No One Seemed To Be Ill, Unless He
Brought It Home With Him From Some Place Where He Had Been Visiting.
The
diseases they used to have were long-lived, such as rheumatism, which may
keep a man comfortably in aches and pains forty years.
My dear old
friend, however, taking them one by one, went through the lot and told me
of the ghosts. The forefathers I knew are all gone - the stout man, the
lame man, the paralysed man, the gruff old stick: not one left. There is
not one left of the old farmers, not a single one. The fathers, too, of
our own generation have been dropping away. The strong young man who used
to fill us with such astonishment at the feats he would achieve without a
thought, no gymnastic training, to whom a sack of wheat was a toy. The
strong young man went one day into the harvest-field, as he had done so
many times before. Suddenly he felt a little dizzy. By-and-by he went
home and became very ill with sunstroke; he recovered, but he was never
strong again; he gradually declined for twelve months, and next
harvest-time he was under the daisies. Just one little touch of the sun,
and the strength of man faded as a leaf. The hardy dark young man, built
of iron, broad, thick, and short, who looked as if frost, snow, and heat
were all the same to him, had something go wrong in his lung: one
twelvemonth, and there was an end. This was a very unhappy affair. The
pickaxe and the spade have made almost a full round to every door; I do
not want to think any more about this. Family changes and the pressure of
these hard times have driven out most of the rest; some seem to have
quite gone out of sight; some have crossed the sea; some have abandoned
the land as a livelihood. Of the few, the very few that still remain,
still fewer abide in their original homes. Time has shuffled them about
from house to house like a pack of cards. Of them all, I verily believe
there is but one soul living in the same old house. If the French had
landed in the mediaeval way to harry with fire and sword, they could not
have swept the place more clean.
Almost the first thing I did with pen and ink as a boy was to draw a map
of the hamlet with the roads and lanes and paths, and I think some of the
ponds, and with each of the houses marked and the occupier's name. Of
course it was very roughly done, and not to any scale, yet it was
perfectly accurate and full of detail. I wish I could find it, but the
confusion of time has scattered and mixed these early papers. A map by
Ptolemy would bear as much resemblance to the same country in a modern
atlas as mine to the present state of that locality. It is all
gone - rubbed out. The names against the whole of those houses have been
altered, one only excepted, and changes have taken place there. Nothing
remains. This is not in a century, half a century, or even in a quarter
of a century, but in a few ticks of the clock.
I think I have heard that the oaks are down. They may be standing or
down, it matters nothing to me; the leaves I last saw upon them are gone
for evermore, nor shall I ever see them come there again ruddy in spring.
I would not see them again even if I could; they could never look again
as they used to do. There are too many memories there. The happiest days
become the saddest afterwards; let us never go back, lest we too die.
There are no such oaks anywhere else, none so tall and straight, and with
such massive heads, on which the sun used to shine as if on the globe of
the earth, one side in shadow, the other in bright light. How often I
have looked at oaks since, and yet have never been able to get the same
effect from them! Like an old author printed in another type, the words
are the same, but the sentiment is different. The brooks have ceased to
run. There is no music now at the old hatch where we used to sit in
danger of our lives, happy as kings, on the narrow bar over the deep
water. The barred pike that used to come up in such numbers are no more
among the flags. The perch used to drift down the stream, and then bring
up again. The sun shone there for a very long time, and the water rippled
and sang, and it always seemed to me that I could feel the rippling and
the singing and the sparkling back through the centuries. The brook is
dead, for when man goes nature ends. I dare say there is water there
still, but it is not the brook; the brook is gone like John Brown's soul.
There used to be clouds over the fields, white clouds in blue summer
skies. I have lived a good deal on clouds; they have been meat to me
often; they bring something to the spirit which even the trees do not. I
see clouds now sometimes when the iron grip of hell permits for a minute
or two; they are very different clouds, and speak differently. I long for
some of the old clouds that had no memories. There were nights in those
times over those fields, not darkness, but Night, full of glowing suns
and glowing richness of life that sprang up to meet them. The nights are
there still; they are everywhere, nothing local in the night; but it is
not the Night to me seen through the window.
There used to be footpaths.
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