But to understand Suffolk ways and to hear Suffolk talk it is necessary to linger in the villages and to gossip with the sons of the soil. The agricultural villages are only articulate at eventide, when they give themselves up to play and gossip. Then, as the long summer day draws to its close, the children find romance in the lengthening shadows, in which their games of robbers and pirates seem much more convincing than they could be made to appear in the glare of the midday sun; the farm labourers slouch off to their evening, over quarts of "bellywengins," at the pub, and the coy mawthers find the twilight a seasonable time for nannicking with the hudderens. This, which may seem unmeaning gibberish to those unacquainted with the peculiar dialect of East Anglia, merely signifies the girls flirting with the "other ones"—the young men, in short.
But a mawther may be of any age. A baby girl is a mawther, and so is a grandame. It is a curiosity of speech which is apt to startle the stranger who first hears it applied to a girl who has hardly yet learned to toddle, in the maternal threat, to be heard any day in any Suffolk village, "Yow come 'ere, mawther, this instant moment, or I'll spank yow, so I 'ool." "Yow," of course, is the Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk shibboleth for "you," by which a native of these parts may be immediately distinguished anywhere.
When the labourers have trudged over to their "shants o' gatter," or quarts and pots of beer—the "bellywengins," or belly vengeance, aforesaid; when the children have been put to bed, and the mawthers and the hudderens have gone nannicking off together in the gathering dusk, then is the gossiping time, both of the housewives and of the labourers. The women talk at the doors of the "housen": the men mostly in the village inns. Hear, passing stranger, what the mawthers are saying:—
"Good daa to 'ee, Mrs Potter, how are ye a-gettin' arn?"
"I'm a-doin' good-tidily, thank'ee, better'n tew or tree weeks sin'. The doctor say I fare to be on the mend; but it hev bin a bad time wi' me sure."
"Ay; owd bones 'on't be young agen, I'm thinkin'; but there, 'taint so much yer aige, 'tis yer sperrut what keep ye up or let ye down."
"Ay, that be trew," says one of the group, "what be life wi'out sperrut? Nothin', in a manner o' speakin'."
"Yar father, Mrs Cobbold, he had it, and he lived to be ninety."
"What a man that wor! I mind him when he come to mine arter he'd walked from Ipswich, an' that's a good ten mile. He come to paiy a shullun he ew my ole man, and, barrin' a bit tirsty, he were as spry as a mavish and fresher'n a paigle."
A mile distant, to the right hand, lies East Bergholt, Constable's birthplace, and between it and the road still stretch in summer those golden cornfields he loved so well. "The Cornfield," that crowning achievement of English landscape, how exquisite a thing it is, radiant in colour on the walls of the National Gallery, and how ineffectually the inadequate medium of black and white attempts to translate it.