I See It In A Different Light Now And Know
That You Were Right And We Were Wrong."
Towards evening I said good-bye to my kind friend and
entertainer and continued my rural ride.
From Coombe it is
five miles to Hurstbourne Tarrant, another charming "highland"
village, and the road, sloping down the entire distance,
struck me as one of the best to be on I had travelled in
Hampshire, 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 mind something that should have been in it. At all
events, it was odd that I had more than once promised myself a
visit to the very village I was approaching solely because
William Cobbett had described and often stayed in it, and now
no thought of him and his ever-delightful Rural Rides was in
my mind.
Arrived at the village I went straight to the "George and
Dragon," where a friend had assured me I could always find
good accommodations. But he was wrong: there was no room for
me, I was told by a weird-looking, lean, white-haired old
woman with whity-blue unfriendly eyes. She appeared to resent
it that any one should ask for accommodation at such a time,
when the "shooting gents" from town required all the rooms
available. Well, I had to sleep somewhere, I told her:
couldn't she direct me to a cottage where 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
wainscoting. "Do you call this a cottage?" I said to the
woman when she came in with tea. "No, I have it as a cottage,
but it is an old farm-house called the Rookery," she returned.
Then, for the first time, I remembered Rural Rides. "This
then is the very house where William Cobbett used to stay
seventy or eighty years ago," I said. She had never heard of
William Cobbett; she only knew that at that date it had been
tenanted by a farmer named Blount, a Roman Catholic, who had
some curious ideas about the land.
That settled it. Blount was the name of Cobbett's friend, and
I had come to the very house where Cobbett was accustomed to
stay.
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