This Natural World Was Changed To A Supernatural, And There Was No More Matter Nor Force In Sea Or Land Nor In The Heavens Above, But Only Spirit.

Chapter Six:

By Swallowfield

One of the most attractive bits of green and wooded country near London I know lies between Reading and Basingstoke and includes Aldermaston with its immemorial oaks in Berkshire and Silchester with Pamber Forest in Hampshire. It has long been one of my favourite haunts, summer and winter, and it is perhaps the only wooded place in England where I have a home feeling as strong as that which I experience in certain places among the South Wiltshire downs and in the absolutely flat country on the Severn, in Somerset, and the flat country in Cambridgeshire and East Anglia, especially at Lynn and about Ely.

I am now going back to my first visit to this green retreat; it was in the course of one of those Easter walks I have spoken of, and the way was through Reading and by Three Mile Cross and Swallowfield. On this occasion I conceived a dislike to Reading which I have never quite got over, for it seemed an unconscionably big place for two slow pedestrians to leave behind. Worse still, when we did leave it we found that Reading would not leave us. It was like a stupendous octopus in red brick which threw out red tentacles, miles and miles long in various directions - little rows and single and double cottages and villas, all in red, red brick and its weary accompaniment, the everlasting hard slate roof. These square red brick boxes with sloping slate tops are built as close as possible to the public road, so that the passer-by looking in at the windows may see the whole interior - wall-papers, pictures, furniture, and oftentimes the dull expressionless face of the woman of the house, staring back at you out of her shallow blue eyes. The weather too was against us; a grey hard sky, like the slate roofs, and a cold strong east wind to make the road dusty all day long.

Arrived at Three Mile Cross, it was no surprise to find it no longer recognizable as the hamlet described in Our Village, but it was saddening to look at the cottage in which Mary Russell Mitford lived and was on the whole very happy with her flowers and work for thirty years of her life, in its present degraded state. It has a sign now and calls itself the "Mitford Arms" and a "Temperance Hotel," and we were told that you could get tea and bread and butter there but nothing else. The cottage has been much altered since Miss Mitford's time, and the open space once occupied by the beloved garden is now filled with buildings, including a corrugated-iron dissenting chapel.

From Three Mile Cross we walked on to Swallowfield, still by those never-ending roadside red-brick cottages and villas, for we were not yet properly out of the hated biscuit metropolis. It was a big village with the houses scattered far and wide over several square miles of country, but just where the church stands it is shady and pleasant. The pretty church yard too is very deeply shaded and occupies a small hill with the Loddon flowing partly round it, then taking its swift way through the village. Miss Mitford's monument is a plain, almost an ugly, granite cross, standing close to the wall, shaded by yew, elm, and beech trees, and one is grateful to think that if she never had her reward when living she has found at any rate a very peaceful resting-place.

The sexton was there and told us that he was but ten years old when Miss Mitford died, but that he remembered her well and she was a very pleasant little woman. Others in the place who remembered her said the same - that she was very pleasant and sweet. We know that she was sweet and charming, but unfortunately the portraits we have of her do not give that impression. They represent her as a fat common-place looking person, a little vulgar perhaps. I fancy the artists were bunglers. I possess a copy of a very small pencil sketch made of her face by a dear old lady friend of mine, now dead, about the year 1851 or 2. My friend had a gift for portraiture in a peculiar way. When she saw a face that greatly interested her, in a drawing-room, on a platform, in the street, anywhere, it remained very vividly in her mind and on going home she would sketch it, and some of these sketches of well known persons are wonderfully good. She was staying in the country with a friend who drove with her to Swallowfield to call on Miss Mitford, and on her return to her friend's house she made the little sketch, and in this tiny portrait I can see the refinement, the sweetness, the animation and charm which she undoubtedly possessed.

But let me now venture to step a little outside of my own province, my small plot - a poor pedestrian's unimportant impressions of places and faces; all these p's come by accident; and this I put in parenthetically just because an editor solemnly told me a while ago that he couldn't abide and wouldn't have alliteration's artful aid in his periodical. Let us leave the subject of what Miss Mitford was to those of her day who knew her; a thousand lovely personalities pass away every year and in a little while are no more remembered than the bright-plumaged bird that falls in the tropical forest, or the vanished orchid bloom of which some one has said that the angels in heaven can look on no more beautiful thing. Leaving all that, let us ask what remains to us of another generation of all she was and did?

She was a prolific writer, both prose and verse, and, as we know, had an extraordinary vogue in her own time.

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