To understand a nation you must go to the cottager.
The well-to-do are educated, they have travelled, if not in their ideas,
they are more or less cosmopolitan. In the cottager the character stands
out in the coarsest relief; in the cottager you get to 'bed-rock,' as the
Americans say; there's the foundation. Character runs upwards, not
downwards. It is not the nature of the aristocrat that permeates the
cottager, but the nature of the cottager that permeates the aristocrat.
The best of us are polished cottagers. Scratch deep enough, and you come
to that; so that to know a people, go to the cottage, and not to the
mansion. The labouring man cannot quickly alter his ways. Can the
manufacturer? All alike try to go in the same old groove, till disaster
visits their persistence. It is English human nature.
APRIL GOSSIP
The old woman tried to let the cuckoo out of the basket at Heathfield
fair as usual on the 14th; but there seems to have been a hitch with the
lid, for he was not heard immediately about the country. Just before that
two little boys were getting over a gate from a hop-garden, with handfuls
of Lent lilies - a beautiful colour under the dark sky. They grow wild
round the margin of the hop garden, showing against the bare dark loam;
gloomy cloud over and gloomy earth under. 'Sell me a bunch?' 'No, no,
can't do that; we wants these yer for granmer.' 'Well, get me a bunch
presently, and I will give you twopence for it.' 'I dunno. We sends the
bunches we finds up to Aunt Polly in Lunnon, and they sends us back
sixpence for every bunch.' So the wild flowers go to Lunnon from all
parts of the country, bushels and bushels of them. Nearly two hundred
miles away in Somerset a friend writes that he has been obliged to put up
notice-boards to stay the people from tearing up his violets and
primroses, not only gathering them but making the flowery banks waste;
and notice-boards have proved no safeguard. The worst is that the roots
are taken, so that years will be required to repair the loss. Birds are
uncertain husbandmen, and sow seeds as fancy leads their wings. Do the
violets get sown by ants? Sir John Lubbock says they carry violet seeds
into their nests.
The lads, who still pelt the frogs in the ponds, just as they always did,
in spite of so much schooling, call them chollies. Pheasants are often
called peacocks. Bush-harrows, which are at work in the meadows at this
time of year, are drudges or dredges. One sunny morning I noticed the
broken handle of a jug on the bank of the road by the garden. What
interested me was the fine shining glaze of this common piece of red
earthenware. And how had the potter made that peculiar marking under the
surface of the glaze?
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