Any One Who Has Noticed The Remarkable Influence Of
Locality In The More Evident Vegetation - Such, For Instance, As
Lichens - Will Be Able To Suppose The Possibility Of Minute
Organisms - Microbe, Bacteria, Whatever You Like To Call Them - Being More
Persistent In One Spot Than In Another.
I have often thought of the
half-magical art of the Chinese, Feng-shui, by which they discover if a
place be fortunate and fit for a house.
It seems to suggest something of
this kind, and I think there is a great deal yet to be discovered by the
diligent observation of localities. The experience of the rudest country
rustic is not to be despised; an observation is an observation, whoever
makes it; there has been an air of too much science in the affected
derision of our forefathers' wisdom.
COUNTRY PLACES.
I.
High up and facing every one who enters a village there still remains an
old notice-board with the following inscription: - 'All persons found
wandering abroad, lying, lodging, or being in any barn, outhouse, or in
the open air, and not giving a good account of themselves, will be
apprehended as rogues and vagabonds, and be either publicly whipt or sent
to the house of correction, and afterwards disposed of according to law,
by order of the magistrates. Any person who shall apprehend any rogue or
vagabond will be entitled to a reward of ten shillings.' It very often
happens that we cannot see the times in which we actually live. A thing
must be gone by before you can see it, just as it must be printed before
it is read. This little bit of weather-stained board may serve, perhaps,
to throw up the present into a picture so that it may be visible. For
this inhuman law still holds good, and is not obsolete or a mere relic of
barbarism. The whipping, indeed, is abrogated for very shame's sake; so
is the reward to the informer; but the magistrate and the imprisonment
and the offence remain. You must not sleep in the open, either in a barn
or a cart-house or in a shed, in the country, or on a door-step in a
town, or in a boat on the beach; and if you have no coin in your pocket
you are still more diabolically wicked - you are a vagrom man, and the
cold cell is your proper place. This is the Jubilee year, too, of the
mildest and best reign of the Christian era. Something in this
weather-beaten board to be very proud of, is it not? Something human and
comforting and assuring to the mind that we have made so much progress.
The pagan Roman Empire reached from the wall of Severus in the north of
England to Athens of the philosophers; it included our islands, France,
Germany, Spain, Italy, Austria, Greece, Turkey in Europe and Asia,
Egypt - the whole world of those days. No one could escape from it,
because it enclosed all; you could not take refuge in Spain on account of
the absence of an extradition treaty; no forger, no thief, no political
offender could get out of it. A crushing power this, quite unknown in our
modern world, with all our engines, steamers, and telegraphs. A man may
hide himself somewhere now, but from the power of old Rome there was no
running away. And all this, too, was under the thumb of one irresponsible
will, in an age when human life was of no value, and there was no State
institution preaching gentleness in every village. Yet even then there
was no such law as this, and in this respect we are more brutal than was
the case nineteen centuries ago. This weather-beaten board may also serve
to remind us that in this Jubilee year the hateful workhouse still
endures; that people are imprisoned for debt under the mockery of
contempt of court; that a man's household goods, down to the bed on which
he sleeps, and the tools warm from his hand, may be sold. In the West End
of London a poor woman, an ironer, being in debt, her six children's
clothes were seized. What a triumph for the Jubilee year! Instead of
building a Church House to add another thousand tons to the enormous
weight of ecclesiastical bricks and mortar that cumbers the land, would
it not be more human to signalise the time by the abolition of these
cruel laws, and by the introduction of some system to gradually
emancipate the poor from the workhouse, which is now their master?
In the gathering dusk of the afternoon I saw a mouse rush to a wall - a
thick stone wall, - run up it a few inches, and disappear in a chink under
some grey lichen. The poor little biter, as the gipsies call the mouse,
had a stronghold wherein to shelter himself, and close by there was a
corn-rick from which he drew free supplies of food. A few minutes
afterwards I was interested in the movements of a pair of wrens that were
playing round the great trunk of an elm, flying from one to another of
the little twigs standing out from the rough bark. First one said
something in wren language, and then the other answered; they were
husband and wife, and after a long consultation they flew to the
corn-rick and crept into a warm hole under the thatch. So both these, the
least of animals and the least of birds, have a resource, and man is the
only creature that punishes his fellow for daring to lie down and sleep.
Up in the plain there were some mounds, or - tumuli - , about which nothing
seemed to be known, though they had evidently been cut into and explored.
At last, however, a farmer - Mr. Nestor Hay, who knew everything - told me
something about them. He cut them open. He had an old county history and
several other volumes which had somehow accumulated in the Manor-house
Farm, and, like many country people, he was extremely fond of studying
the past.
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