LAWFORD MILL
The tale is briefly this: In 1780 Sir Theodosius Boughton, a vicious and sickly boy, was squiring it at Lawford Hall, and fast drinking out his puny constitution. “To him enter” an evil spirit in the shape of a brother-in-law, an Irish adventurer, one Captain Donellan. This graduate in vice took the raw scholar in hand, and with the better will as being next heir to his estates. But it seems that drink and debauchery worked too slowly for the impatient captain, for one evening the wretched boy went to bed, called for his sleeping-draught, and drank the wrong liquid out of the right bottle. And as for Captain Donellan, he bungled matters somehow, and was hanged at Warwick in the following spring—an elegant, well-mannered man in black, who displayed much ceremonious punctilio at ascending the scaffold ahead of the sheriff. Ten years later Lawford Hall was pulled down as an accursed thing, and the building before us is all that survives of it. To-day the Gloire de Dijon rose, the jasmine, and the ivy sprawl up its sad-colored walls and over the porch, which still wears the date 1604.
Either at Lawford Hall, or just above, at the old Holbrook Grange, lived, in Elizabeth’s time, One-handed Boughton, who won an entirely posthumous fame by driving a ghostly coach and six about the country-side. His spirit was at length caught in a phial by certain of the local clergy, corked down, sealed, thrown into a neighboring marl-pit, and so laid forever. Therefore his only successes of late have been in frightening maid-servants out of their situations at the farm.
Leaving Lawford, we paddle through a land pastorally desolate, seeing, often for miles together, neither man’s face nor woman’s. The canoe darts in and out of rush beds; avoids now a shallow, now a snag, a clump of reeds, a conglomerate of logs and pendent shrivelled flags, flotsam of many floods; and again is gliding easily between meadows that hold, in Touchstone’s language, “no assembly but horn beasts.” Our canoe wakes strange emotions in these cattle. They lift their heads, snort, fling up their heels, and, with rigid tails, come capering after us like so many bacchanals. At length a fence stops them, and they obligingly watch us out of sight. The next herd repeats the performance. And always the river is vocal beside us,
“Giving a gentle kiss to every sedge
He overtaketh in his pilgrimage;”
while ahead the water-rat dives, or the moor-hen splashes from one green brim to another; and around the land is slowly changing from the monotonous to the “up-and-down-hilly;” and we, passing through it all, are thankful.
A small cottage appears beside some lime-pits on the right bank. Over its garden gate a blackboard proclaims that here are the “Newnham Regis Baths.” A certain Walter Bailey, M.D., writing in 1587 A Brief Discourse of Certain Baths, etc., sings loud praise of these waters, but warns drinkers to “consist in a mediocrity, and never to adventure to drink above six, or at the utmost eight, pints in one day.” Also, he “will not rashly counsel any to use them in the leap-years.” We disregarded this latter warning, but observed the former; yet the plain man who gave us our glassful asserted that a friend of his, “all hot and sweaty,” drank two quarts of the water one summer day, and took no harm. As a fact, the springs which here rise from the limestone were known and esteemed by the Romans; the remains of their baths were found, and the present one—a pump within a square paling—built on the same spot. But their fame has not travelled of late.
CHURCH LAWFORD
We embarked again, and were soon floating down to Church Lawford. What shall be said of this spot? As we saw it happily, one slope of green—vivid, yet in shadow—swelled up to darker elms and a tall church tower, set high against an amber sunset. Beyond, the sky and the river’s dim reaches melted together, through all delicate yellows, mauves, and grays, into twilight. A swan, scurrying down stream before us, broke the water into pools of gold. And so a bend swept Church Lawford out of our sight and into our kindliest memories.