Book , w n H 1 5 PRESENTED BV / 7 -^' cA /• A SHEPHERD'S LIFE WORKS OF W. H. HUDSON The Purple Land Introduction by Theodore Roosevelt A Crystal Age Foreword by Clifford Smyth Dead Man's Plack and An Old Thorn Birds in Town and Village Illustrated in color Adventures Among Birds Head and Tail Pieces after Bewick Birds of La Plata (2 vols.) Superbly Illustrated Far Away and Long Ago With Photogravure Portrait Idle Days in Patagonia Fully Illustrated A Traveller in Little Things E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY A SHEPHERD'S LIFE IMPRESSIONS OF THE SOUTH WILTSHIRE DOWNS BY W. H. HUDSON ILLUSTRATED BY BERNARD C. GOTCH NEW YORK E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 681 FIFTH AVENUE 1921 New American Edition ^ Entirely re-set ^ s jy ^*\ Published 1921 V By E. P. Dutton & Company $\\ All Rights Reserved am Publisher ! PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA H rJ 02 A NOTE I am obliged to Messrs. Longmans, Green, & Co., for permission to make use of an article entitled "A Shep- herd of the Downs," which appeared in the October and November numbers of "Longmans' Magazine," in 1902. With the exception of that article, portions of which I have incorporated in different chapters, the whole of the matter contained in this work now appears for the first time. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I Salisbury Plain 1 II Salisbury as I see it 17 III WlNTERBOURNE BlSHOP 34 IV A Shepherd of the Downs 45 V Early Memories 63 VI Shepherd Isaac Bawcombe 73 VII The Deer-stealers 84 VIII Shepherds and Poaching 93 IX A Shepherd on Foxes 104 X Bird-life on the Downs 116 XI Starlings and Sheep-bells 127 XII The Shepherd and the Bible .... 137 XIII Vale of the Wylye 145 XIV A Sheep-dog's Life 159 XV Concerning Cats 173 XVI The Ellerbys of Doveton 190 XVII Old Wiltshire Days 200 XVIII Old Wiltshire Days (continued) . . . 214 XIX The Shepherd's Return 236 XX The Dark People of the Village . . . 245 XXI Some Sheep-dogs 264 XXII The Shepherd as Naturalist .... 283 XXIII The Master of the Village .... 293 XXIV Isaac's Children 305 XXV LrviNG in the Past 319 Index 333 vii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Old Sarum Frontispiece PACK Broad Chalke on the Ebble 1 Turnip Pecking 7 The Five Rivers of Salisbury 9 Old Wiltshire Horned Sheep 13 Salisbury Cathedral from the Avon 17 Carriers' Carts, Salisbury Market 24 Stalls in the Market at Salisbury 28 The Market House, Salisbury 31 Ebbesborne Wake on the Ebble 34 Tilshead 39 Idminster on the Bourne 45 Harnham Bridge over the Avon at Salisbury ... 48 Unloading Sheep at the Market 53 The Hurdlemaker 56 Shrewton 63 Shepherd and Flock 69 Barford St. Martin on the Nadder 73 Near Rollestone, on Salisbury Plain 75 Hurdle Pitching 79 Imber 84 "Peacocks" at Barford St. Martin 86 Gomeldon on the Bourne 93 ix x LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE Shepherds and their Dogs 98 Coombe Bissett on the Ebble 104 Boscombe on the Bourne 107 Hurdle and Crib Mending Ill Winterbourne Stoke 116 Allington on the Bourne 121 Upton Lovell on the Wylye 127 Filling the Cribs 130 Ansty on the Nadder 137 Carting Water for the Flock 140 Codford on the Wylye 143 Fisherton de la Mere on the Wylye 145 Titherington Church 149 Knook Church and Manor House on the Wylye . . 152 Wishford on the Wylye 155 Chitterne . 159 The Lambing Fold 163 On Guard 172 Stockton on the Wylye 173 Winterbourne Earls on the Bourne 176 Woodford on the Avon 180 Fovant on the Nadder 182 The Bourne at Winterbourne Gunner 190 Salisbury from the Race Course 199 Fonthill Bishop 200 Hindon 204 Courtyard of "The Lamb," Hindon 208 Swallowcliffe on the Nadder 214 Joan 218 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xi VAGI Tithe Barn, Tisbury 233 Newton Tony on the Bourne 236 Burcombe on the Nadder 245 Misselfore, Bower Chalke 264 In the Fold 268 Shrewton 283 Dwarf Oaks in the Great Ridge Wood .... 286 Chilmark 293 Orcheston St. Mary 305 The Head Shepherd 312 Orcheston St. George 319 Folding for the Night 330 White Sheet Hill from the Shaftesbury Road ... 332 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE — — * J. BRQ4D Crt/*LKE cm me EbDLE A SHEPHERD'S LIFE CHAPTER I Salisbury Plain Introductory remarks — Wiltshire little favoured by tour- ists — Aspect of the downs — Bad weather — Desolate aspect — The bird-scarer — Fascination of the downs — The larger Salisbury Plain — Effect of the military occupation — A century's changes — Birds — Old Wiltshire sheep — Sheep-horns in a well — Changes wrought by cultivation — Rabbit-warrens on the downs — Barrows obliterated by the plough and by rabbits Wiltshire looks large on the map of England, a great green county, yet it never appears to be a favourite one to those who go on rambles in the land. At all events I am unable to bring to mind an instance of a lover of 1 2 P A SHEPHERD'S LIFE Wiltshire who was not a native or a resident, or had not been to Marlborough and loved the country on ac- count of early associations. Nor can I regard myself as an exception, since, owing to a certain kind of adap- tiveness in me, a sense of being at home wherever grass grows, I am in a way a native too. Again listen to any half-dozen of your friends discussing the places they have visited, or intend visiting, comparing notes about the counties, towns, churches, castles, scenery — all that draws them and satisfies their nature, and the chances are that they will not even mention Wiltshire. They all know it "in a way"; they have seen Salisbury Cathedral and Stonehenge, which everybody must go to look at oncq in his life; and they have also viewed the country from the windows of a railroad carriage as they passed through on their flight to Bath and to Wales with its mountains, and to the west country, which many of us love best of all — Somerset, Devon, and Cornwall. For there is nothing striking in Wiltshire, at all events to those who love nature first; nor mountains, nor sea, nor anything to compare with the places they are hasten- ing to, west or north. The downs ! Ye*s, the downs are there, full in sight of your window, in their flowing forms resembling vast, pale green waves, wave beyond wave, "in fluctuation fixed"; a fine country to walk on in fine weather for all those who regard the mere exercise of walking as sufficient pleasure. But to those who wish for something more, these downs may be neglected, since, if downs are wanted, there is the higher, nobler Sussex range within an hour of London. There are others on whom the naked aspect of the downs has a repelling effect. Like Gilpin they love not an undecorated earth; SALISBURY PLAIN 3 and false and ridiculous as Gilpin's taste may seem to me and to all those who love the chalk, which "spoils everything" as Gilpin said, he certainly expresses a feeling common to those who are unaccustomed to the emptiness and silence of these great spaces. As to walking on the downs, one remembers that the fine days are not so many, even in the season when they are looked for — they have certainly been few during this wet and discomfortable one of 1909. It is indeed only on the chalk hills that I ever feel disposed to quarrel with this English climate, for all weathers are good to those who love the open air, and have their special attrac- tions. What a pleasure it is to be out in rough weather in October when the equinoctial gales are on, "the wind Eurodydon," to listen to its roaring in the bending trees, to watch the dead leaves flying, the pestilence-stricken multitudes, yellow and black and red, whirled away in flight on flight before the volleying blast, and to hear and see and feel the tempests of rain, the big silver-grey drops that smite you like hail ! And what pleasure, too, in the still grey November weather, the time of suspense and melancholy before winter, a strange quietude, like a sense of apprehension in nature! And so on through the revolving year, in all places in all weathers, there is pleasure in the open air, except on these chalk hills be- cause of their bleak nakedness. There the wind and driving rain are not for but against you, and may over- come you with misery. One feels their loneliness, monot- ony, and desolation on many days, sometimes even when it is not wet, and I here recall an amusing encounter with a bird-scarer during one of these dreary spells. It was in March, bitterly cold, with an east wind 4 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE which had been blowing many days, and overhead the sky was of a hard, steely grey. I was cycling along the valley of the Ebble, and finally leaving it pushed up a long steep slope and set off over the high plain by a dusty road with the wind hard against me. A more desolate scene than the one before me it would be hard to imagine, for the land was all ploughed and stretched away before me, an endless succession of vast grey fields, divided by wire fences. On all that space there was but one living thing in -sight, a human form, a boy, far away on the left side, standing in the middle of a big field with some- thing which looked like a gun in his hand. Immediately after I saw him he, too, appeared to have caught sight of me, for turning he set off running as fast as he could over the ploughed ground towards the road, as if intend- ing to speak to me. The distance he would have to run was about a quarter of a mile and I doubted that he would be there in time to catch me, but he ran fast and the wind was against me, and he arrived at the road just as I got to. that point. There by the side of the fence he stood, panting from his race, his handsome face glowing with colour, a boy about twelve or thirteen, with a fine strong figure, remarkably well dressed for a bird-scarer. For that was what he was, and he carried a queer, heavy-looking old gun. I got off my wheel and waited for him to speak, but he was silent, and continued regarding me with the smiling countenance of one well pleased with himself. "Well?" I said, but there was no answer; he only kept on smiling. "What did you want?" I demanded impatiently. "I didn't want anything." SALISBURY PLAIN 5 "But you started running here as fast as you could the moment you caught sight of me." "Yes, I did." "Well, what did you do it for — what was your object in running here?" "Just to see you pass," he answered. It was a little ridiculous and vexed me at first, but by and by when I left him, after some more conversation, I felt rather pleased; for it was a new and somewhat flattering experience to have any person run a long dis- tance over a ploughed field, burdened with a heavy gun, "just to see me pass." But it was not strange in the circumstances ; his hours in that grey, windy desolation must have seemed like days, and it was a break in the monotony, a little joyful excitement in getting to the road in time to see a passer- by more closely, and for a few moments gave him a sense of human companionship. I began even to feel a little sorry for him, alone there in his high, dreary world, but presently thought he was better off and better employed than most of his fellows poring over miserable books in school, and I wished we had a more rational system of education for the agricultural districts, one which would not keep the children shut up in a room during all the best hours of the day, when to be out of doors, seeing, hearing, and doing, would fit them so much better for the life-work before them. Squeers' method was a wiser one. We think less of it than of the delightful caricature, which makes Squeers "a joy for ever," as Mr. Lang has said of Pecksniff. But Dickens was a Londoner, and incapable of looking at this or any other question from any other than the Lon- 6 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE doner's standpoint. Can you have a better system for the children of all England than this one which will turn out the most perfect draper's assistant in Oxford Street, or, to go higher, the most efficient Mr. Guppy in a solici- tor's office ? It is true that we have Nature's unconscious intelligence against us; that by and by, when at the age of fourteen the boy is finally released, she will set to work to undo the wrong by discharging from his mind its accumulations of useless knowledge as soon as he begins the work of life. But what a waste of time and energy and money! One can only hope that the slow intellect of the country will wake to this question some day, that the countryman will say to the townsman, Go on making your laws and systems of education for your own children, who will live as you do indoors ; while I shall devise a different one for mine, one which will give them hard muscles and teach them to raise the mutton and pork and cultivate the potatoes and cabbages on which we all feed. To return to the downs. Their very emptiness and desolation, which frightens the stranger from them, only serves to make them more fascinating to those who are intimate with and have learned to love them. That dreary aspect brings to mind the other one, when, on waking with the early sunlight in the room, you look out on a blue sky, cloudless or with white clouds. It may be fancy, or the effect of contrast, but it has always seemed to me that just as the air is purer and fresher on these chalk heights than on the earth below, and as the water is of a more crystal purity, and the sky perhaps bluer, so do all colours and all sounds have a purity and vividness and intensity beyond that of other places. I SALISBURY PLAIN 7 see it in the yellows of hawkweed, rock-rose, and bird's- foot-trefoil, in the innumerable specks of brilliant colour — blue and white and rose — of milk-wort and squinancy- wort, and in the large flowers of the dwarf thistle, glow- ing purple in its green setting; and I hear it in every bird-sound, in the trivial songs of yellow-hammer and corn-bunting, and of dunnock and wren and whitethroat. The pleasure of walking on the downs is not, however, a subject which concerns me now ; it is one I have written about in a former work, "Nature in Downland," descrip- tive of the South Downs. The theme of the present work is the life, human and other, of the South Wiltshire Downs, or of Salisbury Plain. It is the part of Wilt- shire which has most attracted me. Most persons would say that the Marlborough Downs are greater, more like the great Sussex range as it appears from the Weald: 8 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE but chance brought me farther south, and the character and life of the village people when I came to know them made this appear the best place to be in. The Plain itself is not a precisely denned area, and may be made to include as much or little as will suit the writer's purpose. If you want a continuous plain, with no dividing valley cutting through it, you must place it between the Avon and Wylye Rivers, a distance about fifteen miles broad and as many long, with the village of Tilshead in its centre; or, if you don't mind the valleys, you can say it extends from Downton and Tollard Royal south of Salisbury to the Pewsey vale in the north, and from the Hampshire border on the east side to Dorset and Somerset on the west, about twenty-five to thirty miles each way. My own range is over this larger Salis- bury Plain, which includes the River Ebble, or Ebele, with its numerous interesting villages, from Odstock and Combe Bisset, near Salisbury and "the Chalks," to pretty Alvediston near the Dorset line, and all those in the Nadder valley, and westward to White Sheet Hill above Mere. You can picture this high chalk country as an open hand, the left hand, with Salisbury in the hollow of the palm, placed nearest the wrist, and the five valleys which cut through it as the five spread fingers, from the Bourne (the little finger) succeeded by Avon, Wylye, and Nadder, to the Ebble, which comes in lower down as the thumb and has its junction with the main stream below Salisbury. A very large portion of this high country is now in a transitional state, that was once a sheep-walk and is now a training ground for the army. Where the sheep are taken away the turf loses the smooth, elastic char- SALISBURY PLAIN 9 acter which makes it better to walk on than the most perfect lawn. The sheep fed closely, and everything that grew on the down — grasses, clovers, and numerous salisLu Vy small creeping herbs — had acquired the habit of growing and flowering close to the ground, every species and each individual plant striving, with the unconscious intel- ligence that is in all growing things, to hide its leaves 10 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE and pushing sprays under the others, to escape the nib- bling teeth by keeping closer to the surface. There are grasses and some herbs, the plantain among them, which keep down very close but must throw up a tall stem to flower and seed. Look at the plantain when its flowering time comes ; each particular plant growing with its leaves so close down on the surface as to be safe from the busy, searching mouths, then all at once throwing up tall, straight stems to flower and ripen its seeds quickly. Watch a flock at this time, and you will see a sheep walk- ing about, rapidly plucking the flowering spikes, cutting them from the stalk with a sharp snap, taking them off at the rate of a dozen or so in twenty seconds. But the sheep cannot be all over the downs at the same time, and the time is short, myriads of plants throwing up their stems at once, so that many escape, and it has besides a deep perennial root so that the plant keeps its own life though it may be unable to sow any seeds for many seasons. So with other species which must send up a tall flower stem ; and by and by, the flowering over and the seeds ripened or lost, the dead, scattered stems remain like long hairs growing out of a close fur. The turf remains unchanged; but take the sheep away and it is like the removal of a pressure, or a danger: the plant recovers liberty and confidence and casts off the old habit ; it springs and presses up to get the better of its fellows — to get all the dew and rain and sunshine that it can — and the result is a rough surface. Another effect of the military occupation is the destruc- tion of the wild life of the Plain, but that is a matter I have written about in my last book, "Afoot in England," in a chapter on Stonehenge, and need not dwell on here. SALISBURY PLAIN 11 To the lover of Salisbury Plain as it was, the sight of military camps, with white tents or zinc houses, and of bodies of men in khaki marching and drilling, and the sound of guns, now informs him that he is in a district which has lost its attraction, where nature has been dispossessed. Meanwhile, there is a corresponding* change going on in the human life of the district. Let anyone describe it as he thinks best, as an improvement or a deterioration, it is a great change nevertheless, which in my case and probably that of many others is as disagreeable to con- template as that which we are beginning to see in the down, which was once a sheep-walk and is so no longer. On this account I have ceased to frequent that portion of the Plain where the War Office is in possession of the land, and to keep to the southern side in my rambles, out of sight and hearing of the "white-tented camps" and mimic warfare. Here is Salisbury Plain as it has been these thousand years past, or ever since sheep were pastured here more than in any other district in England, and that may well date even more than ten centuries back. Undoubtedly changes have taken place even here, some very great, chiefly during the last, or from the late eigh- teenth century. Changes both in the land and the animal life, wild and domestic. Of the losses in wild bird life there will be something to say in another chapter; they relate chiefly to the extermination of the finest species, the big bird, especially the soaring bird, which is now- gone out of all this wide Wiltshire sky. As a naturalist I must also lament the loss of the old Wiltshire breed of sheep, although so long gone. Once it was the only breed known in Wilts, and extended over the entire 12 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE county ; it was a big animal, the largest of the fine-wooled sheep in England, but for looks it certainly compared badly with modern downland breeds and possessed, it was said, all the points which the breeder, or improver, was against. Thus, its head was big and clumsy, with a round nose, its legs were long and thick, its belly with- out wool, and both sexes were horned. Horns, even in a ram, are an abomination to the modern sheep-farmer in Southern England. Finally, it was hard to fatten. On the other hand it was a sheep which had been from of old on the bare open downs and was modified to suit the conditions, the scanty feed, the bleak, bare country, and the long distances it had to travel to and from the pasture ground. It was a strong, healthy, intelligent animal, in appearance and character like the old original breed of sheep on the pampas of South America, which I knew as a boy, a coarse-wooled sheep with naked belly, tall and hardy, a greatly modified variety of the sheep introduced by the Spanish colonist three centuries ago. At all events, the old Wiltshire sheep had its merits, and when the South Down breed was introduced during the late eighteenth century the farmer viewed it with dis- favour; they liked their old native animal, and did not want to lose it. But it had to go in time, just as in later times the South Down had to go when the Hampshire Down took its place — the breed which is now universal, in South Wilts at all events. A solitary flock of the pure-bred old Wiltshire sheep existed in the county as late as 1840, but the breed has now so entirely disappeared from the country that you find many shepherds who have never even heard of it. Not many days ago I met with a curious instance of SALISBURY PLAIN 13 this ignorance of the past. I was talking to a shepherd, a fine intelligent fellow, keenly interested in the subjects of sheep and sheep-dogs, on the high down above the village of Broad Chalk on the Ebble, and he told me that his dog was of mixed breed, but on its mother's side came from a Welsh sheep-dog, that his father had always had the Welsh dog, once common in Wiltshire, Old Wiltshire horned 3heep ^jr and he wondered why it had gone out as it was so good an animal. This led me to say something about the old sheep having gone out too, and as he had never heard of the old breed I described the animal to him. What I told him, he said, explained something which had been a puzzle to him for some years. There was a deep hollow in the down near the spot where we were standing, and at the bottom he said there was an old well which had been used in former times to water the sheep, but masses of earth had fallen down from the sides, and in that condition it had remained for no one knew how long — perhaps fifty, perhaps a hundred years. Some years ago it came into his master's head to have this old well cleaned out, and this was done with a good 14 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE deal of labour, the sides having first been boarded over to make it safe for the workmen below. At the bottom of the well a vast store of rams' horns was discovered and brought out; and it was a mystery to the farmer and the men how so large a number of sheep's horns had been got together; for rams are few and do not die* often, and here there were hundreds of horns. He understood it now, for if all the sheep, ewes as well as rams, were horned in the old breed, a collection like this might easily have been made. The greatest change of the last hundred years is no doubt that which the plough has wrought in the aspect of the downs. There is a certain pleasure to the eye in the wide fields of golden corn, especially of wheat, in July and August ; but a ploughed down is a down made ugly, and it strikes one as a mistake, even from a purely economic point of view, that this old rich turf, the slow product of centuries, should be ruined for ever as sheep- pasture when so great an extent of uncultivated land exists elsewhere, especially the heavy clays of the Mid- lands, better suited for corn. The effect of breaking up the turf on the high downs is often disastrous ; the thin soil which was preserved by the close, hard turf is blown or washed away, and the soil becomes poorer year by year, in spite of dressing, until it is hardly worth culti- vating. Clover may be grown on it, but it continues to deteriorate; or the tenant or landlord may turn it into a rabbit-warren, the most fatal policy of all. How hideous they are — those great stretches of downland, enclosed in big wire fences and rabbit netting, with little but wiry weeds, moss, and lichen growing on them, the earth dug up everywhere by the disorderly little beasts! SALISBURY PLAIN 15 For a while there is a profit — "it will serve me my time," the owner says — but the end is utter barrenness. One must lament, too, the destruction of the ancient earth-works, especially of the barrows, which is going on all over the downs, most rapidly where the land is broken up by the plough. One wonders if the ever- increasing curiosity of our day with regard to* the history of the human race in the land continues to grow, what our descendants of the next half of the century, to go no further, will say of us and our incredible* carelessness in the matter! So small a matter to us, but one which will, perhaps, be immensely important to them! It is, perhaps, better for our peace that we do not know; it would not be pleasant to have our children's and children's children's contemptuous expressions sounding in our pro- phetic ears. Perhaps we have no right to complain of the obliteration of these memorials of antiquity by the plough; the living are more than the dead, and in this case it may be said that we are only following the Artemisian example in consuming (in our daily bread) minute portions of the ashes of our old relations, albeit untearfully, with a cheerful countenance. Still one can- not but experience a shock on seeing the plough driven through an ancient, smooth turf, curiously marked with barrows, lynchetts, and other mysterious mounds and depressions, where sheep have been pastured for a thou- sand years, without obscuring these chance hieroglyphs scored by men on the surface of the hills. It is not, however, only on the cultivated ground that the destruction is going on ; the rabbit, too, is an active agent in demolishing the barrows and other earth-works. He burrows into the mound and throws out bushels of 16 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE chalk and clay, which is soon washed down by the rains ; he tunnels it through and through and sometimes makes it his village ; then one day the farmer or keeper, who is not an archaeologist, comes along and puts his ferrets into the holes, and one of them, after drinking his fill of blood, falls asleep by the side of his victim, and the keeper sets to work with pick and shovel to dig him out and demolishes half the barrow to recover his vile little beast. ¥' \ CHAPTER II Salisbury as I See It The Salisbury of the villager — The cathedral from the meadows — Walks to Wilton and Old Sarum — The spire and a rainbow — Charm of Old Sarum — The devastation — Salisbury from Old Sarum — Leland's description — Salisbury and the village mind — Mar- ket-day — The infirmary — The cathedral — The lesson of a child's desire — In the streets again — An Apollo of the downs To the dwellers on the Plain Salisbury itself is an ex- ceedingly important place — the most important in the world. For if they have seen a greater — London, let us say — it has left but a confused, a phantasmagoric image on the mind, an impression of endless thorough- fares and of innumerable people all apparently in a 17 18 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE desperate hurry to do something, yet doing nothing; a labyrinth of streets and wilderness of houses, swarming with beings who have no definite object and no more to do with realities than so many lunatics, and are uncon- fined because they are so numerous that all the asylums in the world could not contain them. But of Salisbury they have a very clear image: inexpressibly rich as it is in sights, in wonders, full of people — hundreds of people in the streets and market-place — they can take it all in and know its meaning. Every man and woman, of all classes, in all that concourse, is there for some definite purpose which they can guess and understand; and the busy street and market, and red houses and soaring spire, are all one, and part and parcel too of their own lives in their own distant little village by the Avon or Wylye, or anywhere on the Plain. And that soaring spire which, rising so high above the red town, first catches the eye, the one object which gives unity and distinction to the whole picture, is not more distinct in the mind than the entire Salisbury with its manifold interests and activities. There is nothing in the architecture of England more beautiful than that same spire. I have seen it many times, far and near, from all points of view, and am never in or near the place but I go to some spot where I look at and enjoy the sight; but I will speak here of the two best points of view. The nearest, which is the artist's favourite point, is from the meadows; there, from the waterside, you have the cathedral not too far away nor too near for a picture, whether on canvas or in the mind, standing amidst its great old trees, with nothing but the moist green meadows and the river between. One evening, during the late SALISBURY AS I SEE IT 19 summer of this wettest season, when the rain was begin- ning to cease, I went out this way for my stroll, the pleasantest if not the only "walk" there is in Salisbury. It is true, there are two others: one to Wilton by its long, shady av*enue; the other to Old Sarum; but these are now motor r roads, and until the loathed hooting and dusting engines are thrust away into roads of their own there is little pleasure in them for the man on foot. The rain ceased, but the sky was still stormy, with a great blackness beyond the cathedral and still other black clouds coming up from the west behind me. Then the sun, near its setting, broke out, sending a flame of orange colour through the dark masses around it, and at the same time flinging a magnificent rainbow on that blade cloud against which the immense spire stood wet with rain and flushed with light, so that it looked like a spire built of a stone impregnated with silver. Never had Nature so glorified man's work! It was indeed a mar- vellous thing to see, an effect so rare that in all the years I had known Salisbury, and the many times I had taken that stroll in all weathers, it was my first experience of such a thing. How lucky, then, was Constable to have seen it, when he set himself to paint his famous picture ! And how brave he was and even wise to have attempted such a subject, one which, I am informed by artists with the brush, only a madman would undertake, however great a genius he might be. It was impossible, we know, even to a Constable, but we admire his failure neverthe- less, even as we admire Turner's many failures; but when we go back to Nature we are only too glad to forget all about the picture. The view from the meadows will not, in the future, 20 [A. SHEPHERD'S LIFE I fear, seem so interesting to me; I shall miss the rain- bow, and shall never see again except in that treasured image the great spire as Constable saw and tried to paint it. In like manner, though for a different reason, my future visits to Old Sarum will no longer give me the same pleasure experienced on former occasions. Old Sarum stands over the Avon, a mile and a half from Salisbury; a round chalk hill about 300 feet high, in its- round shape and isolation resembling a stupendous tumulus in which the giants of antiquity were buried, its steeply sloping, green sides ringed about with vast, concentric earth-works and ditches, the work of the "old people," as they say on the Plain, when referring to the ancient Britons, but how ancient, whether invading Celts or Aborigines — the true Britons, who possessed the land from neolithic times — even the anthropologists, the wise men of to-day, are unable to tell us. Later, it was a Roman station, one of the most important, and in after ages a great Norman castle and cathedral city, until early in the thirteenth century, when the old church was pulled down and a new and better one to last for ever was built in the green plain by many running waters. Church and people gone, the castle fell into ruin, though some believe it existed down to the fifteenth century; but from that time onwards the site has been a place of historical memories and a wilderness. Nature had made it a sweet and beautiful spot; the earth over the old buried ruins was covered with an elastic turf, jewelled with the bright little flowers of the chalk, the ramparts and ditches being all overgrown with a dense thicket of thorn, holly, elder, bramble, and ash, tangled up with ivy, briony, and trav- eller's-joy. Once only during the last five or six centuries SALISBURY AS I SEE IT 21 some slight excavations were made when, in 1834, as the result of an excessively dry summer, the lines of the cathedral foundations were discernible on the surface. But it will no longer be the place it was, the Society of Antiquaries having received permission from the Dean and Chapter of Salisbury to work their sweet will on the site. That ancient, beautiful carcass, which had long made their mouths water, on which they have now fallen like a pack of hungry hyenas to tear off the old hide of green turf and burrow down to open to the light or drag out the deep, stony framework. The beautiful surround- ing thickets, too, must go, they tell me, since you cannot turn the hill inside out without destroying the trees and bushes that crown it. What person who has known it and has often sought that spot for the sake of its ancient associations, and of the sweet solace they have found in the solitude, or for the noble view of the sacred city from its summit, will not deplore this fatal amiability of the authorities, this weak desire to please every one and inability to say no to such a proposal ! But let me now return to the object which brings me to this spot; it was not to lament the loss of the beautiful, which cannot be preserved in our age — even this best one of all which Salisbury possessed cannot be preserved — but to look at Salisbury from this point of view. It is not as from "the meadows" a view of the cathedral only, but of the whole town, amidst its circle of vast green downs. It has a beautiful aspect from that point: a red-brick and red-tiled town, set low on that circum- scribed space, whose soft, brilliant green is in lovely contrast with the paler hue of the downs beyond, the perennial moist green of its water-meadows. For many 22 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE swift, clear currents flow around and through Salisbury, and doubtless in former days there were many more channels in the town itself. Leland's description is worth quoting: "There be many fair streates in the Cite Sares- byri, and especially the High Streate and Castle Streate . . . . Al the Streates in a maner, in New Saresbyri, hath little streamlettes and arms derivyd out of Avon than runneth through them. The site of the very town of Saresbyri and much ground thereabout is playne and low, and as a pan or receyvor of most part of the waters of Wiltshire." On this scene, this red town with the great spire, set down among water-meadows, encircled by paler green chalk hills, I look from the top of the inner and highest rampart or earth-work; or going a little distance down sit at ease on the turf to gaze at it by the hour. Nor could a sweeter resting-place be found, especially at the time of ripe elder-berries, when the thickets are purple with their clusters and the starlings come in flocks to feed on them, and feeding keep up a perpetual, low musical jangle about me. It is not, however, of "New Saresbyri" as seen by the tourist, with a mind full of history, archaeology, and the aesthetic delight in cathedrals, that I desire to write, but of Salisbury as it appears to the dweller on the Plain. For Salisbury is the capital of the Plain, the head and heart of all those villages, too many to count, scattered far and wide over the surrounding country. It is the villager's own peculiar city, and even as the spot it stands upon is the "pan or receyvor, of most part of the waters of Wiltshire," so is it the receyvor of all he accomplishes in his laborious life, and thitherward flow all his thoughts SALISBURY AS I SEE IT 23 and ambitions. Perhaps it is not so difficult for me as it would be for most persons who are not natives to identify myself with him and see it as he sees it. That greater place we have been in, that mighty, monstrous London, is ever present to the mind and is like a mist before the sight when we look at other places; but for me there is no such mist, no image so immense and per- sistent as to cover and obscure all others, and no such mental habit as that of regarding people as a mere crowd, a mass, a monstrous organism, in and on which each individual is but a cell, a scale. This feeling troubles and confuses my mind when I am in London, where we live "too thick"; but quitting it I am absolutely free; it has not entered my soul and coloured me with its colour or shut me out from those who have never known it, even of the simplest dwellers on the soil who, to our sophisticated minds, may seem like beings of another species. This is my happiness — to feel, in all places, that I am one with them. To say, for instance, that I am going to Salisbury to-morrow, and catch the gleam in the children's eye and watch them, furtively watching me, whisper to one another that there will be something for them, too, on the morrow. To set out betimes and overtake the early carriers' carts on the road, each with its little cargo of packages and women with baskets and an old man or two, to recognize acquaintances among those who sit in front, and as I go on overtaking and passing carriers and the half-gipsy, little "general dealer" in his dirty, ramshackle, little cart drawn by a rough, fast-trotting pony, all of us intent on business and pleasure, bound for Salisbury — the great market and emporium and place of all delights for all the great Plain. 24 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE I remember that on my very last expedition, when I had come twelve miles in the rain and was standing at a street corner, wet to the skin, waiting for my carrier, a man in a hurry said to me, "I say, just keep an eye on my cart for a minute or two while I run round to see some- body. I've got some fowls in it, and if you see anyone come poking round just ask them what they want — you can't trust every one. I'll be back in a minute." And CARRIERS CAKTS SALISBURY MARKET he was gone, and I was very pleased to watch his cart and fowls till he came back. Business is business and must be attended to, in fair or foul weather, but for business with pleasure we prefer it fine on market-day. The one great and chief pleasure, in which all participate, is just to be there, to be in the crowd — a joyful occasion which gives a festive look to every face. The mere sight of it exhilarates like wine. The numbers — the people and the animals! The car- riers' carts drawn up in rows on rows — carriers from a SALISBURY AS I SEE IT 25 hundred little villages on the Bourne, the Avon, the Wylye, the Nadder, the Ebble, and from all over the Plain, each bringing its little contingent. Hundreds and hundreds more coming by train; you see them pouring down Fisherton Street in a continuous procession, all hurrying market-wards. And what a lively scene the market presents now, full of cattle and sheep and pigs and crowds of people standing round the shouting auc- tioneers! And horses, too, the beribboned hacks, and ponderous draught horses with manes and tails deco- rated with golden straw, thundering over the stone pavement as they are trotted up and down! And what a profusion of fruit and vegetables, fish and meat, and all kinds of provisions on the stalls, where women with baskets on their arms are jostling and bargaining! The Corn Exchange is like a huge beehive, humming with the noise of talk, full of brown-faced farmers in their riding and driving clothes and leggings, standing in knots or thrusting their hands into sacks of oats and barley. You would think that all the farmers from all the Plain were congregated there. There is a joyful contagion in it all. Even the depressed young lover, the forlornest of beings, repairs his wasted spirits and takes heart again. Why, if I've seen a girl with a pretty face to-day I've seen a hundred — and more. And she thinks they be so few she can treat me like that and barely give me a pleasant word in a month! Let her come to Salisbury and see how many there be ! And so with every one in that vast assemblage — vast to the dweller in the Plain. Each one is present as it were in two places, since each has in his or her heart the constant image of home — the little, peaceful village in 26 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE the remote valley; of father and mother and neighbours and children, in school just now, or at play, or home to dinner — home cares and concerns and the business in Salisbury. The selling and buying ; friends and relations to visit or to meet in the market-place, and — how often ! — the sick one to be seen at the Infirmary. This home of the injured and ailing, which is in the mind of so many of the people gathered together, is indeed the cord that draws and binds the city and the village closest together and makes the two like one. That great, comely building of warm, red brick in Fisherton Street, set well back so that you can see it as a whole, behind its cedar and beech-trees — how familiar it is to the villagers! In numberless humble homes, in hundreds of villages of the Plain, and all over the sur- rounding country, the "Infirmary" is a name of the deepest meaning, and a place of many sad and tender and beautiful associations. I heard it spoken of in a manner which surprised me at first, for I know some of the London poor and am accustomed to their attitude towards the metropolitan hospitals. The Londoner uses them very freely; they have come to be as necessary to him as the grocer's shop and the public-house, but for all the benefits he receives from them he has no faintest sense of gratitude, and it is my experience that if you speak to him of this he is roused to anger and demands "What are they for?" So far is he from having any thankful thoughts for all that has been given him for nothing and done for him and for his, if he has anything to say at all on the matter it is to find fault with the hospitals and cast blame on them for not having healed him more quickly or thoroughly. SALISBURY AS I SEE IT 27 This country town hospital and infirmary is differently regarded by the villagers of the Plain. It is curious to find how many among them are personally acquainted with it; perhaps it is not easy for anyone, even in this most healthy district, to get through life without sickness, and all are liable to accidents. The injured or afflicted youth, taken straight from his rough, hard life and poor cottage, wonders at the place he finds himself in — the wide, clean, airy room and white, easy bed, the care and skill of the doctors, the tender nursing by women, and comforts and luxuries, all without payment, but given as it seems to him out of pure divine love and compassion — all this comes to him as something strange, almost incredible. He suffers much perhaps, but can bear pain stoically and forget it when it is past, but the loving kindness he has experienced is remembered. That is one of the very great things Salisbury has for the villagers, and there are many more which may not be spoken of, since we do not want to lose sight of the wood on account of the trees; only one must be men- tioned for a special reason, and that is the cathedral. The villager is extremely familiar with it as he sees it from the market and the street and from a distance, from all the roads which lead him to Salisbury. Seeing it he sees everything beneath it — all the familiar places and objects, all the streets — High and Castle and Crane Streets, and many others, including Endless Street, which reminds one of Sydney Smith's last flicker of fun before that candle went out; and the "White Hart" and the "Angel" and "Old George," and the humbler "Goat" and "Green Man" and "Shoulder of Mutton," with many besides; and the great, red building with its cedar-tree, 28 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE and the knot of men and) boys standing on the bridge gazing down on the trout in the swift river below; and the market-place and its busy crowds — all the familiar sights and scenes that come under the spire like a flock of sheep on a burning day in summer, grouped about a great tree growing in the pasture-land. But he is not familiar with the interior of the great fane; it fails to 3T4U.3 in MARKET draw him, doubtless because he has no time in his busy, practical life for the cultivation of the aesthetic faculties. There is a crust over that part of his mind ; but it need not always and ever be so; the crust is not on the mind of the child. Before a stall in the market-place a child is standing with her mother — a commonplace-looking, little girl of about twelve, blue-eyed, light-haired, with thin arms and legs, dressed, poorly enough, for her holiday. The mother, stoutish, in her best but much-worn black gown SALISBURY AS I SEE IT 29 and a brown straw, out-of-shape hat, decorated with bits of ribbon and a few soiled and frayed, artificial flowers. Probably she is the wife of a labourer who works hard to keep himself and family on fourteen shil- lings a week ; and she, too, shows, in her hard hands and sunburnt face, with little wrinkles appearing, that she is a hard worker; but she is very jolly, for she is in Salisbury on market-day, in fine weather, with several shillings in her purse — a shilling for the fares, and per- haps eightpence for refreshments, and the rest to be expended in necessaries for the house. And now to increase the pleasure of the day she has unexpectedly run against a friend ! There they stand, the two friends, basket on arm, right in the midst of the jostling crowd, talking in their loud, tinny voices at a tremendous rate; while the girl, with a half-eager, half-listless expression, stands by with her hand on her mother's dress, and every time there is a second's pause in the eager talk she gives a little tug at the gown and ejaculates "Mother!" The woman impatiently shakes off the hand and says sharply, "What now, Marty! Can't 'ee let me say just a word without bothering!" and on the talk runs again; then another tug and "Mother!" and then, "You promised, Mother," and by and by, "Mother, you said you'd take me to the cathedral next time." Having heard so much I wanted to hear more, and- addressing the woman I asked her why her child wanted to go. She answered me with a good-humoured laugh. " Tis all because she heard 'em talking about it last win- ter, and she'd never been, and I says to her, 'Never you mind, Marty, I'll take you there the next time I go to Salisbury.' " 30 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE "And she's never forgot it," said the other woman. "Not she — Marty ain't one to forget." "And you been four times, Mother," put in the girl. "Have I now ! Well, 'tis too late now — half-past two and we must be 't 'Goat' at four." "Oh, Mother, you promised!" "Well, then, come along, you worriting child, and let's have it over or you'll give me no peace ;" and away they went. And I would have followed to know the result if it had been in my power to look into that young brain and see the thoughts and feelings there as the crystal- gazer sees things in a crystal. In a vague way, with some very early memories to help me, I can imagine it — the shock of pleased wonder at the sight of that im- mense interior, that far-extending nave with pillars that stand like the tall trunks of pines and beeches, and at the end the light screen which allows the eye to travel on through the rich choir, to see, with fresh wonder and delight, high up and far off, that glory of coloured glass as of a window half-open to an unimaginable place be- yond — a heavenly cathedral to which all this is but a dim porch or passage ! We do not properly appreciate the educational value of such early experiences; and I use that dismal word not because it is perfectly right or for want of a better one, but because it is in everybody's mouth and under- stood by all. For all I know to the contrary, village schools may be bundled in and out of the cathedral from time to time, but that is not the right way, seeing that the child's mind is not the crowd-of -children's mind. But I can imagine that when we have a wiser, better system of education in the villages, in which books will not be SALISBURY AS I SEE IT 31 everything, and to be shut up six or seven hours every- day to prevent the children from learning the things that matter most — I can imagine at such a time that the schoolmaster or mistress will say to the village woman, "I hear you are going to Salisbury to-morrow, or next Tuesday, and I want you to take Janie or little Dan or Tlfi; MARKET HOCSE SALISBURY Peter, and leave him for an hour to play about on the cathedral green and watch the daws flying round the spire, and take a peep inside while you are doing your marketing.'* Back from the cathedral once more, from the infirmary, and from shops and refreshment-houses, out in the sun among the busy people, let us delay a little longer for the sake of our last scene. It was past noon on a hot, brilliant day in August, and that splendid weather had brought in more people 32 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE than I had ever before seen congregated in Salisbury, and never had the people seemed so talkative and merry and full of life as on that day. I was standing at a busy spot by a row of carriers' carts drawn up at the side of the pavement, just where there are three public-houses close together, when I caught sight of a young man of about twenty-two or twenty-three, a shepherd in a grey suit and thick, iron-shod, old boots and brown leggings, with a soft felt hat thrust jauntily on the back of his head, coming along towards me with that half -slouching, half-swinging gait peculiar to the men of the downs, especially when they are in the town on pleasure bent. Decidedly he was there on pleasure and had been indulg- ing in a glass or two of beer (perhaps three) and was very happy, trolling out a song in a pleasant, musical voice as he swung along, taking no notice of the people stopping and turning round to stare after him, or of those of his own party who were following and trying to keep up with him, calling to him all the time to stop, to wait, to go slow, and give them a chance. There were seven following him: a stout, middle-aged woman, then a grey-haired, old woman and two girls, and last a young- ish, married woman with a small boy by the hand; and the stout woman, with a red, laughing face, cried out, "Oh, Dave, do stop, can't 'ee! Where be going so fast, man — don't 'ee see we can't keep up with 'ee?" But he would not stop nor listen. It was his day out, his great day in Salisbury, a very rare occasion, and he was very happy. Then she would turn back to the others and cry, " 'Tisn't no use, he won't bide for us — did 'ee ever see such a boy!" and laughing and perspiring she would start on after him again. SALISBURY AS I SEE IT 33 Now this incident would have been too trivial to relate had it not been for the appearance of the man himself — his powerful and perfect physique and marvellously handsome face — such a face as the old Greek sculptors have left to the world to be universally regarded and admired for all time as the most perfect. I do not think that this was my feeling only ; I imagine that the others in that street who were standing still and staring after him had something of the same sense of surprise and admiration he excited in me. Just then it happened that there was a great commotion outside one of the public- houses, where a considerable party of gipsies in their little carts had drawn up, and were all engaged in a violent, confused altercation. Probably they, or one of them, had just disposed of a couple of stolen ducks, or a sheepskin, or a few rabbits, and they were quarrelling over the division of the spoil. At all events they were violently excited, scowling at each other and one or two in a dancing rage, and had collected a crowd of amused lookers-on; but when the young man came singing by they all turned to stare at him. As he came on I placed myself directly in his path and stared straight into his eyes — grey eyes and very beau- tiful; but he refused to see me; he stared through me like an animal when you try to catch its eyes, and went by still trolling out his song, with all the others streaming after him. CHAPTER III Winterbourne Bishop A favourite village — Isolated situation — Appearance of the village — Hedge-fruit — The winterbourne — Hu- man interest — The home feeling — Man in harmony with nature — Human bones thrown out by a rabbit — A spot unspoiled and unchanged Of the few widely separated villages, hidden away among the lonely downs in the large, blank spaces between the rivers, the one I love best is Winterbourne Bishop. Yet of the entire number — I know them all intimately — I daresay it would be pronounced by most persons the least attractive. It has less shade from trees in summer and is more exposed in winter to the bleak winds of this high country, from whichever quarter they may blow. Placed high itself on a wide, unwooded valley or depression, with the low, sloping downs at some distance away, the village is about as cold a place to pass a winter in as one could 34 WINTERBOURNE BISHOP 35 find in this district. And, it may be added, the most inconvenient to live in at any time, the nearest town, or the easiest to get to, being Salisbury, twelve miles dis- tant by a hilly road. The only means of getting to that great centre of life which the inhabitants possess is by the carrier's cart, which makes the weary four-hours' journey once a week, on market-day. Naturally, not many of them see that place of delights oftener than once a year, and some but once in five or more years. Then, as to the village itself, when you have got down into its one long, rather winding street, or road. This has a green bank, five or six feet high, on either side, on which stand the cottages, mostly facing the road. Real houses there are- none — buildings worthy of being called houses in these great days — unless the three small farm-houses are considered better than cottages, and the rather mean-looking rectory — the rector, poor man, is very poor. Just in the middle part, where the church stands in its green churchyard, the shadiest spot in the village, a few of the cottages are close together, almost touching, then farther apart, twenty yards or so, then farther still, forty or fifty yards. They are small, old cottages; a few have seventeenth-century dates cut on stone tablets on their fronts, but the undated ones look equally old ; some thatched, others tiled, but none par- ticularly attractive. -Certainly they are without the added charm of a green drapery — creeper or ivy rose, clematis, and honeysuckle; and they are also mostly without the cottage-garden flowers, unprofitably gay like the blossom- ing furze, but dear to the soul ; the flowers we find in so many of the villages along the rivers, especially in those of the Wylye valley to be described in a later chapter. 36 r A SHEPHERD'S LIFE The trees, I have said, are few, though the churchyard is shady, where you can- refresh yourself beneath its ancient beeches and its one wide-branching yew, or sit on a tomb in the sun when you wish for warmth and brightness. The trees growing by or near the street are mostly ash or beech, with a pine or two, old but not large; and there are small or dwarf yew-, holly-, and thorn-trees. Very little fruit is grown; two or three to half a dozen apple- and damson-trees are called an or- chard, and one is sorry for the children. But in late summer and autumn they get their fruit from the hedges. These run up towards the downs on either side of the village, at right angles with its street ; long, unkept hedges, beautiful with scarlet haws and traveller's-joy, rich in bramble and elder berries and purple sloes and nuts — a thousand times more nuts than. the little* dormice require for their own modest wants. Finally, to go back to its disadvantages, the village is waterless; at all events in summer, when water is most wanted. Water is such a blessing and joy in a village — a joy for ever when it flows throughout the year, as at Nether Stowey and Winsford and Bourton-on-the- Water, to mention but three of all those happy villages in the land which are known to most of us! What man on coming to such places and watching the rushing, spark- ling, foaming torrent by day and listening to its splashing, gurgling sounds by night, does not resolve that he will live in no village that has not a perennial stream in it! This unblessed, high and dry village has nothing but the winterbourne which gives it its name; a sort of sur- name common to a score or two of villages in Wiltshire, Dorset, Somerset, and Hants. Here the bed of the stream WINTERBOURNE BISHOP 37 lies by the bank on one side of the village street, and when the autumn and early winter rains have fallen abundantly, the hidden reservoirs within the chalk hills are filled to overflowing ; then the water finds its way out and fills the dry old channel and sometimes turns the whole street into a rushing river, to the immense joy of the village children. They are like ducks, hatched and reared at some upland farm where there was not even a muddy pool to dibble in. For a season (the wet one) the village women have water at their own doors and can go out and dip pails in it as often as they want. When spring comes it is still flowing merrily, trying to make you believe that it is going to flow for ever ; beau- tiful, green water-loving plants and grasses spring up and flourish along the roadside, and you may see comf rey and water forget-me-not in flower. Pools, too, have been formed in some deep, hollow places ; they are fringed with tall grasses, whitened over with bloom of water- crowfoot, and poa grass grows up from the bottom to spread its green tresses over the surface. Better still, by and by a couple of stray moorhens make their appear- ance in the pool — strange birds, coloured glossy olive- brown, slashed with white, with splendid scarlet and yellow beaks! If by some strange chance a shining blue kingfisher were to appear it could not create a greater excitement. So much attention do they receive that the poor strangers have no peace of their lives. It is a happy time for the children, and a good time for the busy housewife, who has all the water she wants for cooking and washing and cleaning — she may now dash as many pailfuls over her brick floors as she likes. Then the clear, swift current begins to diminish, and scarcely 38 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE have you had time to notice the change than it is alto- gether gone ! The women must go back to the well and let the bucket down, and laboriously turn and turn the handle of the windlass till it mounts to the top again. The pretty moist, green herbage, the graceful grasses, quickly wither away; dust and straws and rubbish from the road lie in the dry channel, and by and by it is filled with a summer growth of dock and loveless nettles which no child may touch with impunity. No, I cannot think that any person for whom it had no association, no secret interest, would, after looking at this village with its dried-up winterbourne, care to make his home in it. And no person, I imagine, wants to see it; for it has no special attraction and is away from any road, at a distance from everywhere. I knew a great many villages in Salisbury Plain, and was always adding to their number, but there was no intention of visiting this one. Perhaps there is not a village on the Plain, or anywhere in Wiltshire for that matter, which sees fewer strangers. Then I fell in with the old shep- herd whose life will be related in the succeeding chapter, and who, away from his native place, had no story about his past life and the lives of those he had known — no thought in his mind, I might almost say, which was not connected with the village of Winterbourne Bishop. And many of his anecdotes and reflections proved so interesting that I fell into the habit of putting them down in my notebook; until in the end the place itself, where he had followed his "homely trade" so long, seeing and feeling so much, drew me to it. I knew there was "nothing to see" in it, that it was without the usual attractions; that there was, in fact, nothing but the WINTERBOURNE BISHOP 39 human interest, but that was enough. So I came to it to satisfy an idle curiosity — just to see how it would accord with the mental picture produced by his descrip- tion of it. I came, I may say, prepared to like the place for the sole but sufficient reason that it had been his home. Had it not been for this feeling he had produced in me I should not, I imagine, have cared to stay long in it. As it was, I did stay, then came again and found L . ttttant ""'*■ ■■—■■,■ *ST.« TJI-3MEAD that it was growing on me. I wondered why; for the mere interest in the old shepherd's life memories did not seem enough to account for this deepening attachment. It began to seem to me that I liked it more and more because of its very barrenness — the entire absence of all the features which make a place attractive, noble scenery, woods, and waters; deer parks and old houses, Tudor, Elizabethan, Jacobean, stately and beautiful, full of art treasures; ancient monuments and historical asso- ciations. There were none of these things; there was 40 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE nothing here but that wide, vacant expanse, very thinly populated with humble, rural folk — farmers, shepherds, labourers — living in very humble houses. England is so full of riches in ancient monuments and grand and interesting and lovely buildings and objects and scenes, that it is perhaps too rich. For we may get into the habit of looking for such things, expecting them at every turn, every mile of the way. I found it a relief, at Winterbourne Bishop, to be in a country which had nothing to draw a man out of a town. A wide, empty land, with nothing on it to look at but a furze-bush; or when I had gained the summit of the down, and to get a little higher still stood on the top of one of its many barrows, a sight of the distant village, its low, grey or reddish-brown cottages half hidden among its few trees, the square, stone tower of its little church looking at a distance no taller than a milestone. That emptiness seemed good for both mind and body: I could spend long hours idly sauntering or sitting or lying on the turf, thinking of nothing, or only of one thing — that it was a relief to have no thought about anything. But no, something was secretly saying to me all the time, that it was more than what I have said which con- tinued to draw me to this vacant place — more than the mere relief experienced on coming back to nature and solitude, and the freedom of a wide earth and sky. I was not fully conscious of what the something more was until after repeated visits. On each occasion it was a pleasure to leave Salisbury behind and set out on that long, hilly road, and the feeling would keep with me all the journey, even in bad weather, sultry or cold, or with WINTERBOURNE BISHOP 41 the wind hard against me, blowing the white chalk dust into my eyes. From the time I left the turnpike to go the last two and a half to three miles by the side-road I would gaze eagerly ahead for a sight of my destina- tion long before it could possibly be seen ; until, on gain- ing the summit of a low, intervening down, the wished scene would be disclosed — the vale-like, wide depression, with its line of trees, blue-green in the distance, flecks of red and grey colour of the houses among them — and at that sight there would come a sense of elation, like that of coming home. This in fact was the secret! This empty place was, in its aspect, despite the difference in configuration be- tween down and undulating plain, more like the home of my early years than any other place known to me in the country. I can note many differences, but they do not deprive me of this home feeling; it is the likenesses that hold me, the spirit of the place, one which Is not a desert with the desert's melancholy or sense of desolation, but inhabited, although thinly and by humble-minded men whose work and dwellings are unobtrusive. The final effect of this wide, green space with signs of human life and labour on it, and sight of animals — sheep and cattle — at various distances, is that we are not aliens here, intruders or invaders on the earth, living in it but apart, perhaps hating and spoiling it, but with the other animals are children of Nature, like them living and seeking our subsistence under her sky, familiar with her sun and wind and rain. If some ostentatious person had come to this strangely quiet spot and raised a staring, big house, the sight of it in the landscape would have made it impossible to have 42 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE such a feeling as I have described — this sense of man's harmony and oneness with nature. From how much of England has this expression which nature has for the spirit, which is so much more to us than beauty of scenery, been blotted out! This quiet spot in Wiltshire has been inhabited from of old, how far back in time the barrows raised by an ancient, barbarous people are there to tell us, and to show us how long it is possible for the race of men, in all stages of culture, to exist on the earth without spoiling it. One afternoon when walking on Bishop Down I noticed at a distance of a hundred yards or more that a rabbit had started making a burrow in a new place and had thrown out a vast quantity of earth. Going to the spot to see what kind of chalk or soil he was digging so deeply in, I found that he had thrown out a human thigh- bone and a rib or two. They were of a reddish-white colour and had been embedded in a hard mixture of chalk and red earth. The following day I went again, and there were more bones, and every day after that the number increased until it seemed to me that he had brought out the entire skeleton, minus the skull, which I had been curious to see. Then the bones disappeared. The man who looked after the game had seen them, and recognizing that they were human remains had judiciously taken them away to destroy or stow them away in some safe place. For if the village constable had discovered them, or heard of their presence, he would perhaps have made a fuss and even thought it necessary to communi- cate with the coroner of the district. Such things occa- sionally happen, even in Wiltshire where the chalk hills are full of the bones of dead men, and a solemn Crowner's WINTERBOURNE BISHOP 43 quest is held on the remains of a Saxon or Dane or an ancient Briton. When some important person — a Sir Richard Colt Hoare, for example, who dug up 379 bar- rows in Wiltshire, or a General Pitt Rivers — throws out human remains nobody minds, but if an unauthorized rabbit kicks out a lot of bones the matter should be inquired into. But the man whose bones had been thus thrown out into the sunlight after lying so long at that spot, which commanded a view of the distant, little village looking so small in that immense, green space — who and what was he and how long ago did he live on the earth — at Winterbourne Bishop, let us say? There were two bar- rows in that part of the down, but quite a stone's-throw away from the spot where the rabbit was working, so that he may not have been one of the people of that period. Still, it is probable that he was buried a very long time ago, centuries back, perhaps a thousand years, perhaps longer, and by chance there was a slope there which prevented the water from percolating, and the soil in which he had been deposited, under that close-knit turf which looked as if it had never been disturbed, was one in which bones might keep uncrumbled for ever. The thought that occurred to me at the time was that if the man himself had come back to life after so long a period, to stand once more on that down surveying the scene, he would have noticed little change in it, certainly nothing of a startling description. The village itself, looking so small at that distance, in the centre of the vast depression, would probably not be strange to him. It was doubtless there as far back as history goes and probably still farther back in time. For at that point, 44 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE just where the winterbourne gushes out from the low hills, is the spot man would naturally select to make his home. And he would see no mansion or big building, no puff of white steam and sight of a long, black train creeping over the earth, nor any other strange thing. It would appear to him even as he knew it before he fell asleep — the same familiar scene, with furze and bramble and bracken on the slope, the wide expanse with sheep and cattle grazing in the distance, and the dark green of trees in the hollows, and fold on fold of the low down beyond, stretching away to the dim, farthest horizon. iPMlNSTEft OWTMr BOUB.NE CHAPTER IV A Shepherd of the Downs Caleb Bawcombe — An old shepherd's love of his home — Fifty years' shepherding — Bawcombe's singular ap- pearance — A tale of a titlark — Caleb Bawcombe's father — Father and son — A grateful sportsman and Isaac Bawcombe's pension — Death following death in old married couples — In a village churchyard — A farm-labourer's gravestone and his story It is now several years since I first met Caleb Bawcombe, a shepherd of the South Wiltshire Downs, but already old and infirm and past work. I met him at a distance from his native village, and it was only after I had known him a long time and had spent many afternoons and evenings in his company, listening to his anecdotes of his shepherding days, that I went to see his own old home for myself — the village of Winterbourne Bishop already described, to find it a place after my own heart. But as I have said, if I had never known Caleb and heard so 45 46 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE much from him about his own life and the lives of many of his fellow-villagers, I should probably never have seen this village. One of his memories was of an old shepherd named John, whose acquaintance he made when a very young man — John being at that time seventy-eight years old — on the Winterbourne Bishop farm, where he had served for an unbroken period of close on sixty years. Though so aged he was still head shepherd, and he continued to hold that place seven years longer — until his master, who had taken over old John with the place, finally gave up the farm and farming at the same time. He, too, was getting past work and wished to spend his declining years in his native village in an adjoining parish, where he owned some house and cottage property. And now what was to become of the old shepherd, since the new tenant had brought his own men with him? — and he, moreover, considered that John, at eighty-five, was too old to tend a flock on the hills, even of tegs. His old master, anxious to help him, tried to get him some em- ployment in the village where he wished to stay; and failing in this, he at last offered him a cottage rent free in the village where he was going to live himself, and, in addition, twelve shillings a week for the rest of his life. It was in those days an exceedingly generous offer, but John refused it. "Master," he said, "I be going to stay in my own native village, and if I can't make a living the parish '11 have to keep I ; but keep or not keep, here I be and here I be going to stay, where I were borned." From this position the stubborn old man refused to be moved, and there at Winterbourne Bishop his master A SHEPHERD OF THE DOWNS 47 had to leave him, although not without having first made him a sufficient provision. The way in which my old friend, Caleb Bawcombe, told the story plainly revealed his own feeling in the matter. He understood and had the keenest sympathy with old John, dead now over half a century ; or rather, let us say, resting very peacefully in that green spot under the old grey tower of Winterbourne Bishop church where as a small boy he had played among the old gravestones as far back in time as the middle of the eighteenth cen- tury. But old John had long survived wife and children, and having no one but himself to think of was at liberty to end his days where he pleased. Not so with Caleb, for, although his undying passion for home and his love of the shepherd's calling was as great as John's, he was not so free, and he was compelled at last to leave his native downs, which he may never see again, to settle for the remainder of his days in another part of the country. Early in life he "caught a chill" through long exposure to wet and cold in winter; this brought on rheumatic fever and a malady of the thigh, which finally affected the whole limb and made him lame for life. Thus handi- capped he had continued as shepherd for close on fifty years, during which time his sons and daughters had grown up, married, and gone away, mostly to a consider- able distance, leaving their aged parents alone once more. Then the wife, who was a strong woman and of an enter- prising temper, found an opening for herself at a distance from home where she could start a little business. Caleb indignantly refused to give up shepherding in his place to take part in so unheard-of an adventure; but after 48 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE a year or more of life in his lonely hut among the hills and cold, empty cottage in the village, he at length tore himself away from that beloved spot and set forth on the longest journey of his life — about forty-five miles — to join her and help in the work of her new home. Here a few years later I found him, aged seventy-two, but owing to his increasing infirmities looking considerably more. When he considered that his father, a shepherd IURN>UM B o» ' AVON at 3A1.1.3BTTHY before him on those same Wiltshire Downs, lived to eighty-six, and his mother to eighty-four, and that both were vigorous and led active lives almost to the end, he thought it strange that his own work should be so soon done. For in heart and mind he was still young; he did not want to rest yet. Since that first meeting nine years have passed, and as he is actually better in health to-day than he was then, there is good reason to hope that his staying power will equal that of his father. A SHEPHERD OF THE DOWNS 49 I was at first struck with the singularity of Caleb's appearance, and later by the expression of his eyes. A very tall, big-boned, lean, round-shouldered man, he was uncouth almost to the verge of grotesqueness, and walked painfully with the aid of a stick, dragging his shrunken and shortened bad leg. His head was long and narrow, and his high forehead, long nose, long chin, and long, coarse, grey whiskers, worn like a beard on his throat, produced a goat-like effect. This was height- ened by the ears and eyes. The big ears stood out from his head, and owing to a peculiar bend or curl in the membrane at the top they looked at certain angles almost pointed. The hazel eyes were wonderfully clear, but that quality was less remarkable than the unhuman in- telligence in them — fawn-like eyes that gazed steadily at you as one may gaze through the window, open back and front, of a house at the landscape beyond. This peculiarity was a little disconcerting at first, when, after making his acquaintance out of doors, I went in uninvited and sat down with him at his own fireside. The busy old wife talked of this and that, and hinted as politely as she knew how that I was in her way. To her practical, peasant mind there was no sense in my being there. "He be a stranger to we, and we be strangers to he." Caleb was silent, and his clear eyes showed neither annoyance nor pleasure but only their native, wild alertness, but the caste feeling is always less strong in the hill shepherd than in other men who are on the land; in some cases it will vanish at a touch, and it was so in this one. A canary in a cage hanging in the kitchen served to intro- duce the subject of birds captive and birds free. I said that I liked the little yellow bird, and was not vexed to SO A SHEPHERD'S LIFE see him in a cage, since he was cage-born ; but I considered that those who caught wild birds and kept them prisoners did not properly understand things. This happened to be Caleb's view. He had a curiously tender feeling about the little wild birds, and one amusing incident of his boyhood which he remembered came out during our talk. He was out on the down one summer day in charge of his father's flock, when two boys of the village on a ramble in the hills came and sat down on the turf by his side. One of them had a titlark, or meadow pipit, which he had just caught, in his hand, and there was a hot argument as to which of the two was the lawful owner of the poor little captive. The facts were as follows. One of the boys having found the nest became possessed with the desire to get the bird. His companion at once offered to catch it for him, and together they withdrew to a distance and sat down and waited until the bird re- turned to sit on the eggs. Then the young birdcatcher returned to the spot, and creeping quietly up to within five or six feet of the nest threw his hat so that it fell over the sitting titlark; but after having thus secured it he refused to give it up. The dispute waxed hotter as they sat there, and at last when it got to the point of threats of cuffs on the ear and slaps on the face they agreed to fight it out, the victor to have the titlark. The bird was then put under a hat for safety on the smooth turf a few feet away, and the boys proceeded to take off their jackets and roll up their shirt-sleeves, after which they faced one another, and were just about to begin when Caleb, thrusting out his crook, turned the hat over and away flew the titlark. The boys, deprived of their bird and of an excuse, for A SHEPHERD OF THE DOWNS 51 a fight, would gladly have discharged their fury on Caleb, but they durst not, seeing that his dog was lying at his side; they could only threaten and abuse him, call him bad names, and finally put on their coats and walk off. That pretty little tale of a titlark was but the first of a long succession of memories of his early years, with half a century of shepherding life on the downs, which came out during our talks on many autumn and winter evenings as we sat by his kitchen fire. The earlier of these memories were always the best to me, because they took one back sixty years or more, to a time when there was more wildness in the earth than now, and a nobler wild animal life. Even more interesting were some of the memories of his father, Isaac Bawcombe, whose time went back to the early years of the nineteenth century. Caleb cherished an admiration and reverence for his father's memory which were almost a worship, and he loved to describe him as he appeared in his old age, when upwards of eighty. He was erect and tall, standing six feet two in height, well proportioned, with a clean-shaved, florid face, clear, dark eyes, and silver- white hair ; and at this later period of his life he always wore the dress of an old order of pensioners to which he had been admitted — a soft, broad, white felt hat, thick boots and brown leather leggings, and a long, grey cloth overcoat with red collar and brass buttons. According to Caleb, he must have been an exceedingly fine specimen of a man, both physically and morally. Born in 1800, he began following a flock as a boy, and continued as shepherd on the same farm until he was sixty, never rising to more than seven shillings a week and nothing found, since he lived in the cottage where S2 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE he was born and which he inherited from his father. That a man of his fine powers, a head-shepherd on a large hill-farm, should have had no better pay than that down to the year 1860, after nearly half a century of work in one place, seems almost incredible. Even his sons, as they grew up to man's estate, advised him to ask for an increase, but he would not. Seven shillings a week he had always had; and that small sum, with something his wife earned by making highly finished smock-frocks, had been sufficient to keep them all in a decent way; and his sons were now all earning their own living. But Caleb got married, and resolved to leave the old farm at Bishop to take a better place at a distance from home, at Warminster, which had been offered him. He would there have a cottage to live in, nine shillings a week, and a sack of barley for his dog. At that time the shepherd had to keep his own dog — no small expense to him when his wages were no more than six to eight shillings a week. But Caleb was his father's favourite son, and the old man could not endure the thought of losing sight of him; and at last, finding that he could not persuade him not to leave the old home, he became angry, and told him that if he went away to Warminster for the sake of the higher wages and barley for the dog he would disown him! This was a serious matter to Caleb, in spite of the fact that a shep- herd has no money to leave to his children when he passes away. He went nevertheless, for, though he loved and reverenced his father, he had a young wife who pulled the other way; and he was absent for years, and when he returned the old man's heart had softened, so that he was glad to welcome him back to the old home. A SHEPHERD OF THE DOWNS S3 Meanwhile at that humble cottage at Winterbourne Bishop great things had happened; old Isaac was no longer shepherding on the downs, but living very com- fortably in his own cottage in the village. The change came about in this way. The downland shepherds, Caleb said, were as a rule clever poachers; and it is really not surprising, when WL.OADWG SHCEP_ ^-—^Br- £\} ' AT THE MARKET ^^ one considers the temptation to a man with a wife and several hungry children, besides himself and a dog, to feed out of about seven shillings a week. But old Baw- combe was an exception: he would take no game, furred or feathered, nor, if he could prevent it, allow another to take anything from the land fed by his flock. Caleb and his brothers, when as boys and youths they began their shepherding, sometimes caught a rabbit, or their dog caught and killed one without their encouragement; 54 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE but, however the thing came into their hands, they could not take it home on account of their father. Now it happened that an elderly gentleman who had the shooting was a keen sportsman, and that in several successive years he found a wonderful difference in the amount of game at one spot among the hills and in all the rest of his hill property. The only explanation the keeper could give was that Isaac Bawcombe tended his flock on that down where rabbits, hares, and partridges were so plenti- ful. One autumn day the gentleman was shooting over that down, and seeing a big man in a smock-frock stand- ing motionless, crook in hand, regarding him, he called out to his keeper, who was with him, "Who is that big man?" and was told that it was Shepherd Bawcombe. The old gentleman pulled some money out of his pocket, and said, "Give him this half-crown, and thank him for the good sport I've had to-day." But after the coin had been given the giver still remained standing there, think- ing, perhaps, that he had not yet sufficiently rewarded the man; and at last, before turning away, he shouted, "Bawcombe, that's not all. You'll get something more by and by." Isaac had not long to wait for the something more, and it turned out not to be the hare or brace of birds he had half expected. It happened that the sportsman was one of the trustees of an ancient charity which provided for six of the most deserving old men of the parish of Bishop; now, one of the six had recently died, and on this gentleman's recommendation Bawcombe had been elected to fill the vacant place. The letter from Salisbury informing him of his election and commanding his pres- ence in that city filled him with astonishment ; for, though A SHEPHERD OF THE DOWNS 55 he was sixty years old and the father of three sons now out in the world, he could not yet regard himself as an old man, for he had never known a day's illness, nor an ache, and was famed in all that neighbourhood for his great physical strength and endurance. And now, with his own cottage to live in, eight shillings a week, and his pensioner's garments, with certain other benefits, and a shilling a day besides which his old master paid him for some services at the farm-house in the village, Isaac found himself very well off indeed, and he enjoyed his prosperous state for twenty-six years. Then, in 1886, his old wife fell ill and died, and no sooner was she in her grave than he, too, began to droop ; and soon, before the year was out, he followed her, because, as the neigh- bours said, they had always been a loving pair and one could not 'bide without the other. This chapter has already had its proper ending and there was no intention of adding to it, but now for a special reason, which I trust the reader will pardon when he hears it, I must go on to say something about that strange phenomenon of death succeeding death in old married couples, one dying for no other reason than that the other has died. For it is our instinct to hold fast to life, and the older a man gets if he be sane the more he becomes like a new-born child in the impulse to grip tightly. A strange and a rare thing among people generally (the people we know), it is nevertheless quite common among persons of the labouring class in the rural districts. I have sometimes marvelled at the num- ber of such cases to be met with in the villages ; but when one comes to think about it one ceases to wonder that 56 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE it should be so. For the labourer on the land goes on from boyhood to the end of life in the same everlasting round, the changes from task to task, according to the seasons, being no greater than in the case of the animals that alter their actions and habits to suit the varying conditions of the year. March and August and Decem- T>!£ MURDLEMAKER ber, and every month, will bring about the changes in the atmosphere and earth and vegetation and in the ani- mals, which have been from of old, which he knows how to meet, and the old, familiar task, lambing-time, shear- ing-time, root and seed crops, hoeing, haymaking, har- vesting. It is a life of the extremest simplicity, without all those interests outside the home and the daily task, the innumerable distractions, common to all persons in A SHEPHERD OF THE DOWNS 57 other classes and to the workmen in towns as well. Inci- dentally it may be said that it is also the healthiest, that, speaking generally, the agricultural labourer is the health- iest and sanest man in the land, if not also the happiest, as some believe. It is this life of simple, unchanging actions and of habits that are like instincts, of hard labour in sun and wind and rain from day to day, with its weekly break and rest, and of but few comforts and no luxuries, which serves to bind man and wife so closely. And the longer their life goes on together the closer and more unbreakable the union grows. They are growing old: old friends and companions have died or left them; their children have married and gone away and have their own families and affairs, so that the old folks at home are little remem- bered, and to all others they have become of little conse- quence in the world. But they do not know it, for they are together, cherishing the same memories, speaking of the same old, familiar things, and their lost friends and companions, their absent, perhaps estranged children, are with them still in mind as in the old days. The past is with them more than the present, to give an undying interest to life; for they share it, and it is only when one goes, when the old wife gets the tea ready and goes mechanically to the door to gaze out, knowing that her tired man will come in no more to take his customary place and listen to all the things she has stored up in her mind during the day to tell him ; and when the tired labourer comes in at dusk to find no old wife waiting to give him his tea and talk to him while he refreshes himself, he all at once realizes his position; he finds him- self cut off from the entire world, from all of his kind. 58 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE Where are they all ? The enduring sympathy of that one soul that was with him till now had kept him in touch with life, had made it seem unchanged and unchangeable, and with that soul has vanished the old, sweet illusion as well as all ties, all common, human affection. He is desolate, indeed, alone in a desert world, and it is not strange that in many and many a case, even in that of a man still strong, untouched by disease and good for another decade or two, the loss, the awful solitude, has proved too much for him. Such cases, I have said, are common, but they are not recorded, though it is possible with labour to pick them out in the church registers; but in the churchyards you do not find them, since the farm-labourer has only a green mound to mark the spot where he lies. Never- theless, he is sometimes honoured with a gravestone, and last August I came by chance on one on which was recorded a case like that of Isaac Bawcombe and his life-mate. The churchyard is in one of the prettiest and most secluded villages in the downland country described in this book. The church is ancient and beautiful and inter- esting in many ways, and the churchyard, too, is one of the most interesting I know, a beautiful green, tree- shaded spot, with an extraordinary number of tombs and gravestones, many of them dated in the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries, inscribed with names of families which have long died out. I went on that afternoon to pass an hour in the church- yard, and finding an old man in labourer's clothes resting on a tomb, I sat down and entered into conversation with him. He was seventy-nine, he told me, and past work, A SHEPHERD OF THE DOWNS 59 and he had three shillings a week from the parish; but he was very deaf and it fatigued me to talk to him, and seeing the church open I went in. On previous visits I had had a good deal of trouble to get the key, and to find it open now was a pleasant surprise. An old woman was there dusting the seats, and by and by, while I was talking with her, the old labourer came stumping in with his ponderous, iron-shod boots and without taking off his old, rusty hat, and began shouting at the church-cleaner about a pair of trousers he had given her to mend, which he wanted badly. Leaving them to their arguing I went out and began studying the inscriptions on the stones, so hard to make out in some instances; the old man fol- lowed and went his way; then the church-cleaner came out to where I was standing. "A tiresome old man!" she said. "He's that deaf he has to shout to hear himself speak, then you've got to shout back — and all about his old trousers!" "I suppose he wants them," I returned, "and you promised to do them, so he has some reason for going at you about it." "Oh, no, he hasn't," she replied. "The girl brought them for me to mend, and I said, 'Leave them and I'll do them when I've time' — how did I know he wanted them in a hurry ? A troublesome old man I" By and by, taking a pair of spectacles out of her pocket, she put them on, and going down on her knees she began industriously picking the old, brown, dead moss out of the lettering on one side of the tomb. "I'd like to know what it says on this stone," she said. "Well, you can read it for yourself, now you've got your glasses on." 60 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE "I can't read. You see, I'm old — seventy-six years, and when I were little we were very poor and I couldn't get no schooling. I've got these glasses to do my sewing, and only put them on to get this stuff out so's you could read it. I'd like to hear you read it." I began to get interested in the old dame who talked to me so freely. She was small and weak-looking, and appeared very thin in her limp, old, faded gown; she had a meek, patient expression on her face, and her voice, too, like her face, expressed weariness and resigna- tion. "But if you have always lived here you must know what is said on this stone?" "No, I don't ; nobody never read it to me, and I couldn't read it because I wasn't taught to read. But I'd like to hear you read it." It was a long inscription to a person named Ash, gentleman, of this parish, who departed this life over a century ago, and was a man of a noble and generous disposition, good as a husband, a father, a friend, and charitable to the poor. Under all were some lines of verse, scarcely legible in spite of the trouble she had taken to remove the old moss from the letters. She listened with profound interest, then said, "I never heard all that before; I didn't know the name, though I've known this stone since I was a child. I used to climb on to it then. Can you read me another ?" I read her another and several more, then came to one which she said she knew — every word of it, for this was the grave of the sweetest, kindest woman that ever lived. Oh, how good this dear woman had been to her in her young married life more'n fifty years ago! If A SHEPHERD OF THE DOWNS 61 that dear lady had only lived it would not have been so hard for her when her trouble come ! "And what was your trouble?" "It was the loss of my poor man. He was such a good man, a thatcher ; and he fell from a rick and injured his spine, and he died, poor fellow, and left me with our five little children." Then, having told me her own tragedy, to my surprise she brightened up and begged me to read other inscriptions to her. I went on reading, and presently she said, "No, that's wrong. There wasn't ever a Lampard in this parish. That I know." "You don't know! There certainly was a Lampard or it would not be stated here, cut in deep letters on this stone." "No, there wasn't a Lampard. I've never known such a name and I've lived here all my life." "But there were people living here before you came on the scene. He died a long time ago, this Lampard — in 1714, it says. And you are only seventy-six, you tell me; that is to say, you were born in 1835, and that would be one hundred and twenty-one years after he died." "That's a long time! It must be very old, this stone. And the church too. I've heard say it was once a Roman Catholic church. Is that true?" "Why, of course, it's true — all the old churches were, and we were all of that faith until a King of England had a quarrel with the Pope and determined he would be Pope himself as well as king in his own country. So he turned all the priests and monks out, and took their propertv and churches and had his own men put in. That was Henry VIII." 62 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE "I've heard something about that king and his wives. But about Lampard, it do seem strange I've never heard that name before." "Not strange at all; it was a common name in this part of Wiltshire in former days; you find it in dozens of churchyards, but you'll find very few Lampards living in the villages. Why, I could tell you a dozen or twenty surnames, some queer, funny names, that were common in these parts not more than a century ago which seem to have quite died out." "I should like to hear some of them if you'll tell me." "Let me think a moment: there was Thorr, Pizzie, Gee, Every, Pottle, Kiddle, Toomer, Shergold, and " Here she interrupted to say that she knew three of the names I had mentioned. Then, pointing to a small, upright gravestone about twenty feet away, she added, "And there's one." "Very well," I said, "but don't keep putting me out — I've got more names in my mind to tell you. Maid- ment, Marchmont, Velvin, Burpitt, Winzur, Rideout, Cullurne." Of these she only knew one — Rideout. Then I went over to the stone she had pointed to and read the inscription to John Toomer and his wife Re- becca. She died first, in March, 1877, aged 72; he in July the same year, aged 75. "You knew them, I suppose?" "Yes, they belonged here, both of them." "Tell me about them." "There's nothing to tell: he was only a labourer and worked on the same farm all his life." "Who put a stone over them — their children?" A SHEPHERD OF THE DOWNS 63 "No, they're all poor and live away. I think it was a lady who lived here; she'd been good to them, and she came and stood here when they put old John in the ground." "But I want to hear more." "There's no more, I've said; he was a labourer, and after she died he died." "Yes? go on." "How can I go on? There's no more. I knew them so well; they lived in the little, thatched cottage over there, where the Millards live now." "Did they fall ill at the same time?" "Oh, no, he was as well as could be, still at work, till she died, then he went on in a strange way. He would come in of an evening and call his wife. 'Mother! Mother, where are you?' you'd hear him call, 'Mother, be you upstairs? Mother, ain't you coming down for a bit of bread and cheese before you go to bed?' And then in a little while he just died." "And you said there was nothing to tell!" "No, there wasn't anything. He was just one of us, a labourer on the farm." I then gave her something, and to my surprise after taking it she made me an elaborate curtsy. It rather upset me, for I had thought we had got on very well together and were quite free and easy in our talk, very much on a level. But she was not done with me yet. She followed to the gate, and holding out her open hand with that small gift in it, she said in a pathetic voice, "Did you think, sir, I was expecting this? I had no such thought and didn't want it." And I had no thought of saying or writing a word 64 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE about her. But since that day she has haunted me — she and her old John Toomer, and it has just now occurred to me that by putting her in my book I may be able to get her out of my mind. SKR.ETWTOW CHAPTER V Early Memories A child shepherd — Isaac and his children — Shepherding in boyhood — Two notable sheep-dogs — Jack, the adder-killer — Sitting on an adder — Rough and the drovers — The Salisbury coach — A sheep-dog suck- ling a lamb Caleb's shepherding began in childhood; at all events he had had his first experience of it at that time. Many an old shepherd, whose father was shepherd before him, has told me that he began to go with the flock very early in life, when he was no more than ten to twelve years of age. Caleb remembered being put in charge of his father's flock at the tender age of six. It was a new and wonderful experience, and made so vivid and lasting 65 66 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE an impression on his mind that now, when he is past eighty, he speaks of it very feelingly as of something which happened yesterday. It was harvesting time, and Isaac, who was a good reaper, was wanted in the field, but he could find no one, not even a boy, to take charge of his flock in the meantime, and so to be able to reap and keep an eye on the flock at the same time he brought his sheep down to the part of the down adjoining the field. It was on his "liberty," or that part of the down where he was entitled to have his flock. He then took his very small boy, Caleb, and placing him with the sheep told him they were now in his charge ; that he was not to lose sight of them, and at the same time not to run about among the furze-bushes for fear of treading on an adder. By and by the sheep began straying off among the furze-bushes, and no sooner would they disappear from sight than he imagined they were lost for ever, or would be unless he quickly found them, and to find them he had to run about among the bushes with the terror of adders in his mind, and the two troubles together kept him crying with misery all the time. Then, at intervals, Isaac would leave his reaping and come to see how he was getting on, and the tears would vanish from his eyes, and he would feel very brave again, and to his father's question he would reply that he was getting on very well. Finally his father came and took him to the field, to his great relief; but he did not carry him in his arms; he strode along at his usual pace and let the little fellow run after him, stumbling and falling and picking himself up again and running on. And by and by one of the women in the field cried out, "Be you not ashamed, Isaac, EARLY MEMORIES 67 to go that pace and not bide for the little child! I do b'lieve he's no more'n seven year — poor mite!" "No more'n six," answered Isaac proudly, with a laugh. But though not soft or tender with his children he was very fond of them, and when he came home early in the evening he would get them round him and talk to them, and sing old songs and ballads he had learnt in his young years — "Down in the Village," "The Days of Queen Elizabeth," "The Blacksmith," "The Gown of Green," "The Dawning of the Day," and many others, which Caleb in the end got by heart and used to sing, too, when he was grown up. Caleb was about nine when he began to help regularly with the flock; that was in the summertime, when the flock was put every day on the down and when Isaac's services were required for the hay-making and later for harvesting and other work. His best memories of this period relate to his mother and to two sheep-dogs, Jack at first and afterwards Rough, both animals of original character. Jack was a great favourite of his master, who considered him a "tarrable good dog." He was rather short-haired, like the old Welsh sheep-dog once common in Wiltshire, but entirely black instead of the usual colour — blue with a sprinkling of black spots. This dog had an intense hatred of adders and never failed to kill every one he discovered. At the same time he knew that they were dangerous enemies to tackle, and on catch- ing sight of one his hair would instantly bristle up, and he would stand as if paralysed for some moments, glaring at it and gnashing his teeth, then springing like a cat upon it he would seize it in his mouth, only to hurl it from him to a distance. This action he would repeat 68 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE until the adder was dead, and Isaac would then put it under a furze-bush to take it home and hang it on a certain gate. The farmer, too, like the dog, hated adders, and paid his shepherd sixpence for every one his dog killed. One day Caleb, with one of his brothers, was out with the flock, amusing themselves in their usual way on the turf with nine morris-men and the shepherd's puzzle, when all at once their mother appeared unexpectedly on the scene. It was her custom, when the boys were sent out with the flock, to make expeditions to the down just to see what they were up to; and hiding her approach by keeping to a hedge-side or by means of the furze- bushes, she would sometimes come upon them with dis- concerting suddenness. On this occasion just where the boys had been playing there was a low, stout furze-bush, so dense and flat-topped that one could use it as a seat, and his mother taking off and folding her shawl placed it on the bush, and sat down on it to rest herself after her long walk. "I can see her now," said Caleb, "sitting on that furze-bush, in her smock and leggings, with a big hat like a man's on her head — for that's how she dressed." But in a few moments she jumped up, crying out that she felt a snake under her, and snatched off the shawl, and there, sure enough, out of the middle of the flat bush-top appeared the head of an adder, flicking out its tongue. The dog, too, saw it, dashed at the bush, forcing his muzzle and head into the middle of it, seized the serpent by its body and plucked it out and threw it from him, only to follow it up and kill it in the usual way. Rough was a large, shaggy, grey-blue bobtail bitch EARLY MEMORIES 69 with a white collar. She was a clever, good all-round dog, but had originally been trained for the road, and one of the shepherd's stories about her relates to her intelligence in her own special line — the driving of sheep. One day he and his smaller brother were in charge of the flock on the down, and were on the side where it dips down to the turnpike-road about a mile and a half SHEPHERD AHD FLOCK from the village, when a large flock, driven by two men and two dogs, came by. They were going to the Britford sheep-fair and were behind time; Isaac had started at daylight that morning with sheep for the same fair, and that was the reason of the boys being with the flock. As the flock on the down was feeding quietly the boys determined to go to the road to watch the sheep and men pass, and arriving at the roadside they saw that the dogs were too tired to work and the men were getting on with great difficulty. One of them, looking intently at 70 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE Rough, asked if she would work. "Oh, yes, she'll work," said the boy proudly, and calling Rough he pointed to the flock moving very slowly along the road and over the turf on either side of it. Rough knew what was wanted; she had been looking on and had taken the situation in with her professional eye; away she dashed, and running up and down, first on one side then on the other, quickly put the whole flock, numbering 800 into the road and gave them a good start. "Why, she be a road dog!" exclaimed the drover de- lightedly. "She's better for me on the road than for you on the down; I'll buy her of you." "No, I mustn't sell her," said Caleb. "Look here, boy," said the other, "I'll give 'ee a sovran and this young dog, an' he'll be a good one with a little more training." "No, I mustn't," said Caleb, distressed at the other's persistence. "Well, will you come a little way on the road with us?" asked the drover. This the boys agreed to and went on for about a quar- ter of a mile, when all at once the Salisbury coach appeared on the road, coming to meet them. This new trouble was pointed out to Rough, and at once when her little master had given the order she dashed barking into the midst of the mass of sheep and drove them furiously to the side from end to end of the extended flock, making a clear passage for the coach, which was not delayed a minute. And no sooner was the coach gone than the sheep were put back into the road. Then the drover pulled out his sovereign once more and tried to make the boy take it. EARLY MEMORIES 71 "I mustn't," he repeated, almost in tears. "What would father say?" "Say! He won't say nothing. He'll think you've done well." But Caleb thought that perhaps his father would say something, and when he remembered certain whippings he had experienced in the past he had an uncomfortable sensation about his back. "No, I mustn't," was all he could say, and then the drovers with a laugh went on with their sheep. When Isaac came home and the adventure was told to him he laughed and said that he meant to sell Rough some day. He used to say this occasionally to tease his wife because of the dog's intense devotion to her ; and she, being without a sense of humour and half thinking that he meant it, would get up out of her seat and sol- emnly declare that if he ever sold Rough she would never again go out to the down to see what the boys were up to. One day she visited the boys when they had the flock near the turnpike, and seating herself on the turf a few yards from the road got out her work and began sewing. Presently they spied a big, singular-looking man coming at a swinging pace along the road. He was in shirt- sleeves, barefooted, and wore a straw hat without a rim. Rough eyed the strange being's approach with suspicion, and going to her mistress placed herself at her side. The man came up and sat down at a distance of three or four yards from the group, and Rough, looking dangerous, started up and put her forepaws on her mistress's lap and began uttering a low growl. "Will that dog bite, missus?" said the man. 72 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE "Maybe he will," said she. "I won't answer for he if you come any nearer." The two boys had been occupied cutting a faggot from a furze-bush with a bill-hook, and now held a whispered consultation as to what they would do if the man tried to "hurt mother," and agreed that as soon as Rough had got her teeth in his leg they would attack him about the head with the bill-hook. They were not required to go into action; the stranger could not long endure Rough's savage aspect, and very soon he got up and resumed his travels. The shepherd remembered another curious incident in Rough's career. At one time when she had a litter of pups at home she was yet compelled to be a great part of the day with the flock of ewes as they could not do without her. The boys just then were bringing up a motherless lamb by hand and they would put it with the sheep, and to feed it during the day were obliged to catch a ewe with milk. The lamb trotted at Caleb's heels like a dog, and one day when it was hungry and crying to be fed, when Rough happened to be sitting on her haunches close by, it occurred to him that Rough's milk might serve as well as a sheep's. The lamb was put to her and took very kindly to its canine foster-mother, wriggling its tail and pushing vigorously with its nose. Rough submitted patiently to the trial, and the result was that the lamb adopted the sheep-dog as its mother and sucked her milk several times every day, to the great admiration of all who witnessed it. O ' n ^^§* h v ^•■OCV 8AKP0RP' »» M*BriK •» i»c IH/UBDCR. CHAPTER VI Shepherd Isaac Bawcombe A noble shepherd — A fighting village blacksmith — Old Joe the collier — A story of his strength — Donkeys poisoned by yew — The shepherd without his sheep — How the shepherd killed a deer To me the most interesting of Caleb's old memories were those relating to his father, partly on account of the man's fine character, and partly because they went so far back, beginning in the early years of the last century. Altogether he must have been a very fine specimen of a man, both physically and morally. In Caleb's mind he was undoubtedly the first among men morally, but there were two other men supposed to be his equals in bodily strength, one a native of the village, the other a periodical visitor. The first was Jarvis the blacksmith, a man of an immense chest and big arms, one of Isaac's greatest friends, and very good-tempered except when 73 74 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE in his cups, for he did occasionally get drunk and then he quarrelled with anyone and everyone. One afternoon he had made himself quite tipsy at the inn, and when going home, swaying about and walking all over that road, he all at once caught sight of the big shepherd coming soberly on behind. No sooner did he see him than it occurred to his wild and muddled mind that he had a quarrel with this very man, Shepherd Isaac, a quarrel of so pressing a nature that there was nothing to do but to fight it out there and then. He planted himself before the shepherd and challenged him to fight. Isaac smiled and said nothing. "I'll fight thee about this," he repeated, and began tugging at his coat, and after getting it off again made up to Isaac, who still smiled and said no word. Then he pulled his waistcoat off, and finally his shirt, and with nothing but his boots and breeches on once more squared up to Isaac and threw himself into his best fighting atti- tude. "I doan't want to fight thee," said Isaac at length, "but I be thinking 'twould be best to take thee home." And suddenly dashing in he seized Jarvis round the waist with one arm, grasped him around the legs with the other, and flung the big man across his shoulder, and carried him off, struggling and shouting, to his cottage. There at the door, pale and distressed, stood the poor wife waiting for her lord, when Isaac arrived, and going straight in dropped the smith down on his own floor, and with the remark, "Here be your man," walked off to his cottage and his tea. The other powerful man was Old Joe the collier, who flourished and was known in every village in the Salis- SHEPHERD ISAAC BAWCOMBE 75 bury Plain district during the first thirty-five years of the last century. I first heard of this once famous man from Caleb, whose boyish imagination had been affected by his gigantic figure, mighty voice, and his wandering life over all that wide world of Salisbury Plain. After- wards when I became acquainted with a good many old men, aged from 75 to 90 and upwards, I found that Old Joe's memory is still green in a good many villages of the M«' ROLLESTOWI •« iALlSfcl'RY PLAIN district, from the upper waters of the Avon to the borders of Dorset. But it is only these ancients who knew him that keep it green; by and by when they are gone Old Joe and his neddies will be remembered no more. In those days — down to about 1840 — it was customary to burn peat in the cottages, the first cost of which was about four and sixpence the wagon-load — as much as I should require to keep me warm for a month in winter ; but the cost of its conveyance to the villages of the Plain was about five to six shillings per load, as it came from a considerable distance, mostly from the New Forest. How the labourers at that time, when they were paid 76 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE seven or eight shillings a week, could afford to buy fuel at such prices to bake their rye bread and to keep the frost out of their bones is a marvel to us. Isaac was a good deal better off than most of the villagers in this respect, as his master — for he never had but one — allowed him the use of a wagon and the driver's services for the conveyance of one load of peat each year. The wagon- load of peat and another of faggots lasted him the year with the furze obtained from his "liberty" on the down. Coal at that time was only used by the blacksmiths in the villages, and was conveyed in sacks on ponies or donkeys, and of those who were engaged in this business the best known was Old Joe. He appeared periodically in the villages with his eight donkeys, or neddies as he called them, with jingling bells on their headstalls and their burdens of two sacks of small coal on each. In stature he was a giant of about six feet three, very broad-chested, and invariably wore a broad-brimmed hat, a slate-coloured smock-frock, and blue worsted stockings to his knees. He walked behind the donkeys, a very long staff in his hand, shouting at them from time to time, and occasionally swinging his long staff and bringing it down on the back of a donkey who was not keeping up the pace. In this way he wandered from village to village from end to end of the Plain, getting rid of his small coal and load- ing his animals with scrap iron which the blacksmiths would keep for him, and as he continued his rounds for nearly forty years he was a familiar figure to every inhabitant throughout the district. There are some stories still told of his great strength, one of which is worth giving. He was a man of iron con- stitution and gave himself a hard life, and he was hard SHEPHERD ISAAC BAWCOMBE 11 on his neddies, but he had to feed them well, and this he often contrived to do at some one else's expense. One night at a village on the Wylye it was discovered that he had put his eight donkeys in a meadow in which the grass was just ripe for mowing. The enraged farmer took them to the village pound and locked them up, but in the morning the donkeys and Joe with them had vanished and the whole village wondered how he had done it. The stone wall of the pound was four feet and a half high and the iron gate was locked, yet he had lifted the don- keys up and put them over and had loaded them and gone before anyone was up. Once Joe met with a very great misfortune. He arrived late at a village, and finding there was good feed in the churchyard and that everybody was in bed, he put his donkeys in and stretched himself out among the grave- stones to sleep. He had no nerves and no imagination; and was tired, and slept very soundly until it was light and time to put his neddies out before any person came by and discovered that he had been making free with the rector's grass. Glancing round he could see no donkeys, and only when he stood up he found they had not made their escape but were there all about him, lying among the gravestones, stone dead every one! He had for- gotten that a churchyard was a dangerous place to put hungry animals in. They had browsed on the luxuriant yew that grew there, and this was the result. In time he recovered from his loss and replaced his dead neddies with others, and continued for many years longer on his rounds. To return to Isaac Bawcombe. He was born, we have seen, in 1800, and began following a flock as a boy and 78 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE continued as shepherd on the same farm for a period of fifty-five years. The care of sheep was the one all- absorbing occupation of his life, and how much it was to him appears in this anecdote of his state of mind when he was deprived of it for a time. The flock was sold and Isaac was left without sheep, and with little to do except to wait from Michaelmas to Candlemas, when there would be sheep again at the farm. It was a long time to Isaac, and he found his enforced holiday so tedious that he made himself a nuisance to his wife in the house. Forty times a day he would throw off his hat and sit down, resolved to be happy at his own fireside, but after a few minutes the desire to be up and doing would return, and up he would get and out he would go again. One dark cloudy evening a man from the farm put his head in at the door. "Isaac," he said, "There be sheep for 'ee up 't the farm — two hundred ewes and a hundred more to come in dree days. Master, he sent I to say you be wanted." And away the man went. Isaac jumped up and hurried forth without taking his crook from the corner and actually without putting on his hat! His wife called out after him, and getting no response sent the boy with his hat to overtake him. But the little fellow soon returned with the hat — he could not overtake his father! He was away three or four hours at the farm, then returned, his hair very wet, his face beaming, and sat down with a great sigh of pleasure. "Two hundred ewes," he said, "and a hundred more to come — what d'y°u think of that?" "Well, Isaac," said she, "I hope thee'll be happy now and let I alone." SHEPHERD ISAAC BAWCOMBE 79 After all that had been told to me about the elder Bawcombe's life and character, it came somewhat as a shock to learn that at one period during his early man- hood he had indulged in one form of poaching — a sport which had a marvellous fascination for the people of England in former times, but was pretty well extinguished during the first quarter of the last century. Deer he had taken ; and the whole tale of the deer-stealing, which was a common offence in that part of Wiltshire down to about 1834, sounds strange at the present day. Large herds of deer were kept at that time at an estate a few miles from Winterbourne Bishop, and it often happened that many of the animals broke bounds and roamed singly and in small bands over the hills. When deer were observed in the open, certain of the villagers would settle on some plan of action; watchers would be sent out not only to keep an eye on the deer but on the 80 r A SHEPHERD'S LIFE keepers too. Much depended on the state of the weather and the moon, as some light was necessary; then, when the conditions were favourable and the keepers had been watched to their cottages, the gang would go out for a night's hunting. But it was a dangerous sport, as the keepers also knew that deer were out of bounds, and they would form some counter-plan, and one peculiarly nasty plan they had was to go out about three of four o'clock in the morning and secrete themselves somewhere close to the village to intercept the poachers on their return. Bawcombe, who never in his life associated with the village idlers and frequenters of the ale-house, had no connexion with these men. His expeditions were made alone on some dark, unpromising night, when the regular poachers were in bed and asleep. He would steal away after bedtime, or would go out ostensibly to look after the sheep, and, if fortunate, would return in the small hours with a deer on his back. Then, helped by his mother, with whom he lived ( for this was when he was a young unmarried man, about 1820), he would quickly skin and cut up the carcass, stow the meat away in some secret place, and bury the head, hide, and offal deep in the earth ; and when morning came it would find Isaac out following his flock as usual, with no trace of guilt or fatigue in his rosy cheeks and clear, honest eyes. This was a very astonishing story to hear from Caleb, but to suspect him of inventing or of exaggerating was impossible to anyone who knew him. And we have seen that Isaac Bawcombe was an exceptional man — physically a kind of Alexander Selkirk of the Wiltshire Downs. SHEPHERD ISAAC BAWCOMBE 81 And he, moreover, had a dog to help him — one as superior in speed and strength to the ordinary sheep-dog as he him- self was to the ruck of his fellow-men. It was only after much questioning on my part that Caleb brought himself to tell me of these ancient adventures, and finally to give a detailed account of how his father came to take his first deer. It was in the depth of winter — bitterly cold, with a strong north wind blowing on the snow-covered downs — when one evening Isaac caught sight of two deer out on his sheep-walk. In that part of Wiltshire there is a famous monument of antiquity, a vast mound-like wall, with a deep depression or fosse running at its side. Now it happened that on the highest part of the down, where the wall or mound was most exposed to the blast, the snow had been blown clean off the top, and the deer were feed- ing here on the short turf, keeping to the ridge, so that, outlined against the sky, they had become visible to Isaac at a great distance. He saw and pondered. These deer, just now, while out of bonds, were no man's property, and it would be no sin to kill and eat one — if he could catch it! — and it was a season of bitter want. For many many days he had eaten his barley bread, and on some days barley-flour dumplings, and had been content with this poor fare ; but now the sight of these animals made him crave for meat with an intolerable craving, and he determined to do some- thing to satisfy it. He went home and had his poor supper, and when it was dark set forth again with his dog. He found the deer still feeding on the mound. Stealing softly along among the furze-bushes, he got the black line of the 82 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE mound against the starry sky, and by and by, as he moved along, the black figures of the deer, with their heads down, came into view. He then doubled back and, proceeding some distance, got down into the fosse and stole forward to them again under the wall. His idea was that on taking alarm they would immediately make for the forest which was their home, and would probably pass near him. They did not hear him until he was within sixty yards, and then bounded down from the wall, over the dyke, and away, but in almost opposite directions — one alone mak- ing for the forest ; and on this one the dog was set. Out he shot like an arrow from the bow, and after him ran Isaac "as he had never runned afore in all his life". For a short space deer and dog in hot pursuit were visible on the snow, then the darkness swallowed them up as they rushed down the slope; but in less than half a minute a sound came back to Isaac, flying, too, down the incline — the long, wailing cry of a deer in distress. The dog had seized his quarry by one of the front legs, a little above the hoof, and held it fast, and they were struggling on the snow when Isaac came up and flung himself upon his victim, then thrust his knife through its windpipe "to stop its noise". Having killed it, he threw it on his back and went home, not by the turnpike, nor by any road or path, but over fields and through copses until he got to the back of his mother's cottage. There was no door on that side, but there was a window, and when he had rapped at it and his mother opened it, without speaking a word he thrust the dead deer through, then made his way round to the front. That was how he killed his first deer. How the others were taken I do not know; I wish I did, since this one SHEPHERD ISAAC BAWCOMBE 83 exploit of a Wiltshire shepherd has more interest for me than I find in fifty narratives of elephants slaughtered wholesale with explosive bullets, written for the delight and astonishment of the reading public by our most glorious Nimrods. CHAPTER VII The Deer-Stealers Deer-stealing on Salisbury Plain — The head-keeper Har- butt — Strange story of a baby — Found as a surname — John Barter, the village carpenter — How the keeper was fooled — A poaching attack planned — The fight — Head-keeper and carpenter — The car- penter hides his son — The arrest — Barter's sons for- sake the village There were other memories of deer-taking handed down to Caleb by his parents, and the one best worth preserving relates to the head-keeper of the preserves, or chase, and to a great fight in which he was engaged with two brothers of the girl who was afterwards to be Isaac's wife. Here it may be necessary to explain that formerly the owner of Cranbourne Chase, at that time Lord Rivers, claimed the deer and the right to preserve and hunt over a considerable extent of country outside of his own lands. 84 THE DEER-STEALERS 85 On the Wiltshire side these rights extended from Cran- bourne Chase over the South Wiltshire Downs to Salis- bury, and the whole territory, about thirty miles broad, was divided into beats or walks, six or eight in number, each beat provided with a keeper's lodge. This state of things continued to the year 1834, when the chase was "disfranchised" by Act of Parliament. The incident I am going to relate occurred about 1815 or perhaps two or three years later. The border of one of the deer walks was at a spot known as Three Downs Place, two miles and a half from Winterbourne Bishop. Here in a hollow of the downs there was an extensive wood, and just within the wood a large stone house, said to be centuries old but long pulled down, called Rollston House, in which the head-keeper lived with two under- keepers. He had a wife but no children, and was a middle-aged, thick-set, very dark man, powerful and vigilant, a "tarrable" hater and persecutor of poachers, feared and hated by them in turn, and his name was Harbutt. It happened that one morning, when he had unbarred the front door to go out, he found a great difficulty in opening it, caused by a heavy object having been fastened to the door-handle. It proved to be a basket or box, in which a well-nourished, nice-looking boy baby was sleep- ing, well wrapped up and covered with a cloth. On the cloth a scrap of paper was pinned with the following lines written on it: Take me in and treat me well, For in this house my father dwell. Harbutt read the lines and didn't even smile at the gram- mar; on the contrary, he appeared very much upset, and 86 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE was still standing holding the paper, staring stupidly at it, when his wife came on the scene. "What be this?" she exclaimed, and looked first at the paper, then at him, then at the rosy child fast asleep in its cradle; and in- stantly, with a great cry, she fell on it and snatched it up in her arms, and holding it clasped to her bosom, began lavishing caresses and endearing expressions on it, tears of rapture in her eyes! Not one word of inquiry or bitter, jealous reproach — all that part of her was swal- lowed up and annihilated in the joy of a woman who had been denied a child of her own to love and nourish and worship. And now one had come to her and it mattered little how. Two or three days later the infant was baptized at the village church with the quaint name of Moses Found. Caleb was a little surprised at my thinking it a laugh- able name. It was to his mind a singularly appropriate one ; he assured me it was not the only case he knew of THE DEER-STEALERS 87 in which the surname Found had been bestowed on a child of unknown parentage, and he told me the story of one of the Founds who had gone to Salisbury as a boy and worked and saved and eventually become quite a prosper- ous and important person. There was really nothing funny in it. The story of Moses Found had been told him by his old mother ; she, he remarked significantly, had good cause to remember it. She was herself a native of the village, born two or three years later than the mysterious Moses ; her father, John Barter by name, was a carpenter and lived in an old, thatched house which still exists and is very familiar to me. He had five sons; then, after an interval of some years, a daughter was born, who in due time was to be Isaac's wife. When she was a little girl her brothers were all grown up or on the verge of man- hood, and Moses, too, was a young man — "the spit of his father," people said, meaning the head-keeper — and he was now one of Harbutt's under-keepers. About this time some of the more ardent spirits in the village, not satisfied with an occasional hunt when a deer broke out and roamed over the downs, took to poaching them in the woods. One night, a hunt having been ar- ranged, one of the most daring of the men secreted him- self close to the keeper's house, and having watched the keepers go in and the light put out, he actually succeeded in fastening up the doors from the outside with screws and pieces of wood without creating an alarm. He then met his confederates at an agreed spot and the hunting began, during which one deer was chased to the house and actually pulled down and killed on the lawn. Meanwhile the inmates were in a state of great excite- 88 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE ment; the under-keepers feared that a force it would be dangerous to oppose had taken possession of the woods, while Harbutt raved and roared like a maddened wild beast in a cage, and put forth all his strength to pull the doors open. Finally he smashed a window and leaped out, gun in hand, and calling the others to follow rushed into the wood. But he was too late ; the hunt was over and the poachers had made good their escape, taking the carcasses of two or three deer they had succeeded in killing. The keeper was not to be fooled in the same way a second time, and before very long he had his revenge. A fresh raid was planned, and on this occasion two of the five brothers were in it, and there were four more, the blacksmith of Winterbourne Bishop, their best man, two famous shearers, father and son, from a neighbouring village, and a young farm labourer. They knew very well that with the head-keeper in his present frame of mind it was a risky affair, and they made a solemn compact that if caught they would stand by one another to the end. And caught they were, and on this occasion the keepers were four. At the very beginning the blacksmith, their ablest man and virtual leader, was knocked down senseless with a blow on his head with the butt end of a gun. Immediately on seeing this the two famous shearers took to their heels and the young labourer followed their example. The brothers were left but refused to be taken, although Harbutt roared at them in his bull's voice that he would shoot them unless they surrendered. They made light of his threats and fought against the four, and eventually were separated. By and by the younger of the two was THE DEER-STEALERS 89 driven into a brambly thicket where his opponents im- agined that it would be impossible for him to escape. But he was a youth of indomitable spirit, strong and agile as a wild cat ; and returning blow for blow he succeeded in tearing himself from them, then after a running fight through the darkest part of the wood for a distance of two or three hundred yards they at length lost him or gave him up and went back to assist Harbutt and Moses against the other man. Left to himself he got out of the wood and made his way back to the village. It was long past midnight when he turned up at his father's cottage, a pitiable object covered with mud and blood, hatless, his clothes torn to shreds, his face and whole body covered with bruises and bleeding wounds. The old man was in a great state of distress about his other son, and early in the morning went to examine the ground where the fight had been. It was only too easily found; the sod was trampled down and branches broken as though a score of men had been engaged. Then he found his eldest son's cap, and a little farther away a sleeve of his coat; shreds and rags were numerous on the bramble bushes, and by and by he came on a pool of blood. "They've kill 'n!" he cried in despair, "they've killed my poor boy !" and straight to Rollston House he went to inquire, and was met by Harbutt himself, who came out limping, one boot on, the other foot bound up with rags, one arm in a sling and a cloth tied round his head. He was told that his son was alive and safe indoors and that he would be taken to Salisbury later in the day. "His clothes be all torn to pieces," added the keeper. "You can just go home at once and git him others before the constable comes to take him." 90 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE "You've tored them to pieces yourself and you can git him others," retorted the old man in a rage. "Very well," said the keeper. "But bide a moment — I've something more to say to you. When your son comes out of jail in a year or so you tell him from me that if he'll just step up this way I'll give him five shillings and as much beer as he likes to drink. I never see'd a better fighter!" It was a great compliment to his son, but the old man was troubled in his mind. "What dost mean, keeper, by a year or so ?" he asked. "When I said that," returned the other with a grin, "I was just thinking what 'twould be he deserves to git." "And you'd agot your deserts, by God," cried the angry father, "if that boy of mine hadn't a-been left alone to fight ye!" Harbutt regarded him with a smile of gratified malice. "You can go home now," he said. "If you'd see your son you'll find 'n in Salisbury jail. Maybe you'll be wanting new locks on your doors; you can git they in Salisbury too — you've no blacksmith in your village now. No, your boy weren't alone and you know that damned well." *"I know naught about that," he returned, and started to walk home with a heavy heart. Until now he had been clinging to the hope that the other son had not been identified in the dark wood. And now what could he do to save one of the two from hateful imprisonment? The boy was not in a fit condition to make his escape ; he could hardly get across the room and could not sit or lie down without groaning. He could only try to hide him in the cottage and pray that they would not discover him. The cottage was in the middle of the village and had but little THE DEER-STEALERS 91 ground to it, but there was a small, boarded-up cavity or cell at one end of an attic, and it might be possible to save him by putting him in there. Here, then, in a bed placed for him on the floor, his bruised son was obliged to lie, in the close, dark hole, for some days. One day, about a week later, when he was recovering from his hurts, he crawled out of his box and climbed down the narrow stairs to the ground floor to see the light and breathe a better air for a short time, and while down he was tempted to take a peep at the street through the small, latticed window. But he quickly withdrew his head and by and by said to his father, "I'm feared Moses has seen me. Just now when I was at the window he came by and looked up and see'd me with my head all tied up, and I'm feared he knew 'twas I." After that they could only wait in fear and trembling, and on the next day quite early there came a loud rap at the door, and on its»being opened by the old man the con- stable and two keepers appeared standing before him. "I've come to take your son," said the constable. The old man stepped back without a word and took down his gun from its place on the wall, then spoke: "If you've got a search-warrant you may come in; if you haven't got'n I'll blow the brains out of the first man that puts a foot inside my door". They hesitated a few moments then silently withdrew. After consulting together the constable went off to the nearest magistrate, leaving the two keepers to keep watch on the house: Moses Found was one of them. Later in the day the constable returned armed with a warrant and was thereupon admitted, with the result that the poor youth was soon discovered in his hiding-place and carried 92 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE off. And that was the last he saw of his home, his young sister crying bitterly and his old father white and trembling with grief and impotent rage. A month or two later the two brothers were tried and sentenced each to six months' imprisonment. They never came home. On their release they went to Woolwich, where men were wanted and the pay was good. And by and by the accounts they sent home induced first one then the other brother to go and join them, and the poor old father, who had been very proud of his five sons, was left alone with his young daughter — Isaac's destined wife. : *33«?S*Z* Gori*i.DoT* a> -oa Bourne CHAPTER VIII Shepherds and Poaching General remarks on poaching — Farmer, shepherd, and dog — A sheep-dog that would not hunt — Taking a partridge from a hawk — Old Gaarge and Young Gaarge — Partridge-poaching — The shepherd robbed of his rabbits — Wisdom of Shepherd Gathergood — Hare-trapping on the down — Hare-taking with a crook When Caleb was at length free from his father's tutelage, and as an under-shepherd practically independent, he did not follow Isaac's strict example with regard to wild animals, good for the pot, which came by chance in his way ; he even allowed himself to go a little out of his way on occasion to get them. We know that about this matter the law of the land does not square with the moral law as it is written in the heart of the peasant. A wounded partridge or other bird which he finds in his walks abroad or which comes by 93 94 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE chance to him is his by a natural right, and he will take and eat or dispose of it without scruple. With rabbits he is very free — he doesn't wait to find a distressed one with a stoat on its track — stoats are not sufficiently abun- dant ; and a hare, too, may be picked up at any moment ; only in this case he must be very sure that no one is looking. Knowing the law, and being perhaps a respect- able, religious person, he is anxious to abstain from all appearance of evil. This taking a hare or rabbit or wounded partridge is in his mind a very different thing from systematic poaching; but he is aware that to the classes above him it is not so — the law has made them one. It is a hard, arbitrary, unnatural law, made by and for them, his betters, and outwardly he must conform to it. Thus you will find the best of men among the shepherds and labourers freely helping themselves to any wild creature that falls in their way, yet sharing the game- preserver's hatred of the real poacher. The village poacher as a rule is an idle, dissolute fellow, and the sober, industrious, righteous shepherd or ploughman or carter does not like to be put on a level with such a person. But there is no escape from the hard and fast rule in such things, and however open and truthful he may be in every- thing else, in this one matter he is obliged to practise a certain amount of deception. Here is a case to serve as an illustration ; I have only just heard it, after putting to- gether the material I had collected for this chapter, in conversation with an old shepherd friend of mine. He is a fine old man who has followed a flock these fifty years, and will, I have no doubt, carry his crook for yet another ten. Not only is he a "good shepherd," in the sense in which Caleb uses that phrase, with a more SHEPHERDS AND POACHING 95 intimate knowledge of sheep and all the ailments they are subject to than I have found in any other, but he is also a truly religious man, one that "walks with God". He told me this story of a sheep-dog he owned when head- shepherd on a large farm on the Dorsetshire border with a master whose chief delight in life was in coursing hares. They abounded on his land, and he naturally wanted the men employed on the farm to regard them as sacred ani- mals. One day he came out to the shepherd to complain that some one had seen his dog hunting a hare. The shepherd indignantly asked who had said such a thing. "Never mind about that," said the farmer. "Is it true?" "It is a lie," said the shepherd. "My dog never hunts a hare or anything else. 'Tis my belief the one that said that has got a dog himself that hunts the hares and he wants to put the blame on some one else." "May be so," said the farmer, unconvinced. Just then a hare made its appearance, coming across the field directly towards them, and either because they never moved or it did not smell them it came on and on, stopping at intervals to sit for a minute or so on its haunches, then on again until it was within forty yards of where they were standing. The farmer watched it approach and at the same time kept an eye on the dog sitting at their feet and watching the hare too, very steadily. "Now, shep- herd," said the farmer, "don't you say one word to the dog and I'll see for myself." Not a word did he say, and the hare came and sat for some seconds near them, then limped away out of sight, and the dog made not the slightest movement, "That's all right," said the farmer, 96 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE well pleased. "I know now 'twas a lie I heard about your dog. I've seen for myself and I'll just keep a sharp eye on the man that told me." My comment on this story was that the farmer had dis- played an almost incredible ignorance of a sheep-dog — and a shepherd. "How would it have been if you had said, 'Catch him, Bob,' or whatever his name was?" I asked. He looked at me with a twinkle in his eye and replied, "I do b'lieve he'd ha' got 'n, but he'd never move till I told 'n'\ It comes to this: the shepherd refuses to believe thai by taking a hare he is robbing any man of his property, and if he is obliged to tell a lie to save himself from the con- sequences he does not consider that it is a lie. When he understood that I was on his side in this question, he told me about a good sheep-dog he once possessed which he had to get rid of because he would not take a hare! A dog when broken is made to distinguish between the things he must and must not do. He is "feelingly per- suaded" by kind words and caresses in one case and hard words and hard blows in the other. He learns that if he hunts hares and rabbits it will be very bad for him, and in due time, after some suffering, he is able to overcome this strongest instinct of a dog. He acquires an artificial conscience. Then, when his education is finished, he must be made to understand that it is not quite finished after all — that he must partially unlearn one of the saddest of the lessons instilled in him. He must hunt a hare or rabbit when told by his master to do so. It is a compact between man and dog. Thus, they have got a law which SHEPHERDS AND POACHING 97 the dog has sworn to obey; but the man who made it is above the law and can when he thinks proper command his servant to break it. The dog, as a rule, takes it all in very readily and often allows himself more liberty than his master gives him; the most highly accomplished ani- mal is one that, like my shepherd's dog in the former in- stance, will not stir till he is told. In the other case the poor brute could not rise to the position ; it was too com- plex for him, and when ordered to catch a rabbit he could only put his tail between his legs and look in a puzzled way at his master. "Why do you tell me to do a thing for which I shall be thrashed ?" It was only after Caleb had known me some time, when we were fast friends, that he talked with perfect freedom of these things and told me of his own small, illicit takings without excuse or explanation. One day he saw a sparrowhawk dash down upon a running partridge and struggle with it on the ground. It was in a grass field, divided from the one he was walking in by a large, unkept hedge without a gap in it to let him through. Presently the hawk rose up with the partridge still violently struggling in its talons, and flew over the hedge to Caleb's side, but was no sooner over than it came down again and the struggle went on once more on the ground. On Caleb running to the spot the hawk flew off, leaving his prey behind. He had grasped it in its sides, driving his sharp claws well in, and the partridge, though unable to fly, was still alive. The shepherd killed it and put it in his pocket, and enjoyed it very much when he came to eat it. From this case, a most innocent form of poaching, he went on to relate how he had once been able to deprive a 98 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE cunning poacher and a bad man, a human sparrowhawk, of his quarry. There were two persons in the village, father and son, he very heartily detested, known respectively as Old Gaarge and Young Gaarge, inveterate poachers both. They were worse than the real reprobate who haunted the j . __ . . ... .■, SHEPHERDS *ND THEIR DOQS public-house and did no work and was not ashamed of his evil ways, for these two were hypocrites and were out- wardly sober, righteous men, who kept themselves a little apart from their neighbours and were very severe in their condemnation of other people's faults. One Sunday morning Caleb was on his way to his ewes folded at a distance from the village, walking by a hedge- row at the foot of the down, when he heard a shot fired some way ahead, and after a minute or two a second shot. SHEPHERDS [AND POACHING 99 This greatly excited his curiosity and caused him to keep a sharp look-out in the direction the sounds had come from, and by and by he caught sight of a man walking towards him. It was Old Gaarge in his long smock-frock, proceeding in a leisurely way towards the village, but catching sight of the shepherd he turned aside through a gap in the hedge and went off in another direction to avoid meeting him. No doubt, thought Caleb, he has got his gun in two pieces hidden under his smock. He went on until he came to a small field of oats which had grown badly and had only been half reaped, and here he dis- covered that Old Gaarge had been lying in hiding to shoot at the partridges that came to feed. He had been screened from the sight of the birds by a couple of hurdles and some straw, and there were feathers of the birds he had shot scattered about. He had finished his Sunday morn- ing's sport and was going back, a little too late on this occasion as it turned out. Caleb went on to his flock, but before getting to it his dog discovered a dead partridge in the hedge ; it had flown that far and then dropped, and there was fresh blood on its feathers. He put it in his pocket and carried it about most of the day while with his sheep on the down. Late in the afternoon he spied two magpies pecking at some- thing out in the middle of a field and went to see what they had found. It was a second partridge which Old Gaarge had shot in the morning and had lost, the bird having flown to some ' distance before dropping. The magpies had probably found it already dead, as it was cold ; they had begun tearing the skin at the neck and had opened it down to the breast-bone. Caleb took this bird, too, and by and by, sitting down to examine it, he thought 100 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE he would try to mend the torn skin with the needle and thread he always carried inside his cap. He succeeded in stitching it neatly up, and putting back the feathers in their place the rent was quite concealed. That evening he took the two birds to a man in the village who made a liveli- hood by collecting bones, rags, and things of that kind; the man took the birds in his hand, held them up, felt their weight, examined them carefully, and pronounced them to be two good, fat birds, and agreed to pay two shillings for them. Such a man may be found in most villages; he calls himself a "general dealer," and keeps a trap and pony — in some cases he keeps the ale-house — and is a useful member of the small, rural community — a sort of human carrion-crow. The two shillings were very welcome, but more than the money was the pleasing thought that he had got the birds shot by the hypocritical old poacher for his own profit. Caleb had good cause to hate him. He, Caleb, was one of the shepherds who had his master's permission to take rabbits on the land, and having found his snares broken on many occasions he came to the conclusion that they were visited in the night time by some very cunning per- son who kept a watch on his movements. One evening he set five snares in a turnip field and went just before day- light next morning in a dense fog to visit them. Every one was broken ! He had just started on his way back, feeling angry and much puzzled at such a thing, when the fog at once passed away and revealed the figures of two men walking hurriedly off over the down. They were at a considerable distance, but the light was now strong enough to enable him to identify Old Gaarge and Young SHEPHERDS AND POACHING 10t Gaarge. In a few moments they vanished over the brow. Caleb was mad at being deprived of his rabbits in this mean way, but pleased at the same time in having discov- ered who the culprits were; but what to do about it he did not know. On the following day he was with his flock on the down and found himself near another shepherd, also with his sheep, one he knew very well, a quiet but knowing old man named Joseph Gathergood. He was known to be a skilful rabbit-catcher, and Caleb thought he would go over to him and tell him about how he was being tricked by the two Gaarges and ask him what to do in the matter. The old man was very friendly and at once told him what to do. "Don't you set no more snares by the hedges and in the turmots," he said. "Set them out on the open down where no one would go after rabbits and they'll not find the snares." And this was how it had to be done. First he was to scrape the ground with the heel of his boot until the fresh earth could be seen through the broken turf; then he was to sprinkle a little rabbit scent on the scraped spot, and plant his snare. The scent and smell of the fresh earth combined would draw the rabbits to the spot ; they would go there to scratch and would inevitably get caught if the snare was properly placed. Caleb tried this plan with one snare, and on the follow- ing morning found that he had a rabbit. He set it again that evening, then again, until he had caught five rabbits on five consecutive nights, all with the same snare. That convinced him that he had been taught a valuable lesson and that old Gathergood was a very wise man about rabbits ; and he was very happy to think that he had got the better of his two sneaking enemies. 102 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE But Shepherd Gathergood was just as wise about hares, and, as in the other case, he took them out on the down in the most open places. His success was due to his knowl- edge of the hare's taste for blackthorn twigs. He would take a good, strong blackthorn stem or shoot with twigs on it, and stick it firmly down in the middle of a large grass field or on the open down, and place the steel trap tied to the stick at a distance of a foot or so from it, the trap concealed under grass or moss and dead leaves. The smell of the blackthorn would draw the hare to the spot, and he would move round and round nibbling the twigs until caught. Caleb never tried this plan, but was convinced that Gathergood was right about it. He told me of another shepherd who was clever at taking hares in another way, and who was often chaffed by his acquaintances on account of the extraordinary length of his shepherd's crook. It was like a lance or pole, being twice the usual length. But he had a use for it. This shepherd used to make hares' forms on the downs in all suitable places, forming them so cunningly that no one seeing them by chance would have believed they were the work of human hands. The hares certainly made use of them. When out with his flock he would visit these forms, walking quietly past them at a distance of twenty to thirty feet, his dog following at his heels. On catching sight of a hare crouching in a form he would drop a word, and the dog would instantly stand still and remain fixed and motionless, while the shepherd went on but in a circle so as gradually to approach the form. Meanwhile the hare would keep his eyes fixed on the dog, paying no at- tention to the man, until by and by the long staff would SHEPHERDS AND POACHING 103 be swung round and a blow descend on the poor, silly head from the opposite side, and if the blow was not powerful enough to stun or disable the hare, the dog would have it before it got many yards from the cosy nest prepared for its destruction. CHAPTER IX The Shepherd on Foxes A fox-trapping shepherd — Gamekeepers and foxes — Fox and stoat — A gamekeeper off his guard — Pheasants and foxes — Caleb kills a fox — A fox-hunting sheep- dog — Two varieties of foxes — Rabbits playing with little foxes — How to expel foxes — A playful spirit in the fox — Fox-hunting a danger to sheep Caleb related that his friend Shepherd Gathergood was a great fox-killer and, as with hares, he took them in a way of his own. He said that the fox will always go to a heap of ashes in any open place, and his plan was to place a steel trap concealed among the ashes, made fast to a stick about three feet high, firmly planted in the middle of the heap, with a piece of strong-smelling cheese tied to the top. The two attractions of an ash-heap and the smell of strong cheese was more than any fox could resist. When he caught a fox he killed and buried it on the down 104 THE SHEPHERD ON FOXES 105 and said "nothing to nobody" about it. He killed them to protect himself from their depredations; foxes, like Old Gaarge and his son in Caleb's case, went around at night to rob him of the rabbits he took in his snares. Caleb never blamed him for this; on the contrary, he greatly admired him for his courage, seeing that if it had been found out he would have been a marked man. It was perhaps intelligence or cunning rather than courage ; he did not believe that he would be found out, and he never was; he told Caleb of these things because he was sure of his man. Those who were interested in the hunt never suspected him, and as to gamekeepers, they hardly counted. He was helping them ; no one hates a fox more than they do. The farmer gets compensation for damage, and the hen-wife is paid for her stolen chickens by the hunt. The keeper is required to look after the game, and at the same time to spare his chief enemy, the fox. Indeed, the keeper's state of mind with regard to foxes has always been a source of amusement to me, and by long practice I am able to talk to him on that delicate sub- ject in a way to make him uncomfortable and self-contra- dictory. There are various, quite innocent questions which the student of wild life may put to a keeper about foxes which have a disturbing effect on his brain. How to expel foxes from a covert, for example; and here is another: Is it true that the fox listens for the distressed cries of a rabbit pursued by a stoat and that he will de- prive the stoat of his captive? Perhaps ; Yes ; No, I don't think so, because one hunts by night, the other by day, he will answer, but you see that the question troubles him. One keeper, off his guard, promptly answered, "I've no doubt of it ; I can always bring a fox to me by imitating 106 A SHEPHERD'S LIFE the cry of a rabbit hunted by a stoat." But he did not say what his object was in attracting the fox. I say that the keeper was off his guard in this instance, because the fiction that foxes were preserved on the estate was kept up, though as a fact they were systematically destroyed by the keepers. As the pheasant-breeding craze appears to increase rather than diminish, notwithstanding the disastrous effect it has had in alienating the people from their lords and masters, the conflict of interest be- tween fox-hunter and pheasant-breeder will tend to be- come more and more acute, and the probable end will be that fox-hunting will have to go. A melancholy outlook to those who love the country and old country sports, and who do not regard pheasant-shooting as now followed as sport at all. It is a delusion of the landlords that the country people think most highly of the great pheasant- preserver who has two or three big shoots in a season, during which vast numbers of birds are slaughtered — every bird "costing a guinea," as the saying is. It brings money into the country, he or his apologist tells you, and provides employment for the village poor in October and November, when there is little doing. He does not know the truth of the matter. A certain number of the poorer people of the village are employed as beaters for the big shoots at a shilling a day or so, and occasionally a la- bourer, going to or from his work, finds a pheasant's nest and informs the keeper and receives some slight reward. If he "keeps his eyes open" and shows himself anxious at all times to serve the keeper he will sometimes get a rabbit for his Sunday dinner. This is not a sufficient return for the freedom to walk on the land and in woods, which the villager possessed THE SHEPHERD ON FOXES 107 formerly, even in his worst days of his oppression, a liberty which has now been taken from him. The keeper is there now to prevent him; he was there before, and from of old, but the pheasant was not yet a sacred bird, and it didn't matter that a man walked on the turf or picked up a few fallen sticks in a wood. The keeper is there to tell him to keep to the road and sometimes to ask him, even when he is on the road, what is he looking over the hedge for. He slinks obediently away; he is only a Bos combe