are the glory of "the happy autumn fields." The traveller's joy gleams in the September sunlight as the feathery awns lengthen on its seed vessels. What could be more beautiful! Later on it becomes the "old man's beard," and the hedges will be white with the snowy down right up to Christmas, until the winter frosts have once more scattered the seeds along the hedgerow. Of a rich russet tint are the maple leaves in every copse and fence. On the blackthorn hang the purple sloeberries, like small damsons, luscious and covered with bloom. Tart are they to the taste, like the crab-apples which abound in the hedges. These fruits are picked by the poor people and made into wine. Crab-apples may be seen on the trees as late as January. Blackberries are found in extraordinary numbers on this limestone soil, and the hedges are full of elder-berries, as well as the little black fruit of the privet. Add to these the red berries of the hawthorn or the may, the hips and haws, the brown nuts and the succulent berries of the yew, and we have an extraordinary variety of fruits and bird food. Woodbine or wild honeysuckle may often be picked during October as well as in the spring. By the river the trout grow darker and more lanky day by day as the nights lengthen. The water is very, very clear. "You might as well throw your 'at in as try to catch them," says Tom Peregrine. The willows are gold as well as silver now, for some of the leaves have turned; while others still show white downy backs when the breeze ruffles them. In the garden by the brook-side the tall willow-herbs are seeding; the pods are bursting, and the gossamer-like, grey down--the "silver mist" of Tennyson--is conspicuous all along the brook. The water-mint and scorpion-grasses remain far into November, and the former scents more sweetly as the season wanes. But

"Heavily hangs the broad sunflower, Over its grave in the earth so chilly; Heavily hangs the hollyhock; Heavily hangs the tiger lily."

An old wild duck that left the garden last spring to rear her progeny in a more secluded spot half a mile up stream has returned to us. Every morning her ten young ones pitch down into the water in front of the house, and remain until they are disturbed; then, with loud quacks and tumultuous flappings, they rise in a long string and fly right away for several miles, often returning at nightfall. Such wild birds are far more interesting as occasional visitors to your garden than the fancy fowl of strange shape and colouring often to be seen on ornamental water. A teal came during the autumn of 1897 to the sanctuary in front of the house, attracted by the decoys; she stayed six weeks with us, taking daily exercise in the skies at an immense height, and circling round and round. Unfortunately, when the weeds were cut, she left us, never to return.

By the end of October almost all our summer birds have left us. First of all, in August, went the cuckoo, seeking a winter resort in the north of Africa. The swifts were the next to go. After a brief stay of scarce three months they disappeared as suddenly in August as they came in May. The long-tailed swallows and the white-throated martins were with us for six months, but about the middle of October they were no more seen. All have gone southwards towards the Afric shore, seeking warmth and days of endless sunshine. Gone, too, the blackcap, the redstart, and the little fly-catcher; vanishing in the dark night, they gathered in legions and sped across the seas. One night towards the end of September, whilst walking in the road, I heard such a loud, rushing sound in front, beyond a turning of the lane, that I imagined a thrashing machine was coming round the corner among the big elm trees. But on approaching the spot, I found the noise was nothing more nor less than the chattering and clattering of an immense concourse of starlings. The roar of their wings when they were disturbed in the trees could be heard half a mile away. Although a few starlings remain round the eaves of the houses throughout the winter, vast flocks of them assemble at this time in the fields, and some doubtless travel southwards and westwards in search of warmer quarters. The other evening a large flock of lapwings, or common plover, gave a very fine display--a sort of serpentine dance to the tune of the setting sun, all for my edification. They could not quite make up their minds to settle on a brown ploughed field. No sooner had they touched the ground than they would rise again with shrill cries, flash here and flash there, faster and faster, but all in perfect time and all in perfect order--now flying in long drawn out lines, now in battalions; bowing here, bowing there; now they would "right about turn" and curtsey to the sun. A thousand trained ballet dancer; could not have been in better time. It was as if all joined hands, dressed in green and white; for at every turn a thousand white breasts gleamed in the purple sunset. The restless call of the birds added a peculiar charm to the scene in the darkening twilight.

Of our winter visitants that come to take the place of the summer migrants the fieldfare is the commonest and most familiar. Ere the leaf is off the ash and the beeches are tinged with russet and gold, flocks of these handsome birds leave their homes in the ice-bound north, and fly southwards to England and the sunny shores of France. Such a _rara avis_ as the grey phalarope--a wading bird like the sandpiper--occasionally finds its way to the Cotswolds. Wild geese, curlews, and wimbrels with sharp, snipe-like beaks, are shot occasionally by the farmers. A few woodcocks, snipe, and wildfowl also visit us. In the winter the short-eared owls come; they are rarer than their long-eared relatives, who stay with us all the year. The common barn owl, of a white, creamy colour, is the screech owl that we hear on summer nights. Brown owls are the ones that hoot; they do not screech.

Curiously enough I missed the corncrake's well-known call in the meadows by the river in the springtime of 1897; and not one was bagged in September by the partridge-shooters. This is the first year they have been absent. I always looked for their pleasing croak in May by the trout stream, and invariably shot several while partridge-shooting in former years.

The earthquake of 1895 was very severely felt in the Cotswolds. Next to an earthquake a bad thunderstorm is the most awe inspiring of all things to mortals. During last autumn the Cotswold district was visited by a thunderstorm of short duration, but great severity. A gale was blowing from the south; thunder and lightning came up from the same direction, and, travelling at an immense speed, passed rapidly over our house about ten p.m. The shocks became louder and louder; and whilst five or six of us were watching the lightning from a large window in the hall, there was a deafening report as of a dozen canons exploding simultaneously at close quarters. At the same time a flame of blue fire of intense brilliancy seemed to fall like a meteor a few yards in front of our eyes. At first we were sure the house had been struck, so that the first impulse was to rush out of doors; but the succeeding report being much less severe, confidence was restored. The general conclusion was that a thunderbolt had fallen, and, missing the house by a few yards, had disappeared in the earth. A search next morning on the lawn did not throw any light on the matter. Probably, if there was a thunderbolt, it fell into the river; for it is well known that water is a great conductor of the electric fluid, and thunderstorms often seem to follow the course of a stream. The summer lightning, which kept the sky in a blaze of light for two hours after the storm had passed away, was the finest I remember.

It is a pity mankind is so little addicted to being out of doors after sunset. Some of the most beautiful drives and walks I have ever enjoyed have been those taken at night. Driving out one evening from Cirencester, the road on either side was illuminated with the fairy lights of countless glow-worms. It is the female insect that is usually responsible for this wonderful green signal taper; the males seldom use it. Whereas the former is merely an apterous creeping grub, the latter is an insect provided with wings. Flying about at night, he is guided to his mate by the light she puts forth; and it is a peculiar characteristic of the male glow-worm, that his eyes are so placed that he is unable to view any object that is not immediately beneath him.

It is early in summer that these wonderful lights are to be seen; June is the best month for observing them. During July and August glow-worms seem to migrate to warmer quarters in sheltered banks and holes, nor is their light visible to the eye after June is out, save on very warm evenings, and then only in a lesser degree.

The glow-worms on this particular night were so numerous as to remind one of the fireflies in the tropics. At no place are these lovely insects more numerous and resplendent than at Kandy in Ceylon. Myriads of them flit about in the cool evening atmosphere, giving the appearance of countless meteors darting in different directions across the sky.

In the clear Cotswold atmosphere very brilliant meteors are observable at certain seasons of the year. Never shall I forget the strange variety of phenomena witnessed whilst driving homewards one evening in autumn from the railway station seven miles away. There had been a time of stormy, unsettled weather for some weeks previously, and the meteorological conditions were in a very disturbed state. But as I started homewards the stars were shining brightly, whilst far away in the western sky, beyond the rolling downs and bleak plains of the Cotswold Hills, shone forth the strange, mysterious, zodiacal light, towering upwards into a point among the stars, and shaped in the form of a cone. It was the first occasion this curious, unexplained phenomenon had ever come under my notice, and it was awe inspiring enough in itself. But before I had gone more than two miles of my solitary journey, great black clouds came up behind me from the south, and I knew I was racing with the storm. Then, as "the great organ of eternity began to play" and the ominous murmurs of distant thunder broke the silence of the night, a stiff breeze from the south seemed to come from behind and pass me, as if travelling quicker than my fast-trotting nag. Like a whisper from the grave it rustled in the brown, lifeless leaves that still lingered on the trees, making me wish I was nearer the old house that I knew was ready to welcome me five miles on in the little valley, nestling under the sheltering hill. And soon more clouds seemed to spring up suddenly, north, south, east, and west, where ten minutes before the sky had been clear and starry. And the sheet lightning began to play over them with a continuous flow of silvery radiance, north answering south, and east giving back to west the reflected glory of the mighty electric fluid. But the centre of the heavens was still clear and free from cloud, so that there yet remained a large open space in front of me, wherein the stars shone brighter than ever. And as I gazed forward and upward, and urged the willing horse into a twelve-mile-an-hour trot, the open space in the heavens revealed the glories of the finest display of fireworks I have ever seen. First of all two or three smaller stars shot across the hemisphere and disappeared into eternal space. But suddenly a brilliant light, like an enormous rocket, appeared in the western sky, far above the clouds. First it moved in a steady flight, hovering like a kestrel above us; then, with a flash which startled me out of my wits and brought my horse to a standstill, it rushed apparently towards us, and finally disappeared behind the clouds. It was some time before either horse or driver regained the nerve which had for a time forsaken them; and even then I was inclined to attribute this wonderful meteoric shower to a display of fireworks in a neighbouring village, so close to us had this last rocket-like shooting star appeared to be. A meteor which is sufficiently brilliant to frighten a horse and make him stop dead is of rare occurrence. I was thankful when I reached home in safety that I had not only won my race against the storm, but that I had seen no more atmospheric phenomena of so startling a nature.

In addition to the wonders of the heaven there are many other interesting features connected with a drive or walk by the light of the stars or the moon. A Cotswold village seen by moonlight is even more picturesque than it is by day. The old, gabled manor houses are a delightful picture on a cold, frosty night in winter; if most of the rooms are lit up, they give one the idea of endless hospitality and cheerfulness when viewed from without. To walk by a stream such as the Coln on such a night is for the time like being in fairyland. Every eddy and ripple is transformed into a crystal stream, sparkling with a thousand diamonds. The sound of the waters as they gurgle and bubble over the stones on the shallows seems for all the world like children's voices plaintively repeating over and over again the old strain:

"I chatter, chatter as I flow To join the brimming river, For men may come and men may go, But I go on for ever."

Now is the time to discover the haunts of wild duck and other shy birds like the teal and the heron. In frosty weather many of these visitors come and go without our being any the wiser, unless we are out at night. Before sunrise they will be far, far away, and will probably never return any more. Time after time we have been startled by a flight of duck rising abruptly from the stream, in places where by day one would never dream of looking for them. Foxes, too, may be seen within a stone's throw of the house on a moonlight evening. They love to prowl around on the chance of a dainty morsel, such as a fat duck or a semi-domestic moorhen. Nor will they take any notice of you at such a time.

I made a midnight expedition once last hunting season to see that the "earths" were properly stopped in some small coverts situated on a bleak and lonely spot on the Cotswold Hills. On the way I had to pass close to a large barrow. Weird indeed looked the old time-worn stone that has stood for thousands of years at the end of this old burial mound. A small wood close by rejoices in the name of "Deadman's Acre." The moon was casting a ghastly light over the great moss-grown stone and the deserted wolds. The words of Ossian rose to my lips as I wondered what manner of men lay buried here. "We shall pass away like a dream. Our tombs will be lost on the heath. The hunter shall not know the place of our rest. Give us the song of other years. Let the night pass away on the sound, and morning return with joy." Then, as the rustling wind spoke in the lifeless leaves of the beeches, the plain seemed to be peopled with strange phantasies--the ghosts of the heroes of old. And a voice came back to me on the whispering breeze:

"Thou, too, must share our fate; for human life is short. Soon will thy tomb be hid, and the grass grow rank on thy grave."

MACPHERSON'S _Ossian_.

And sometimes when I have been up on the hills by night, and, looking away over the broad vale stretched out below, have seen in the distance the gliding lights of some Great Western express--a trusty weight-carrier bearing through the darkness its precious burden of humanity--I thought of the time when the old seas ran here. And then there seemed to come from the direction of the old White Horse and Wayland Smith's cave the faint murmuring sound of the "Blowing-stone" ("King Alfred's bugle-horn")--that summoner of men to arms a thousand years ago, like the beacons of later days that "shone on Beachy Head"; and I felt like a man standing at the prow of a mighty liner, "homeward bound," on some fine though dark and starless evening, when no sound breaks upon his ear but the monotonous beating of the screw and the ceaseless flow of unfathomed waters, save that ever and anon in the far distance the moaning foghorn sounds its note of warning; whilst as he stands "forward" and inhales the pure health-giving salt distilled from balmy vapours that rise everlastingly from the surface of the deep, nothing is visible to the eye--straining westward for a glimpse of white chalk cliffs, or eastward, perhaps, for the first peep of dawn--save the intermittent flash from the lighthouse tower, and the signals glowing weird and fiery that reveal in the misty darkness those softly gliding phantasies, the ships that pass in the night.

II.

In nine years out of ten autumn lingers on until the death of the old year; then, with the advent of the new, our English winter begins in earnest.

It is Christmas Day, and so lovely is the weather that I am sitting on the terrace watching the warm, grateful sun gradually disappearing through the grey ash trunks in the hanging wood beyond the river. The birds are singing with all the promise of an early spring. There is scarcely a breath of wind stirring, and one might almost imagine it to be April. Tom Peregrine, clad in his best Sunday homespun, passes along his well-worn track through the rough grass beyond the water, intent on visiting his vermin traps, or bent on some form of destruction,--for he is never happy unless he is killing. My old friend, the one-legged cock pheasant, who for the third year in succession has contrived to escape our annual battue, comes up to my feet to take the bread I offer. When he was flushed by the beaten there was no need to call "Spare him," for with all the cunning of a veteran he towered straight into the skies and passed over the guns out of shot. Two fantail pigeons of purest white, sitting in a dark yew tree that overhangs the stream a hundred yards away, make the prettiest picture in the world against the dusky foliage.

Splash!--a great brown trout rolls in the shallow water like a porpoise in the sea. A two-pounder in this little stream makes as much fuss as a twenty-pound salmon in the mighty Tweed.

Hark! was that a lamb bleating down in old Mr. Peregrine's meadow? It was: the first lamb, herald of the spring that is to be. May its little life be as peaceful as this its first birthday: less stormy than the life of that Lamb whose birth all people celebrate to-day.

The rooks are cawing, and a faint cry of plover comes from the hill.

Soft and grey is the winter sky, but behold! round the sun in the west there arises a perfect solar halo, very similar to an ordinary rainbow, but smaller in its arc and fainter in its hues of yellow and rose--a very beautiful phenomenon, and one seldom to be seen in England. Halos of this nature are supposed to arise from the double refraction of the rays from the sun as the light passes through thin clouds, or from the transmission of light through particles of ice. It lingers a full quarter of an hour, and then dies away. Does this bode rough weather? Surely the cruel Boreas and the frost will not come suddenly on us after this lovely, mild Christmas! Listen to the Christmas bells ringing two miles away at Barnsley village I we can never tire of the sound here, for it is only on very still days that it reaches us across the wolds.

"Hark! In the air, around, above, The Angelic Music soars and swells, And, in the Garden that I love I hear the sound of Christmas Bells.

"From hamlet, hollow, village, height, The silvery Message seems to start, And far away its notes to-night Are surging through the city's heart.

"Assurance clear to those who fret O'er vanished Faith and feelings fled, That not in English homes is yet Tradition dumb, or Reverence dead.

"Now onward floats the sacred tale, Past leafless woodlands, freezing rills; It wakes from sleep the silent vale, It skims the mere, it scales the hills;

"And rippling on up rings of space, Sounds faint and fainter as more high, Till mortal ear no more may trace The music homeward to the sky.

"To courtly roof and rustic cot Old comrades wend from far and wide; Now is the ancient feud forgot, The growing grudge is laid aside.

"Peace and goodwill 'twixt rich and poor! Goodwill and peace 'twixt class and class! Let old with new, let Prince with boor Send round the bowl, and drain the glass!"

ALFRED AUSTIN.

I have culled these lines from the poet laureate's charming "Christmas Carol," as they are both singularly beautiful and singularly appropriate to our Cotswold village.

I take the liberty of saying that in our little hamlet there _is_ peace and goodwill 'twixt rich and poor at Christmas-time.

"Now is the ancient feud forgot, The growing grudge is laid aside."

Our humble rejoicings during this last Christmas were very similar to those of a hundred years ago. They included a grand smoking concert at the club, during which the mummers gave an admirable performance of their old play, of which more anon; then a big feed for every man, woman, and child of the hamlet (about a hundred souls) was held in the manor house; added to which we received visits from carol singers and musicians of all kinds to the number of seventy-two, reckoning up the total aggregate of the different bands, all of whom were welcomed, for Christmas comes but once a year, after all, and "the more the merrier" should be our motto at this time. So from villages three and four miles away came bands of children to sing the old, old songs. The brass band, including old grey-haired men who fifty years ago with strings and wood-wind led the psalmody at Chedworth Church, come too, and play inside the hall. We do not brew at home nowadays. Even such old-fashioned Conservatives as old Mr. Peregrine, senior, have at length given up the custom, so we cannot, like Sir Roger, allow a greater quantity of malt to our small beer at Christmas; but we take good care to order in some four or five eighteen-gallon casks at this time. Let it be added that we never saw any man the worse for drink in consequence of this apparent indiscretion. But then, we have a butler of the old school.

When we held our Yuletide revels in the manor house, and the old walls rang with the laughter and merriment of the whole hamlet (for farmers as well as labourers honoured us), it occurred to me that the bigotphones, which had been lying by in a cupboard for about a twelvemonth, might amuse the company. Bigotphones, I must explain to those readers who are uninitiated, are delightfully simple contrivances fitted with reed mouthpieces--exact representations in mockery of the various instruments that make up a brass band--but composed of strong cardboard, and dependent solely on the judicious application of the human lips and the skilful modulation of the human voice for their effect. These being produced, an impromptu band was formed: young Peregrine seized the bassoon, the carter took the clarionet, the shepherd the French horn, the cowman the trombone, and, seated at the piano, I myself conducted the orchestra. Never before have I been so astonished as I was by the unexpected musical ability displayed. No matter what tune I struck up, that heterogeneous orchestra played it as if they had been doing nothing else all their lives. "The British Grenadiers," "The Eton Boating Song," "Two Lovely Black Eyes" (solo, young Peregrine on the bassoon), "A Fine Hunting Day,"--all and sundry were performed in perfect time and without a false note. Singularly enough, it is very difficult for the voice to "go flat" on the bigotphone. Then, not content with these popular songs we inaugurated a dance. Now could be seen the beautiful and accomplished Miss Peregrine doing the light fantastic round the stone floor of the hall to the tune of "See me dance the polka"; then, too, the stately Mrs. Peregrine insisted on our playing "Sir Roger de Coverley," and it was danced with that pomp and ceremony which such occasions alone are wont to show. None of your "kitchen lancers" for us hamlet folk; we leave that kind of thing to the swells and nobs. Tom Peregrine alone was baffled. Whilst his family in general were bowing there, curtseying here, clapping hands and "passing under to the right" in the usual "Sir Roger" style, he stood in grey homespun of the best material (I never yet saw a Cotswold man in a vulgar chessboard suit), and as he stood he marvelled greatly, exclaiming now and then, "Well, I never; this is something new to be sure!" "I never saw such things in all my life, never!" He would not dance; but, seizing one of the bigotphones, he blew into it until I was in some anxiety lest he should have an apoplectic fit I need scarcely say he failed to produce a single note.

Thus our Yuletide festivities passed away, all enjoying themselves immensely, and thus was sealed the bond of fellowship and of goodwill 'twixt class and class for the coming year.

Whilst the younger folks danced, the fathers of the hamlet walked on tiptoe with fearful tread around the house, looking at the faded family portraits. I was pleased to find that what they liked best was the ancient armour; for said they, "Doubtless squire wore that in the old battles hereabouts, when Oliver Cromwell was round these parts." On my pointing out the picture of the man who built the house three hundred years ago, they surrounded it, and gazed at the features for a great length of time; indeed, I feared that they would never come away, so fascinated were they by this relic of antiquity, illustrating the ancient though simple annals of their village.

I persuaded the head of our mummer troop to write out their play as it was handed down to him by his predecessors. This he did in a fine bold hand on four sides of foolscap. Unfortunately the literary quality of the lines is so poor that they are hardly worth reproducing, except as a specimen of the poetry of very early times handed down by oral tradition. Suffice it to say that the _dramatis personae_ are five in number--viz., Father Christmas, Saint George, a Turkish Knight, the Doctor, and an Old Woman. All are dressed in paper flimsies of various shapes and colours. First of all enters Father Christmas.

"In comes I old Father Christmas, Welcome in or welcome not, Sometimes cold and sometimes hot. I hope Father Christmas will never be forgot," etc.

Then Saint George comes in, and after a great deal of bragging he fights the "most dreadful battle that ever was known," his adversary being the knight "just come from Turkey-land," with the inevitable result that the Turkish knight falls. This brings in the Doctor, who suggests the following remedies:--

"Give him a bucket of dry hot ashes to eat, Groom him down with a bezom stick, And give him a yard and a half of pump water to drink."

For these offices he mentions that his fee is fifty guineas, but he will take ten pounds, adding:

"I can cure the itchy pitchy, Palsy, and the gout; Pains within or pains without; A broken leg or a broken arm, Or a broken limb of any sort. I cured old Mother Roundabout," etc.

He declares that he is not one of those "quack doctors who go about from house to house telling you more lies in one half-hour than what you can find true in seven years."

So the knight just come from Turkey-land is resuscitated and sent back to his own country.

Last of all the old woman speaks:

"In comes I old Betsy Bub; On my shoulder I carry my tub, And in my hand a dripping-pan. Don't you think I'm a jolly old man?

Now last Christmas my father killed a fat hog, And my mother made black-puddings enough to choke a dog, And they hung them up with a pudden string Till the fat dropped out and the maggots crawled in," etc.

The mummers' play, of which the above is a very brief _résumé_, lasts about half an hour, and includes many songs of a topical nature.

Yes, Christmas is Christmas still in the heart of old England. We are apt to talk of the good old days that are no more, lamenting the customs and country sports that have passed away; but let us not forget that two hundred years hence, when we who are living now will have long passed "that bourne from which no traveller returns," our descendants, as they sit round their hearths at Yuletide, may in the same way regret the grand old times when good Victoria--the greatest monarch of all ages--was Queen of England; those times when during the London season fair ladies and gallant men might be seen on Drawing-room days driving down St James's Street in grand carriages, drawn by magnificent horses, with servants in cocked hats and wigs and gold lace; when the rural villages of merrie England were cheered throughout the dreary winter months by the sound of horse and hound, and by the sight of beautiful ladies and red-coated sportsmen, mounted on blood horses, careering over the country, clearing hedges and ditches of fabulous height and width; when every man, woman, and child in the village turned out to see the "meet," and the peer and the peasant were for the day on an equal footing, bound together by an extraordinary devotion to the chase of "that little red rover" which men called the fox--now, alas! extinct, as the mammoth or the bear, owing to barbed wire and the abolition of the horse; when to such an extent were games and sports a part of our national life that half London flocked to see two elevens of cricketers (including a champion "nine" feet high called Grace) fighting their mimic battle arrayed in white flannels and curiously coloured caps, at a place called Lords, the exact site of which is now, alas I lost in the sea of houses; when as an absolute fact the first news men turned to on opening their daily papers in the morning was the column devoted to cricket, football, or horse-racing; when in the good old days, before electricity and the motor-car caused the finest specimen of the brute creation to become virtually extinct (although a few may still be seen at the Zoological Gardens), horse-racing for a cup and a small fortune in gold was only second to cricket and football in the estimation of all merrie Englanders--the only races now indulged in being those of flying machines to Mars and back twice a day. Two hundred years hence, I say, the Victorian era--time of blessed peace and unexampled prosperity--will be pronounced by all unprejudiced judges as the true days of merrie England. Let us, then, though not unmindful of the past, pin our faith firmly on the present and the future. _Carpe diem_ should be our motto in these fleeting times, and, above all, progress, not retrogression. Let us, as the old, old sound of the village bells comes to us over the rolling downs this New Year's eve, recall to mind

".... the primal sympathy Which having been must ever be."

Let our hearts warm to the battle cry of advancing civilisation and the attainment of the ideal humanity, soaring upwards step by step, re-echoing the prayer contained in those lilting stanzas with which Tennyson greets the New Year:

"Ring out the old, ring in the new; Ring happy bells across the snow: The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true.

"Ring out the grief that saps the mind, For those that here we see no more Ring out the feud of rich and poor, Ring in redress to all mankind.

"Ring out false pride in place and blood, The civic slander and the spite; Ring in the love of truth and right; Ring in the common love of good.

"Ring out old shapes of foul disease; Ring out the narrowing lust of gold; Ring out the thousand wars of old, Ring in the thousand years of peace.

"Ring in the valiant man and free, The larger heart, the kindlier hand; Ring out the darkness of the land. Ring in the Christ that is to be."