Tom Brown at Rugby. Hughes Thomas

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you could ride round easily on your ponies in an hour. I'm only just come down into the vale, by Blowing Stone Hill, and if I once begin about the vale, what's to stop me? You'll have to hear all about Wantage, the birthplace of Alfred, and Farringdon, which held out so long for Charles I. (the vale was near Oxford, and dreadfully malignant;75 full of Throgmortons, Puseys, and Pyes, and such like, and their brawny retainers). Did you ever read Thomas Ingoldsby's "Legend of Hamilton Tighe"?76 If you haven't, you ought to have. Well, Farringdon is where he lived, before he went to sea; his real name was Hampden Pye, and the Pyes were the great folk at Farringdon. Then there's Pusey. You've heard of the Pusey horn,77 which King Canute gave to the Puseys of that day, and which the gallant old squire, lately gone to his rest (whom Berkshire freeholders78 turned out of last Parliament, to their eternal disgrace, for voting according to his conscience), used to bring out on high days, holidays, and bonfire nights. And the splendid old Cross church at Uffington, the Uffingas town; how the whole country-side teems with Saxon names and memories! And the old moated grange79 at Compton, nestled close under the hill-side, where twenty Marianas80 may have lived, with its bright water-lilies in the moat, and its yew walk "the cloister walk," and its peerless terraced gardens. There they all are, and twenty things besides, for those who care about them, and have eyes. And these are the sort of things you may find, I believe, every one of you, in any common English country neighborhood.

      Will you look for them under your own noses, or will you not? Well, well, I've done what I can to make you, and if you will go gadding over half Europe now every holiday, I can't help it. I was born and bred a west-countryman,81 thank God! a Wessex man, a citizen of the noblest Saxon kingdom of Wessex, a regular "Angular Saxon,"82 the very soul of me "adscriptus glebæ."83 There's nothing like the old country-side for me, and no music like the twang of the real old Saxon tongue, as one gets it fresh from the veritable chaw84 in the White Horse Vale; and I say with "Gaarge Ridler," the old west-country yeoman,

      "Throo aall the waarld owld Gaarge would bwoast,

      Commend me to merry owld England mwoast;

      While vools85 gwoes prating vur and nigh,

      We stwops at whum,86 my dog and I."87

      SQUIRE BROWN AND HIS HOUSEHOLD

      Here at any rate lived and stopped at home Squire Brown, J. P.88 for the county of Berks, in a village near the foot of the White Horse range. And here he dealt out justice and mercy in a rough way, and brought up sons and daughters, and hunted the fox, and grumbled at the badness of the roads and the times. And his wife dealt out stockings, and calico89 shirts, and smock frocks,90 and comforting drinks to the old folks with the "rheumatiz," and good counsel to all; and kept the coal and clothes clubs going, for Yule-tide,91 when the bands of mummers92 came round dressed out in ribbons and colored paper caps, and stamped round the Squire's kitchen, repeating in true sing-song vernacular93 the legend of St. George and his fight, and the ten-pound doctor,94 who plays his part at healing the Saint – a relic, I believe, of the old middle-age mysteries.95 It was the first dramatic representation which greeted the eyes of little Tom, who was brought down into the kitchen by his nurse to witness it, at the mature age of three years. Tom was the eldest child of his parents, and from his earliest babyhood exhibited the family characteristics in great strength. He was a hearty, strong boy from the first, given to fighting with and escaping from his nurse, and fraternizing with all the village boys, with whom he made expeditions all round the neighborhood. And here in the quiet, old-fashioned country village, under the shadow of the everlasting hills, Tom Brown was reared, and never left it till he went first to school when nearly eight years of age, for in those days change of air twice a year was not thought absolutely necessary for the health of all her majesty's lieges.96

      THE OLD BOY ABUSETH MOVING ON

      I have been credibly informed, and am inclined to believe, that the various Boards of Directors of Railway Companies, those gigantic jobbers97 and bribers, while quarrelling about everything else, agreed together some ten years back to buy up the learned profession of medicine, body and soul. To this end they set apart several millions of money, which they continually distribute judiciously among the doctors, stipulating only this one thing, that they shall prescribe change of air to every patient who can pay, or borrow money to pay, a railway fare, and see their prescription carried out. If it be not for this, why is it that none of us can be well at home for a year together? It wasn't so twenty years ago, – not a bit of it. The Browns didn't go out of the county once in five years. A visit to Reading or Abingdon twice a year, at Assizes or Quarter Sessions98 which the Squire made on his horse, with a pair of saddle-bags containing his wardrobe – a stay of a day or two at some country neighbor's – or an expedition to a county ball or the yeomanry review —99 made up the sum of the Brown locomotion in most years. A stray Brown from some distant county dropped in every now and then; or from Oxford, on grave nag, an old don100 contemporary of the Squire; and were looked upon by the Brown household and the villagers with the same sort of feeling with which we now regard a man who has crossed the Rocky Mountains, or launched a boat on the great lake in Central Africa. The White Horse Vale, remember, was traversed by no great road; nothing but country parish roads, and these very bad. Only one coach ran there, and this one only from Wantage to London, so that the western part of the vale was without regular means of moving on, and certainly didn't seem to want them. There was the canal, by the way, which supplied the country-side with coal, and up and down which continually went the long barges with the big black men lounging by the side of the horses along the towing-path, and the women in bright-colored handkerchiefs standing in the sterns steering. Standing, I say, but you could never see whether they were standing or sitting, all but their heads and shoulders being out of sight in the cozy little cabins which occupied some eight feet of the stern and which Tom Brown pictured to himself as the most desirable of residences. His nurse told him that those good-natured-looking women were in the constant habit of enticing children into the barges and taking them up to London and selling them, which Tom wouldn't believe, and which made him resolve as soon as possible to accept the oft-proffered invitation of these sirens101 to "young master," to come in and have a ride. But as yet the nurse was too much for Tom.

      THE OLD BOY APPROVETH MOVING ON

      Yet why should I, after all, abuse the gadabout propensities of my countrymen? We are a vagabond nation now, that's certain, for better, for worse. I am a vagabond; I have been away from home no less than five distinct times in the last year. The Queen sets us the example – we are moving on from top to bottom. Little dirty Jack, who abides in Clement's Inn102 gateway, and blacks my boots for a penny, takes his month's hop-picking103 every year as a matter of course. Why shouldn't he? I am delighted at it. I love vagabonds, only I prefer poor to rich ones; – couriers104 and ladies' maids, imperialsСкачать книгу