Part 1

COPYRIGHT, 1891, BY HARPER & BROTHERS.

_All rights reserved._

Our journey opens in Northamptonshire, and in that season when the year grows ancient,

“Not yet on summer’s death, nor on the birth Of trembling winter.”

In the stubble the crack! crack! of a stray gun speaks, now and again, of partridge-time. Over the pastures, undulating with ridge and furrow, where the black oxen feed, patches of gloom and gleam are scurrying as the wind--westerly, with a touch of north--chases the light showers under a vivid sun. Along the drab road darts a bullfinch, his family after him; pauses a moment among the dogrose berries; is off again, and lost in the dazzle ahead.

A high grassy ridge stands up from the plain; and upon it, white and salient against a dark cloud, the spire of a village church. From its belfry, says the sexton, you may spy forty parishes: but more important are the few cottages immediately below. They seem conspicuously inglorious: yet their name is written large in the histories. It speaks of a bright June day when along this ridge--then unenclosed and scattered with broom and heath flowers--the rattle of musketry and outcries of battle rolled from morning to late afternoon, by which time was lost a king with his kingdom. For the village is Naseby. Here, by the market green, the Parliamentarians ranged their baggage. Yonder, on Mill Hill and Broad Moor, with just a hollow between, the two armies faced each other; the royalists with bean-stalks in their hats, their enemies with badges of white linen. To the left, Sulby hedges were lined with Ireton’s dragoons. And the rest is an old story: Rupert, tardily returning from a headlong charge, finds no “cause” left to befriend, no foe to fight. While his men were pillaging, Cromwell has snatched the day. His Majesty is flying through Market-Harborough towards Leicester, and thither along the dusty roads his beaten regiments trail after him, with the Ironsides at their heels, hewing hip and thigh.

An obelisk, set about with thorn-bushes and shaded by oak and birch, marks the battle-field. It rests on a base of rough moss-grown stones, and holds out “a useful lesson to British kings never to exceed the bounds of their just prerogative, and to British subjects never to swerve from the allegiance due to their legitimate monarch.” And the advice is well meant, no doubt; but, as the Watch asked of Dogberry, “How if they will not?”

Naseby, however, has another boast. Here, beside the monument, we are standing on the water-shed of England. In the fields below rise many little springs, whereof those to the south and east unite to form the Ise brook, which runs into the Nen, and so find their goal in the North Sea; those to the west form the Avon, and seek the British Channel. And it is westward that we turn our faces--we, whom you shall briefly know as P. and Q.; for the business that brings us to Naseby is to find here the source of Shakespeare’s Avon, and so follow its windings downward to the Severn.

The source is modest enough, being but a well amid the “good cabbage” of the inn garden. To-day, a basin of mere brick encloses it; but in 1823, the date of the obelisk, some person of refinement would adorn also Avon Well; and procured from Mr. Groggan of London a Swan of Avon in plaster; and Mr. Groggan contrived that the water should gush elegantly from her bill, but not for long. For the small boy came with stones, after his kind; and now, sans wing, sans head, sans everything, she crouches among the cabbages, “a rare bird upon earth.”

From Avon Well the spring flows to the northwest, and we follow it through “wide-skirted meads” dotted with rubbing-posts and divided by stiff ox fences (the bullfinches of the fox-hunter--for we are in the famous Pytchley country), past a broad reservoir fringed with reed and poplars, and so through more pastures to Sulby Abbey. And always, as we look back, Naseby spire marks our starting-point. About three miles down, the runnel has grown to a respectable brook, quite large enough to have kept supplied the abbey fish-ponds.

On the site of this abbey--founded circa 1155 by William de Wydeville in honor of the Blessed Virgin--now stands a red-brick farm-house, passably old, and coated with ivy. Of the vanished building it conserves but two relics--a stone coffin and the floriated cover of another. The course of the stream beside it, and for some way below, is traced by the thorn-bushes under which it winds (in springtime how pleasantly!) until Welford is reached--a small brick village. Here, after rioting awhile in a maze of spendthrift channels, it recombines its waters to run under its first bridge, and begin a sober life by supplying a branch of the Grand Junction Canal. A round-house at the canal’s head forms, with the bridge, what Mr. Samuel Ireland, in his Beauties of the Warwickshire Avon (1795), calls “an agreeable landscape, giving that sort of view which, being simple in itself, seldom fails to constitute elegance.” Rather, to our thinking, the landscape’s beauty lies in its suggestion, in that here we touch the true heart of the country life; of quiet nights dividing slow, familiar days, during which man and man’s work grow steeped in the soil’s complexion, secure of all but

“the penalty of Adam, The season’s difference.”

It is enough that we are grateful for it as we pass on down the valley where the canal and stream run side by side--the canal demurely between straight banks, the stream below trying always how many curves it can make in each field, until quieted for a while by the dam of a little red-brick mill, set down all alone in the brilliant green. The thorn-bushes are giving place to willows--not such as fringe the Thames, but gray trees of a smaller leaf, and, by your leave, more beautiful. Our walk as we follow the towpath of the canal, having the river on our left, is full of peaceful incidents and subtle revelations of color--a lock, a quaint swing-bridge, a swallow taking the sunlight on his breast as he skims between us and the inky clouds, a white horse emphasizing the meadow’s verdure. The next field holds a group of sable--a flock of rooks, a pair of black horses, a dozen velvet-black oxen, beside whom the thirteenth ox seems consciously indecorous in a half-mourning suit of iron-gray. Next, from a hawthorn “total gules” with autumn berries, we start six magpies; and so, like Christian, “give three skips and go on singing” beneath the spires and towers of this and that small village (Welford and North and South Kilworth) that look down from the edging hills.

Below South Kilworth, where a windmill crowns the upland, the valley turns southward, and we leave the canal to track the Avon again, that here is choked with rushes. For a mile or two we pursue it, now jumping, now crossing by a timely pole or hurdle, from Northamptonshire into Leicestershire and back (for the stream divides these counties), until it enters the grounds of Stanford Hall, and under the yellowing chestnuts of the park grows suddenly a dignified sheet of water, with real swans.

Stanford Hall (the seat of Lord Bray) is, according to Ireland, “spacious, but wants those pictorial decorations that would render it an object of attention to the traveller of taste.” But to us, who saw it in the waning daylight, the comfortable square house seemed full of quiet charm, as did the squat perpendicular church, untouched by the restorer, and backed by a grassy mound that rises to the eastern window, and the two bridges (the older one disused) under which the Avon leaves the park. A twisted wych-elm divides them, its roots set among broad burdock leaves.

Below Stanford the stream contracts again, and again meanders among black cattle and green fields to Lilburne. Here it winds past a congeries of grassy mounds, dotted now with black-faced sheep, that was once a Roman encampment, the Tripontium mentioned by the emperor Antoninus in his journey from London to Lincoln. Climbing to the eminence of the prætorium and gazing westward, we see on the high ground two beech-crowned tumuli side by side, clearly an outpost or speculum overlooking Watling Street, the Roman road that passes just beyond the ridge “from Dover into Chestre.” This same high ground is the eastern hem of Dunsmore Heath, once so dismally ravaged by the Dun Cow of legend, till Guy of Warwick rode out and slew her in single combat. The heath, a long ridge of lias bordering our river to the south for many miles to come, is now enclosed and tilled; but its straggling cottages, duck ponds, and furze clumps still suggest the time when all was common land.

At our feet, close under the encampment, an antique bridge crosses Avon. Beside it is hollowed a sheep-washing pool, and across the road stands a little church. Tempted by its elaborate window mouldings, we poke our heads in at the door, but at once withdraw them to cough and sneeze. The place is given over to dense smoke and a small decent man, who says that a service will be held in ten minutes, and what to do with the stove he doesn’t know. So we leave him, and pass on, trudging towards Catthorpe, a mile below.

A wooden paling, once green, but subdued by years to all delicate tints, fronts the village street. Behind, in a garden of cypress and lilacs, lies the old vicarage, with deep bow-windows sunk level with the turf, a noteworthy house. For John Dyer, author of “Grongar Hill”--“Bard of the Fleece,” as Wordsworth hails him--held Catthorpe living for a few years in the last century; and here, while his friends

“in the town, in the busy, gay town, Forgot such a man as John Dyer,”

looked out on this gray garden wall, over which the fig-tree clambers, and “relished versing.” The church stands close by, a ragged cedar beside it, an elm drooping before its plain tower. We take a long look before descending again to the river, like Dyer

“resolved, this charming day, Into the open fields to stray, And have no roof above our head But that whereon the gods do tread.”

Just below Catthorpe, by a long line of arches called Dow

(or Dove) Bridge, Watling Street pushes across the river with Roman directness. This bridge marks the meeting-point of three counties, for beyond it we step into Warwickshire. It is indifferently modern, yet “the scene, though simple, aided by a group of cattle then passing, had sufficient attraction in the meridian of a summer sun to induce” the egregious Ireland “to attempt a sketch of it as a picturesque view,” and supply us with a sentence to be quoted a thousand times during our voyage, and always with ribald appreciation.

The valley narrows as we draw near Rugby. Clifton on Dunsmore, eminent by situation only, stands boldly up on the left, and under it, by Clifton mill, the stream runs down to Brownsover. Brownsover too has its mill, with a pool and cluster of wych-elms below. And hard by we find (as we think) Tom Brown’s willow, the tree which wouldn’t “throw out straight hickory shoots twelve feet long, with no leaves, worse luck!” where Tom sat aloft, and “Velveteens,” the keeper, below, through that soft, hazy day in the Mayfly season, till the sun came slanting through the branches, and told of locking-up near at hand. We are hushed as we stand before it, and taste the reward of such as “identify.”

And now, just ahead, on the same line of hill as Clifton, stands the town of Rugby. No good view of it can be found from the river-side, for the middle distance is always a straight line of railway sheds or embankments. Perhaps the best is to be had from the towpath of the Oxford Canal, marked high above our right by a line of larch and poplar, where a tall aqueduct carries it over the river Swift.

This is the stream which, coming from Lutterworth, bore down in 1427 the ashes of John Wiclif to the Avon. Forty years after his peaceful interment the Council of Constance gave orders to exhume and burn his body, to see if it could be discerned from those of the faithful. “In obedience thereto,” says Fuller, “Richard Fleming, bishop of Lincoln, diocesan of Lutterworth, sent his officers (vultures with a quick sight sent at a dead carcass!) to ungrave him accordingly. To Lutterworth they come--sumner, commissary, official, chancellor, proctors, doctors, and the servants (so that the remnant of the body would not hold out a bone amongst so many hands), take what is left out of the grave, and burn them to ashes, and cast them into Swift, a brook running hard by. Thus the brook hath conveyed his ashes into Avon, Avon into Severn, Severn into the narrow seas, they into the main ocean. And thus the ashes of Wiclif are the emblem of his doctrine, which now is dispersed all the world over.”

For aught we know, the upper part of this stream may justify its name.

The two streams unite in that green vale over which Dr. Arnold used to gaze in humorous despair. “It is no wonder,” he said, “we do not like looking that way, when one considers that there is nothing fine between us and the Ural Mountains;” and, in a letter to Archbishop Whately,” ... we have no hills, no plains, not a single wood, and but one single copse; no heath, no down, no rock, no river, no clear stream, scarcely any flowers--for the lias is particularly poor in them--nothing but one endless monotony of enclosed fields and hedge-row trees;” lastly, “I care nothing for Warwickshire, and am in it like a plant sunk in the ground in a pot; my roots never strike beyond the pot, and I could be transplanted at any moment without tearing or severing my fibres.” And we consent, in part, for the fibres of great men lie in their work, not in this or that soil. But what fibres--not his own--were cracked when Rugby lost its great schoolmaster we feel presently as, haunted by his son’s noble elegy, we stand before the altar of the school chapel, where he rests.

At Rugby our narrative, hitherto smilingly pastoral, quickens to epic. So far we had followed Avon afoot, but here we meant to launch a Canadian canoe on its waters, creating a legend. She lay beside a small river-side tavern, her bright basswood sides gleaming in the sunshine. A small crowd had gathered, and was being addressed with volubility by a high complexioned man of urbane demeanor. He was bareheaded and coatless; he was shod in blue carpet slippers, on each of which a yellow anchor (emblem of Hope) was entwined with sprays of the pink convolvulus, typifying (according to P., who is a botanist), “I recognize your worth, and will sustain it by judicious and tender affection.” As we launched our canoe and placed our sacks on board, he turned his discourse on us. It breathed the spirit of calm confidence. There were long shallows just below (he said), and an uprooted willow blocking the stream, and three waterfalls, and fences of barbed wire. He enumerated the perils; he was sanguine about each; and ours was the first canoe he ever set eyes on.

We pushed off and waved good-bye. The sun shone in our faces; behind, the voice of confidence shouted us over the first shallow. Our canoe swung round a bend beside a small willow coppice, and we sighed as the kindly crowd was hidden from us.

We turned at the sound of stertorous breathing. A pair of blue slippers came twinkling after us over the meadow. Our friend had fetched a circuit round the coppice, and soon both craft and crew were as babes in his hands. Was it a shallow?--he hounded us over. Was it a willow fallen “ascaunt the brook?”--he drove us under, clambering himself along the trunk, as once Ophelia, and exhorting always. At the foot of the first waterfall he took leave of us, and turned back singing across the fields. He was a good man, but would be obeyed. We learned from him, first, that the art of canoeing has no limits; second, that the “impenetrability of matter” is a discredited phrase; and, after the manner of Bunyan, we called him Mr. Win-by-Will.

By many dense beds of rushes, through which a flock of ducks scattered before us, we dropped down to Newbold on Avon, a pretty village on the hill-side, with green orchards sloping to the stream. By climbing through them and looking due south, you may see the spire of Bilton, where Addison lived for many years. Below Newbold the river tumbles over two waterfalls, runs thence by a line of rush beds to a railway bridge, and so beneath Caldecott’s famous spinney, where Tom Brown, East, and the “Madman” sought the kestrel’s nest. Many Scotch firs mingle with the beeches of the spinney, and just below them the stream divides, enclosing a small island, and recombines to hold a southward course past Holbrook Court.

Holbrook Court is a gloomy building that looks down its park slope upon a weir, a red-brick mill, and a gloomier farm-house of stone. This farm-house has a history, being all that is left of Lawford Hall, the scene of the once notorious “Laurel-Water Tragedy.”

The tale is briefly this: In 1780 Sir Theodosius Boughton, a vicious and sickly boy, was squiring it at Lawford Hall, and fast drinking out his puny constitution. “To him enter” an evil spirit in the shape of a brother-in-law, an Irish adventurer, one Captain Donellan. This graduate in vice took the raw scholar in hand, and with the better will as being next heir to his estates. But it seems that drink and debauchery worked too slowly for the impatient captain, for one evening the wretched boy went to bed, called for his sleeping-draught, and drank the wrong liquid out of the right bottle. And as for Captain Donellan, he bungled matters somehow, and was hanged at Warwick in the following spring--an elegant, well-mannered man in black, who displayed much ceremonious punctilio at ascending the scaffold ahead of the sheriff. Ten years later Lawford Hall was pulled down as an accursed thing, and the building before us is all that survives of it. To-day the Gloire de Dijon rose, the jasmine, and the ivy sprawl up its sad-colored walls and over the porch, which still wears the date 1604.

Either at Lawford Hall, or just above, at the old Holbrook Grange, lived, in Elizabeth’s time, One-handed Boughton, who won an entirely posthumous fame by driving a ghostly coach and six about the country-side. His spirit was at length caught in a phial by certain of the local clergy, corked down, sealed, thrown into a neighboring marl-pit, and so laid forever. Therefore his only successes of late have been in frightening maid-servants out of their situations at the farm.

Leaving Lawford, we paddle through a land pastorally desolate, seeing, often for miles together, neither man’s face nor woman’s. The canoe darts in and out of rush beds; avoids now a shallow, now a snag, a clump of reeds, a conglomerate of logs and pendent shrivelled flags, flotsam of many floods; and again is gliding easily between meadows that hold, in Touchstone’s language, “no assembly but horn beasts.” Our canoe wakes strange emotions in these cattle. They lift their heads, snort, fling up their heels, and, with rigid tails, come capering after us like so many bacchanals. At length a fence stops them, and they obligingly watch us out of sight. The next herd repeats the performance. And always the river is vocal beside us,

“Giving a gentle kiss to every sedge He overtaketh in his pilgrimage;”

while ahead the water-rat dives, or the moor-hen splashes from one green brim to another; and around the land is slowly changing from the monotonous to the “up-and-down-hilly;” and we, passing through it all, are thankful.

A small cottage appears beside some lime-pits on the right bank. Over its garden gate a blackboard proclaims that here are the “Newnham Regis Baths.” A certain Walter Bailey, M.D., writing in 1587 A Brief Discourse of Certain Baths, etc., sings loud praise of these waters, but warns drinkers to “consist in a mediocrity, and never to adventure to drink above six, or at the utmost eight, pints in one day.” Also, he “will not rashly counsel any to use them in the leap-years.” We disregarded this latter warning, but observed the former; yet the plain man who gave us our glassful asserted that a friend of his, “all hot and sweaty,” drank two quarts of the water one summer day, and took no harm. As a fact, the springs which here rise from the limestone were known and esteemed by the Romans; the remains of their baths were found, and the present one--a pump within a square paling--built on the same spot. But their fame has not travelled of late.

We embarked again, and were soon floating down to Church Lawford. What shall be said of this spot? As we saw it happily, one slope of green--vivid, yet in shadow--swelled up to darker elms and a tall church tower, set high against an amber sunset. Beyond, the sky and the river’s dim reaches melted together, through all delicate yellows, mauves, and grays, into twilight. A swan, scurrying down stream before us, broke the water into pools of gold. And so a bend swept Church Lawford out of our sight and into our kindliest memories.

Nearly opposite lies Newnham Regis, about a mile from its baths. In Saxon times, they say, a king’s palace stood here; and three large fish-ponds, with some mounds, remain for a sign of it. Here, beside a pleasant mill, the foot-path crosses to Church Lawford. Just below, the stream is blocked by an osier bed; and we struggled there for the half of one mortal hour, and mused on the carpet slippers, and Hope, and such things; and “late and at last” were out and paddling through the uncertain light under the pointed arches of Bretford Bridge.

Here crosses the second great Roman road, the Fosseway,

“that tilleth from Toteneys From the one end of Cornewaile anon to Cateneys, From the South-west to North-est, into Englonde’s ende. _Fosse_ men callith thilke way, that by mony town doth wende.”

Thenceforward for a mile we move in darkness over glimmering waters, until a railway bridge looms ahead, and we spy, half a mile away, the lights of a little station. This must be Brandon, we decide; and running in beside the bank, begin a quick contention with the echo.

Voices answer us, male and female, and soon many villagers are about us, peering at the canoe.

“Are we in time for the last train to Coventry?”

Chorus answers “Yes;” only one melancholy stripling insists that it isn’t likely.

And he is right. We hear a rumble; a red eye flames out; the last train, with a hot trail of smoke, comes roaring over the bridge and shoots into Brandon station. We are too late.

“Beds?”

The melancholy one echoes: “Beds! In Brandon?”

“The inn?”

“Well, you might try the inn.”