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We were anxious to see this unfortunate man, who was yet happy in a loving family. He had gone early in the morning in his donkey-cart to the little market town, fourteen miles away, to get the few necessaries they could afford to buy. Doubtless they would be very few. We had not long to wait, as the white donkey that drew the cart had put on a tremendous spurt at the end, notwithstanding that the four youngsters had climbed in to add to his burden. But what was our surprise to behold in the charioteer a tall, gaunt, grey-faced old man with long white hair and beard! He must have been seventy, that old man with a young wife and four happy bright-eyed little children!

We could understand it better when he finally settled down in his corner in the kitchen and began to relate the events of the day, addressing his poor little wife, now busy darning or patching an old garment, while the children, clustered at his knee, listened as to a fairy tale. Certainly this white-haired man had not grown old in mind; he was keenly interested in all he saw and heard, and he had seen and heard much in the little market town that day. Cattle and pigs and sheep and shepherds and sheepdogs; farmers, shopkeepers, dealers, publicans, tramps, and gentlefolks in carriages and on horseback; shops, too, with beautiful new things in the windows; millinery, agricultural implements, flowers and fruit and vegetables; toys and books and sweeties of all colours. And the people he had met on the road and at market, and what they had said to him about the weather and their business and the prospects of the year, how their wives and children were, and the clever jokes they had made, and his own jokes, which were the cleverest of all. If he had just returned from Central Africa or from Thibet he could not have had more to tell them nor told it with greater zest.

We went to our room, but until the small hours the wind of the old traveller's talk could still be heard at intervals from the kitchen, mingled with occasional shrill explosions of laughter from the listening children.

It happened that on the following day, spent in idling in the forest and about the hamlet, conversing with the cottagers, we were told that our old man was a bit of a humbug; that he was a great talker, with a hundred schemes for the improvement of his fortunes, and, incidently, for the benefit of his neighbours and the world at large; but nothing came of it all and he was now fast sinking into the lowest depths of poverty. Yet who would blame him? 'Tis the nature of the gorse to be "unprofitably gay." All that, however, is a question for the moralist; the point now is that in walking, even in that poor way, when, on account of physical weakness, it was often a pain and weariness, there are alleviations which may be more to us than positive pleasures, and scenes to delight the eye that are missed by the wheelman in his haste, or but dimly seen or vaguely surmised in passing--green refreshing nooks and crystal streamlets, and shadowy woodland depths with glimpses of a blue sky beyond--all in the wilderness of the human heart.

The "walks" already spoken of, at a time when life had little or no other pleasure for us on account of poverty and ill-health, were taken at pretty regular intervals two or three times a year. It all depended on our means; in very lean years there was but one outing. It was impossible to escape altogether from the immense unfriendly wilderness of London simply because, albeit "unfriendly," it yet appeared to be the only place in the wide world where our poor little talents could earn us a few shillings a week to live on. Music and literature! but I fancy the nearest crossing-sweeper did better, and could afford to give himself a more generous dinner every day. It occasionally happened that an article sent to some magazine was not returned, and always after so many rejections to have one accepted and paid for with a cheque worth several pounds was a cause of astonishment, and was as truly a miracle as if the angel of the sun had compassionately thrown us down a handful of gold. And out of these little handfuls enough was sometimes saved for the country rambles at Easter and Whitsuntide and in the autumn. It was during one of these Easter walks, when seeking for a resting-place for the night, that we met with another adventure worth telling.

We had got to that best part of Surrey not yet colonized by wealthy men from the City, but where all things are as they were of old, when, late in the day, we came to a pleasant straggling village with one street a mile long. Here we resolved to stay, and walked the length of the street making inquiries, but were told by every person we spoke to that the only place we could stay at was the inn--the "White Hart." When we said we preferred to stay at a cottage they smiled a pitying smile. No, there was no such place. But we were determined not to go to the inn, although it had a very inviting look, and was well placed with no other house near it, looking on the wide village green with ancient trees shading the road on either side.

Having passed it and got to the end of the village, we turned and walked back, still making vain inquiries, passing it again, and when once more at the starting-point we were in despair when we spied a man coming along the middle of the road and went out to meet him to ask the weary question for the last time. His appearance was rather odd as he came towards us on that blowy March evening with dust and straws flying past and the level sun shining full on him. He was tall and slim, with a large round smooth face and big pale-blue innocent-looking eyes, and he walked rapidly but in a peculiar jerky yet shambling manner, swinging and tossing his legs and arms about. Moving along in this disjointed manner in his loose fluttering clothes he put one in mind of a big flimsy newspaper blown along the road by the wind. This unpromising-looking person at once told us that there was a place where we could stay; he knew it well, for it happened to be his father's house and his own home. It was away at the other end of the village. His people had given accommodation to strangers before, and would be glad to receive us and make us comfortable.

Surprised, and a little doubtful of our good fortune, I asked my young man if he could explain the fact that so many of his neighbours had assured us that no accommodation was to be had in the village except at the inn. He did not make a direct reply. He said that the ways of the villagers were not the ways of his people. He and all his house cherished only kind feelings towards their neighbours; whether those feelings were returned or not, it was not for him to say. And there was something else. A small appointment which would keep a man from want for the term of his natural life, without absorbing all his time, had become vacant in the village. Several of the young men in the place were anxious to have it; then he, too, came forward as a candidate, and all the others jeered at him and tried to laugh him out of it. He cared nothing for that, and when the examination came off he proved the best man and got the place. He had fought his fight and had overcome all his enemies; if they did not like him any the better for his victory, and did and said little things to injure him, he did not mind much, he could afford to forgive them.

Having finished his story, he said good-bye, and went his way, blown, as it were, along the road by the wind.

We were now very curious to see the other members of his family; they would, we imagined, prove amusing, if nothing better. They proved a good deal better. The house we sought, for a house it was, stood a little way back from the street in a large garden. It had in former times been an inn, or farm-house, possibly a manor-house, and was large, with many small rooms, and short, narrow, crooked staircases, half-landings and narrow passages, and a few large rooms, their low ceilings resting on old oak beams, black as ebony. Outside, it was the most picturesque and doubtless the oldest house in the village; many-gabled, with very tall ancient chimneys, the roofs of red tiles mottled grey and yellow with age and lichen. It was a surprise to find a woodman--for that was what the man was--living in such a big place. The woodman himself, his appearance and character, gave us a second and greater surprise. He was a well-shaped man of medium height; although past middle life he looked young, and had no white thread in his raven-black hair and beard. His teeth were white and even, and his features as perfect as I have seen in any man. His eyes were pure dark blue, contrasting rather strangely with his pale olive skin and intense black hair. Only a woodman, but he might have come of one of the oldest and best families in the country, if there is any connection between good blood and fine features and a noble expression. Oddly enough, his surname was an uncommon and aristocratic one. His wife, on the other hand, although a very good woman as we found, had a distinctly plebeian countenance. One day she informed us that she came of a different and better class than her husband's. She was the daughter of a small tradesman, and had begun life as a lady's-maid: her husband was nothing but a labourer; his people had been labourers for generations, consequently her marriage to him had involved a considerable descent in the social scale. Hearing this, it was hard to repress a smile.

The contrast between this man and the ordinary villager of his class was as great in manners and conversation as in features and expression. His combined dignity and gentleness, and apparent unconsciousness of any caste difference between man and man, were astonishing in one who had been a simple toiler all his life.

There were some grown-up children, others growing up, with others that were still quite small. The boys, I noticed, favoured their mother, and had commonplace faces; the girls took after their father, and though their features were not so perfect they were exceptionally good-looking. The eldest son--the disjointed, fly-away-looking young man who had conquered all his enemies--had a wife and child. The eldest daughter was also married, and had one child. Altogether the three families numbered about sixteen persons, each family having its separate set of rooms, but all dining at one table. How did they do it? It seemed easy enough to them. They were serious people in a sense, although always cheerful and sometimes hilarious when together of an evening, or at their meals. But they regarded life as a serious matter, a state of probation; they were non-smokers, total abstainers, diligent at their work, united, profoundly religious. A fresh wonder came to light when I found that this poor woodman, with so large a family to support, who spent ten or twelve hours every day at his outdoor work, had yet been able out of his small earnings to buy bricks and other materials, and, assisted by his sons, to build a chapel adjoining his house. Here he held religious services on Sundays, and once or twice of an evening during the week. These services consisted of extempore prayers, a short address, and hymns accompanied by a harmonium, which they all appeared able to play.

What his particular doctrine was I did not inquire, nor did I wish for any information on that point. Doubtless he was a Dissenter of some kind living in a village where there was no chapel; the services were for the family, but were also attended by a few of the villagers and some persons from neighbouring farms who preferred a simpler form of worship to that of the Church.

It was not strange that this little community should have been regarded with something like disfavour by the other villagers. For these others, man for man, made just as much money, and paid less rent for their small cottages, and, furthermore, received doles from the vicar and his well-to-do parishioners, yet they could not better their position, much less afford the good clothing, books, music, and other pleasant things which the independent woodman bestowed on his family. And they knew why. The woodman's very presence in their midst was a continual reproach, a sermon on improvidence and intemperance, which they could not avoid hearing by thrusting their fingers into their ears.

During my stay with these people something occurred to cause them a very deep disquiet. The reader will probably smile when I tell them what it was. Awaking one night after midnight I heard the unusual sound of voices in earnest conversation in the room below; this went on until I fell asleep again. In the morning we noticed that our landlady had a somewhat haggard face, and that the daughters also had pale faces, with purple marks under the eyes, as if they had kept their mother company in some sorrowful vigil. We were not left long in ignorance of the cause of this cloud. The good woman asked if we had been much disturbed by the talking. I answered that I had heard voices and had supposed that friends from a distance had arrived overnight and that they had sat up talking to a late hour. No--that was not it, she said; but someone had arrived late, a son who was sixteen years old, and who had been absent for some days on a visit to relations in another county. When they gathered round him to hear his news he confessed that while away he had learnt to smoke, and he now wished them to know that he had well considered the matter, and was convinced that it was not wrong nor harmful to smoke, and was determined not to give up his tobacco. They had talked to him--father, mother, brothers, and sisters--using every argument they could find or invent to move him, until it was day and time for the woodman to go to his woods, and the others to their several occupations. But their "all-night sitting" had been wasted; the stubborn youth had not been convinced nor shaken. When, after morning prayers, they got up from their knees, the sunlight shining in upon them, they had made a last appeal with tears in their eyes, and he had refused to give the promise they asked. The poor woman was greatly distressed. This young fellow, I thought, favours his mother in features, but mentally he is perhaps more like his father. Being a smoker myself I ventured to put in a word for him. They were distressing themselves too much, I told her; smoking in moderation was not only harmless, especially to those who worked out of doors, but it was a well-nigh universal habit, and many leading men in the religious world, both churchmen and dissenters, were known to be smokers.

Her answer, which came quickly enough, was that they did not regard the practice of smoking as in itself bad, but they knew that in some circumstances it was inexpedient; and in the case of her son they were troubled at the thought of what smoking would ultimately lead to. People, she continued, did not care to smoke, any more than they did to eat and drink, in solitude. It was a social habit, and it was inevitable that her boy should look for others to keep him company in smoking. There would be no harm in that in the summer-time when young people like to keep out of doors until bedtime; but during the long winter evenings he would have to look for his companions in the parlour of the public-house. And it would not be easy, scarcely possible, to sit long among the others without drinking a little beer. It is really no more wrong to drink a little beer than to smoke, he would say; and it would be true. One pipe would lead to another and one glass of beer to another. The habit would be formed and at last all his evenings and all his earnings would be spent in the public-house.

She was right, and I had nothing more to say except to wish her success in her efforts.

It is curious that the strongest protests against the evils of the village pubic, which one hears from village women, come from those who are not themselves sufferers. Perhaps it is not curious. Instinctively we hide our sores, bodily and mental, from the public gaze.

Not long ago I was in a small rustic village in Wiltshire, perhaps the most charming village I have seen in that country. There was no inn or ale-house, and feeling very thirsty after my long walk I went to a cottage and asked the woman I saw there for a drink of milk. She invited me in, and spreading a clean cloth on the table, placed a jug of new milk, a loaf, and butter before me. For these good things she proudly refused to accept payment. As she was a handsome young woman, with a clear, pleasant voice, I was glad to have her sit there and talk to me while I refreshed myself. Besides, I was in search of information and got it from her during our talk. My object in going to the village was to see a woman who, I had been told, was living there. I now heard that her cottage was close by, but unfortunately, while anxious to see her, I had no excuse for calling.

"Do you think," said I to my young hostess, "that it would do to tell her that I had heard something of her strange history and misfortunes, and wished to offer her a little help? Is she very poor?"

"Oh, no," she replied. "Please do not offer her money, if you see her. She would be offended. There is no one in this village who would take a shilling as a gift from a stranger. We all have enough; there is not a poor person among us."

"What a happy village!" I exclaimed. "Perhaps you are all total abstainers."

She laughed, and said that they all brewed their own beer--there was not a total abstainer among them. Every cottager made from fifty to eighty gallons, or more, and they drank beer every day, but very moderately, while it lasted. They were all very sober; their children would have to go to some neighbouring village to see a tipsy man.

I remarked that at the next village, which had three public-houses, there were a good marry persons so poor that they would gladly at any time take a shilling from any one.

It was the same everywhere in the district, she said, except in that village which had no public-house. Not only were they better off, and independent of blanket societies and charity in all forms, but they were infinitely happier. And after the day's work the men came home to spend the evening with their wives and children.

At this stage I was surprised by a sudden burst of passion on her part. She stood up, her face flushing red, and solemnly declared that if ever a public-house was opened in that village, and if the men took to spending their evenings in it, her husband with them, she would not endure such a condition of things--she wondered that so many women endured it--but would take her little ones and go away to earn her own living under some other roof!

The rambles I have described were mostly inland: when by chance they took us down to the sea our impressions and adventures appeared less interesting. Looking back on the holiday, it would seem to us a somewhat vacant time compared to one spent in wandering from village to village. I mean if we do not take into account that first impression which the sea invariably makes on us on returning to it after a long absence--the shock of recognition and wonder and joy as if we had been suffering from loss of memory and it had now suddenly come back to us. That brief moving experience over, there is little the sea can give us to compare with the land. How could it be otherwise in our case, seeing that we were by it in a crowd, our movements and way of life regulated for us in places which appear like overgrown and ill-organized convalescent homes? There was always a secret intense dislike of all parasitic and holiday places, an uncomfortable feeling which made the pleasure seem poor and the remembrance of days so spent hardly worth dwelling on. And as we are able to keep in or throw out of our minds whatever we please, being autocrats in our own little kingdom, I elected to cast away most of the memories of these comparatively insipid holidays. But not all, and of those I retain I will describe at least two, one in the present chapter on the East Anglian coast, the other later on.

It was cold, though the month was August; it blew and the sky was grey and rain beginning to fall when we came down about noon to a small town on the Norfolk coast, where we hoped to find lodging and such comforts as could be purchased out of a slender purse. It was a small modern pleasure town of an almost startling appearance owing to the material used in building its straight rows of cottages and its ugly square houses and villas. This was an orange-brown stone found in the neighbourhood, the roofs being all of hard, black slate. I had never seen houses of such a colour, it was stronger, more glaring and aggressive than the reddest brick, and there was not a green thing to partially screen or soften it, nor did the darkness of the wet weather have any mitigating effect on it. The town was built on high ground, with an open grassy space before it sloping down to the cliff in which steps had been cut to give access to the beach, and beyond the cliff we caught sight of the grey, desolate, wind-vexed sea. But the rain was coming down more and more heavily, turning the streets into torrents, so that we began to envy those who had found a shelter even in so ugly a place. No one would take us in. House after house, street after street, we tried, and at every door with "Apartments to Let" over it where we knocked the same hateful landlady-face appeared with the same triumphant gleam in the fish-eyes and the same smile on the mouth that opened to tell us delightedly that she and the town were "full up"; that never had there been known such a rush of visitors; applicants were being turned away every hour from every door!

After three miserable hours spent in this way we began inquiring at all the shops, and eventually at one were told of a poor woman in a small house in a street a good way back from the front who would perhaps be able to taken us in. To this place we went and knocked at a low door in a long blank wall in a narrow street; it was opened to us by a pale thin sad-looking woman in a rusty black gown, who asked us into a shabby parlour, and agreed to take us in until we could find something better. She had a gentle voice and was full of sympathy, and seeing our plight took us into the kitchen behind the parlour, which was living- and working-room as well, to dry ourselves by the fire.

"The greatest pleasure in life," said once a magnificent young athlete, a great pedestrian, to me, "is to rest when you are tired." And, I should add, to dry and warm yourself by a big fire when wet and cold, and to eat and drink when you are hungry and thirsty. All these pleasures were now ours, for very soon tea and chops were ready for us; and so strangely human, so sister-like did this quiet helpful woman seem after our harsh experiences on that rough rainy day--that we congratulated ourselves on our good fortune in having found such a haven, and soon informed her that we wanted no "better place."

She worked with her needle to support herself and her one child, a little boy of ten; and by and by when he came in pretty wet from some outdoor occupation we made his acquaintance and the discovery that he was a little boy of an original character. He was so much to his mother, who, poor soul, had nobody else in the world to love, that she was always haunted by the fear of losing him. He was her boy, the child of her body, exclusively her own, unlike all other boys, and her wise heart told her that if she put him in a school he would be changed so that she would no longer know him for her boy. For it is true that our schools are factories, with a machinery to unmake and remake, or fabricate, the souls of children much in the way in which shoddy is manufactured. You may see a thousand rags or garments of a thousand shapes and colours cast in to be boiled, bleached, pulled to pieces, combed and woven, and finally come out as a piece of cloth a thousand yards long of a uniform harmonious pattern, smooth, glossy, and respectable. His individuality gone, he would in a sense be lost to her; and although by nature a weak timid woman, though poor, and a stranger in a strange place, this thought, or feeling, or "ridiculous delusion" as most people would call it, had made her strong, and she had succeeded in keeping her boy out of school.

Hers was an interesting story. Left alone in the world she had married one in her own class, very happily as she imagined. He was in some business in a country town, well off enough to provide a comfortable home, and he was very good; in fact, his one fault was that he was too good, too open-hearted and fond of associating with other good fellows like himself, and of pledging them in the cup that cheers and at the same time inebriates. Nevertheless, things went very well for a time, until the child was born, the business declined, and they began to be a little pinched. Then it occurred to her that she, too, might be able to do something. She started dressmaking, and as she had good taste and was clever and quick, her business soon prospered. This pleased him; it relieved him from the necessity of providing for the home, and enabled him to follow his own inclination, which was to take things easily--to be an idle man, with a little ready money in his pocket for betting and other pleasures. The money was now provided out of "our business." This state of things continued without any change, except that process of degeneration which continued in him, until the child was about four years old, when all at once one day he told her they were not doing as well as they might. She was giving far too much of her time and attention to domestic matters--to the child especially. Business was business--a thing it was hard for a woman to understand--and it was impossible for her to give her mind properly to it with her thoughts occupied with the child. It couldn't be done. Let the child be put away, he said, and the receipts would probably be doubled. He had been making inquiries and found that for a modest annual payment the boy could be taken proper care of at a distance by good decent people he had heard of.

She had never suspected such a thought in his mind, and this proposal had the effect of a stunning blow. She answered not one word: he said his say and went out, and she knew she would not see him again for many hours, perhaps not for some days; she knew, too, that he would say no more to her on the subject, that it would all be arranged about the child with or without her consent. His will was law, her wishes nothing. For she was his wife and humble obedient slave; never had she pleaded with or admonished him and never complained, even when, after her long day of hard work, he came in at ten or eleven o'clock at night with several of his pals, all excited with drink and noisy as himself, to call for supper. Nevertheless she had been happy--intensely happy, because of the child. The love for the man she had married, wondering how one so bright and handsome and universally admired and liked could stoop to her, who had nothing but love and worship to give in return--that love was now gone and was not missed, so much greater and more satisfying was the love for her boy. And now she must lose him. Two or three silent miserable days passed by while she waited for the dreadful separation, until the thought of it became unendurable and she resolved to keep her child and sacrifice everything else. Secretly she prepared for flight, getting together the few necessary things she could carry; then, with the child in her arms, she stole out one evening and began her flight, which took her all across England at its widest part, and ended at this small coast town, the best hiding-place she could think of.

The boy was a queer little fellow, healthy but colourless, with strangely beautiful grey eyes which, on first seeing them, almost startled one with their intelligence. He was shy and almost obstinately silent, but when I talked to him on certain subjects the intense suppressed interest he felt would show itself in his face, and by and by it would burst out in speech--an impetuous torrent of words in a high shrill voice. He reminded me of a lark in a cage. Watch it in its prison when the sun shines forth--when, like the captive falcon in Dante, it is "cheated by a gleam"--its wing-tremblings, and all its little tentative motions, how the excitement grows and grows in it, until, although shut up and flight denied it, the passion can no longer be contained and it bursts out in a torrent of shrill and guttural sounds, which, if it were free and soaring, would be its song. His passion was all for nature, and his mother out of her small earnings had managed to get quite a number of volumes together for him. These he read and re-read until he knew them by heart; and on Sundays, or any other day they could take, those two lonely ones would take a basket containing their luncheon, her work and a book or two, and set out on a long ramble along the coast to pass the day in some solitary spot among the sandhills.

With these two, the gentle woman and her quiet boy over his book, and the kitchen fire to warm and dry us after each wetting, the bad weather became quite bearable although it lasted many days. And it was amazingly bad. The wind blew with a fury from the sea; it was hard to walk against it. The people in hundreds waited in their dull apartments for a lull, and when it came they poured out like hungry sheep from the fold, or like children from a school, swarming over the green slope down to the beach, to scatter far and wide over the sands. Then, in a little while; a new menacing blackness would come up out of the sea, and by and by a fresh storm of wind would send the people scuttling back into shelter. So it went on day after day, and when night came the sound of the ever-troubled sea grew louder, so that, shut up in our little rooms in that back street, we had it in our ears, except at intervals, when the wind howled loud enough to drown its great voice, and hurled tempests of rain and hail against the roofs and windows.

To me the most amazing thing was the spectacle of the swifts. It was late for them, near the end of August; they should now have been far away on their flight to Africa; yet here they were, delaying on that desolate east coast in wind and wet, more than a hundred of them. It was strange to see so many at one spot, and I could only suppose that they had congregated previous to migration at that unsuitable place, and were being kept back by the late breeders, who had not yet been wrought up to the point of abandoning their broods. They haunted a vast ruinous old barn-like building near the front, which was probably old a century before the town was built, and about fifteen to twenty pairs had their nests under the eaves. Over this building they hung all day in a crowd, rising high to come down again at a frantic speed, and at each descent a few birds could be seen to enter the holes, while others rushed out to join the throng, and then all rose and came down again and swept round and round in a furious chase, shrieking as if mad. At all hours they drew me to that spot, and standing there, marvelling at their swaying power and the fury that possessed them, they appeared to me like tormented beings, and were like those doomed wretches in the halls of Eblis whose hearts were in a blaze of unquenchable fire, and who, every one with hands pressed to his breast, went spinning round in an everlasting agonized dance. They were tormented and crazed by the two most powerful instincts of birds pulling in opposite directions--the parental instinct and the passion of migration which called them to the south.

In such weather, especially on that naked desolate coast, exposed to the fury of the winds, one marvels at our modern craze for the sea; not merely to come and gaze upon and listen to it, to renew our youth in its salt, exhilarating waters and to lie in delicious idleness on the warm shingle or mossy cliff; but to be always, for days and weeks and even for months, at all hours, in all weathers, close to it, with its murmur, "as of one in pain," for ever in our ears.

Undoubtedly it is an unnatural, a diseased, want in us, the result of a life too confined and artificial in close dirty overcrowded cities. It is to satisfy this craving that towns have sprung up everywhere on our coasts and extended their ugly fronts for miles and leagues, with their tens of thousands of windows from which the city-sickened wretches may gaze and gaze and listen and feed their sick souls with the ocean. That is to say, during their indoor hours; at other times they walk or sit or lie as close as they can to it, following the water as it ebbs and reluctantly retiring before it when it returns. It was not so formerly, before the discovery was made that the sea could cure us. Probably our great-grandfathers didn't even know they were sick; at all events, those who had to live in the vicinity of the sea were satisfied to be a little distance from it, out of sight of its grey desolation and, if possible, out of hearing of its "accents disconsolate." This may be seen anywhere on our coasts; excepting the seaports and fishing settlements, the towns and villages are almost always some distance from the sea, often in a hollow or at all events screened by rising ground and woods from it. The modern seaside place has, in most cases, its old town or village not far away but quite as near as the healthy ancients wished to be.

The old village nearest to our little naked and ugly modern town was discovered at a distance of about two miles, but it might have been two hundred, so great was the change to its sheltered atmosphere. Loitering in its quiet streets among the old picturesque brick houses with tiled or thatched roofs and tall chimneys--ivy and rose and creeper-covered, with a background of old oaks and elms--I had the sensation of having come back to my own home. In that still air you could hear men and women talking fifty or a hundred yards away, the cry or laugh of a child and the clear crowing of a cock, also the smaller aerial sounds of nature, the tinkling notes of tits and other birdlings in the trees, the twitter of swallows and martins, and the "lisp of leaves and ripple of rain." It was sweet and restful in that home-like place, and hard to leave it to go back to the front to face the furious blasts once more. Rut there were compensations.

The little town, we have seen, was overcrowded with late summer visitors, all eager for the sea yet compelled to waste so much precious time shut up in apartments, and at every appearance of a slight improvement in the weather they would pour out of the houses and the green slope would be covered with a crowd of many hundreds, all hurrying down to the beach. The crowd was composed mostly of women--about three to every man, I should say--and their children; and it was one of the most interesting crowds I had ever come across on account of the large number of persons in it of a peculiarly fine type, which chance had brought together at that spot. It was the large English blonde, and there were so many individuals of this type that they gave a character to the crowd so that those of a different physique and colour appeared to be fewer than they were and were almost overlooked. They came from various places about the country, in the north and the Midlands, and appeared to be of the well-to-do classes; they, or many of them, were with their families but without their lords. They were mostly tall and large in every way, very white-skinned, with light or golden hair and large light blue eyes. A common character of these women was their quiet reposeful manner; they walked and talked and rose up and sat down and did everything, in fact, with an air of deliberation; they gazed in a slow steady way at you, and were dignified, some even majestic, and were like a herd of large beautiful white cows. The children, too, especially the girls, some almost as tall as their large mothers, though still in short frocks, were very fine. The one pastime of these was paddling, and it was a delight to see their bare feet and legs. The legs of those who had been longest on the spot--probably several weeks in some instances--were of a deep nutty brown hue suffused with pink; after these a gradation of colour, light brown tinged with buff, pinkish buff and cream, like the Gloire de Dijon rose; and so on to the delicate tender pink of the clover blossom; and, finally, the purest ivory white of the latest arrivals whose skins had not yet been caressed and coloured by sun and wind.

How beautiful are the feet of these girls by the sea who bring us glad tidings of a better time to come and the day of a nobler courage, a freer larger life when garments which have long oppressed and hindered shall have been cast away! It was, as I have said, mere chance which had brought so many persons of a particular type together on this occasion, and I thought I might go there year after year and never see the like again. As a fact I did return when August came round and found a crowd of a different character. The type was there but did not predominate: it was no longer the herd of beautiful white and strawberry cows with golden horns and large placid eyes. Nothing in fact was the same, for when I looked for the swifts there were no more than about twenty birds instead of over a hundred, and although just on the eve of departure they were not behaving in the same excited manner.

Probably I should not have thought so much about that particular crowd in that tempestuous August, and remembered it so vividly, but for the presence of three persons in it and the strange contrast they made to the large white type I have described. These were a woman and her two little girls, aged about eight and ten respectively, but very small for their years. She was a little black haired and black-eyed woman with a pale sad dark face, on which some great grief or tragedy had left its shadow; very quiet and subdued in her manner; she would sit on a chair on the beach when the weather permitted, a book on her knees, while her two little ones played about, chasing and flying from the waves, or with the aid of their long poles vaulting from rock to rock. They were dressed in black frocks and scarlet blouses, which set off their beautiful small dark faces; their eyes sparkled like black diamonds, and their loose hair was a wonder to see, a black mist or cloud about their heads and necks composed of threads fine as gossamer, blacker than jet and shining like spun glass-hair that looked as if no comb or brush could ever tame its beautiful wildness. And in spirit they were what they seemed: such a wild, joyous, frolicsome spirit with such grace and fleetness one does not look for in human beings, but only in birds or in some small bird-like volatile mammal--a squirrel or a marmoset of the tropical forest, or the chinchilla of the desolate mountain slopes, the swiftest, wildest, loveliest, most airy and most vocal of small beasties. Occasionally to watch their wonderful motions more closely and have speech with them, I followed when they raced over the sands or flew about over the slippery rocks, and felt like a cochin-china fowl, or muscovy duck, or dodo, trying to keep pace with a humming-bird. Their voices were well suited to their small brilliant forms; not loud, though high-pitched and singularly musical and penetrative, like the high clear notes of a skylark at a distance. They also reminded me of certain notes, which have a human quality, in some of our songsters--the swallow, redstart, pied wagtail, whinchat, and two or three others. Such pure and beautiful sounds are sometimes heard in human voices, chiefly in children, when they are talking and laughing in joyous excitement. But for any sort of conversation they were too volatile; before I could get a dozen words from them they would be off again, flying and flitting along the margin, like sandpipers, and beating the clear-voiced sandpiper at his own aerial graceful game.

The mother and her little ones were of the higher sub-type: they had delicate skins, beautiful faces, clear musical voices. They were Iberians in blood, but improved; purified and refined as by fire; gentleized and spiritualized, and to the lower types down to the aboriginals, as is the bright consummate flower to leaf and stem and root.

Often and often we are teased and tantalized and mocked by that old question:

Oh! so old-- Thousands of years, thousands of years, If all were told--

of black and blue eyes; blue versus black and black versus blue, to put it both ways. And by black we mean black with orange-brown lights in it--the eye called tortoise-shell; and velvety browns with other browns, also hazels. Blue includes all blues, from ultramarine, or violet, to the palest blue of a pale sky; and all greys down to the grey that is almost white. Our preference for this or that colour is supposed to depend on nothing but individual taste, or fancy, and association. I believe it is something more, but I do find that we are very apt to be swayed this way and that by the colour of the eyes of the people we meet in life, according as they attract or repel us. The eyes of the two little girls were black as polished black diamonds until looked at closely, when they appeared a beautiful deep brown on which the black pupils were seen distinctly; they were so lovely that I, predisposed to prefer dark to light, felt that this question was now definitely settled for me--that black was best. That irresistible charm, the flame-like spirit which raised these two so much above the others--how could it go with anything but the darkest eyes!

But no sooner was the question thus settled definitely and for all time, to my very great satisfaction, than it was unsettled again. I do not know how this came about; it may have been the sight of some small child's blue eyes looking up at me, like the arch blue eyes of a kitten, full of wonder at the world and everything in it;

"Where did you get those eyes so blue?" "Out of the sky as I came through";

or it may have been the sight of a harebell; and perhaps it came from nothing but the "waste shining of the sky." At all events, there they were, remembered again, looking at me from the past, blue eyes that were beautiful and dear to me, whose blue colour was associated with every sweetness and charm in child and woman and with all that is best and highest in human souls; and I could not and had no wish to resist their appeal.

Then came a new experience of the eye that is blue--a meeting with one who almost seemed to be less flesh than spirit. A middle-aged lady, frail, very frail; exceedingly pale from long ill-health, prematurely white-haired, with beautiful grey eyes, gentle but wonderfully bright. Altogether she was like a being compounded as to her grosser part of foam and mist and gossamer and thistledown, and was swayed by every breath of air, and who, should she venture abroad in rough weather, would be lifted and blown away by the gale and scattered like mist over the earth. Yet she, so frail, so timid, was the one member of the community who had set herself to do the work of a giant--that of championing all ill-used and suffering creatures, wild or tame, holding a protecting shield over them against the innate brutality of the people. She had been abused and mocked and jeered at by many, while others had regarded her action with an amused smile or else with a cold indifference. But eventually some, for very shame, had been drawn to her side, and a change in the feeling of the people had resulted; domestic animals were treated better, and it was no longer universally believed that all wild animals, especially those with wings, existed only that men might amuse themselves by killing and wounding and trapping and caging and persecuting them in various other ways.

The sight of that burning and shining spirit in its frail tenement--for did I not actually see her spirit and the very soul of her in those eyes?--was the last of the unforgotten experiences I had at that place which had startled and repelled me with its ugliness.

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