The soil could be improved by taking the flints out.
"The soil to look upon," Cobbett truly says, "appears to be
more 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
hobby was a good one for the poor of the village; the stones,
too, proved useful afterwards to the road-makers, who have
been using them these many years. A few heaps almost clothed
over with a turf which had formed on them in the course of
eighty years were still to be seen on the land when I was
there.
The following day I took no ride. The weather was so
beautiful it seemed better to spend the time sitting or
basking in the warmth and brightness or strolling about.
At all events, it was a perfect day at Hurstbourne Tarrant,
though not everywhere, 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 George and Dragon Inn. This charming bird
is quite common in the neighbourhood, although, as elsewhere
in England, the natives know it not by its book name, nor by
any other, and do not distinguish it from its less engaging
cousin, the yellowhammer.
After breakfast I strolled about the common and in Doles Wood,
on the down above the village, listening to the birds, and on
my way back encountered a tramp whose singular appearance
produced a deep impression on 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
stomach for the task, I will make a present of the title to
any one of my fellow-travellers, curious in tramps, who cares
to use it. This makes two good titles I have given away in
this chapter with a borrowed one.
But if it had been possible for me to write such a book, a
prominent place would be given in it to the one tramp I have
met who could be accurately described as gorgeous. I did not
cultivate his acquaintance; chance threw us together and we
separated after exchanging a few polite commonplaces, but his
big flamboyant image remains vividly impressed on my mind.
At noon, in the brilliant sunshine, as I came loiteringly down
the long slope from Doles Wood to the village, he overtook me.
He was a huge man, over six feet high, nobly built, suggesting
a Scandinavian origin, with a broad blond face, good features,
and prominent blue eyes, and his hair was curly and shone 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 stamp of the irreclaimable blackguard on his face; and
that same handsome face was just then disfigured with several
bruises in three colours - blue, black, and red. Doubtless he
had been in a drunken brawl on the previous evening and had
perhaps been thrown out of some low public-house and properly
punished.
In his dress he was as remarkable as in his figure. Bright
blue trousers much too small for his stout legs, once the
property, no doubt, of some sporting young gent of loud tastes
in colours; a spotted fancy waistcoat, not long enough to meet
the trousers, a dirty scarlet tie, long black frock-coat,
shiny in places, and a small dirty grey cap which only covered
the topmost part of his head of golden hair.
Walking by the hedge-side he picked and devoured the late
blackberries, which were still abundant. It was a beautiful
unkept hedge with scarlet and purple fruit among the
many-coloured fading leaves and silver-grey down of old-man's-
beard.
I too picked and ate a few berries and made the remark that it
was late to eat such fruit in November. The Devil in these
parts, I told him, flies abroad in October to spit on the
bramble bushes and spoil the fruit. It was even worse further
north, in Norfolk and Suffolk, where they say the Devil goes
out at Michaelmas and shakes his verminous trousers over the
bushes.
He didn't smile; he went on sternly eating blackberries, and
then remarked in a bitter tone, "That Devil they talk about
must have a busy time, to go messing about blackberry bushes
in addition to all his other important work."
I was silent, and presently, after swallowing a few more
berries, he resumed in the same tone: "Very fine, very
beautiful all this" - waving his hand to indicate the hedge,
its rich tangle 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 pleasure of seeing things. But when it
comes to a man tramping twenty or thirty miles a day on an
empty belly, looking for work which he can't find, he doesn't
see it quite in the same way."
"True," I returned, with indifference.
But he was not to be put off by my sudden coldness, and he
proceeded to inform me that he had just returned from
Salisbury Plain, that it had been noised abroad that ten
thousand men were wanted by the War Office to work in forming
new camps.
