Wi’ the Scots lords at his feet.”
This ballad is one peculiar to our island, and no one can seriously deny that some one of its authors was one of the greatest writers of narrative poetry that ever lived.
CHAPTER XV
AN OUTCAST—WILTSHIRE
Not far from “The White Horse” is a little town upon a stream that waves myriads of reeds and tall purple flowers of hemp agrimony. These are the last shops I am likely to pass in Wiltshire, and it occurs to me that I should like to taste lardy cakes—which I last bought in Wroughton fifteen years ago—before I leave the county. Richard Jefferies’ grandfather was “My Lord Lardy Cake” in old Swindon sixty years ago, and his memory is kept alive by those tough, sweet slabs of larded pastry which, in his generous ovens, gathered all the best essences of the other cakes, pies, tarts and joints which were permitted to be baked with them. In “Amaryllis at the Fair” they are mentioned with some indignity as a ploughboy’s delicacy. My lips water for them, and at the first bakery in —— I ask for some. The baker tells me he has sold the last one. He is a small, white-haired and white-bearded man with an expression of unctuous repose, assuredly a pillar of his chapel and possibly its treasurer, and though he himself will, by his own telling, have no more lardy cakes until the next morning, he stiffly tries to persuade me that none of his fellow-townsmen bakes them. I disbelieve the man of dough for all his conscious look of sagacity and virtue, and am rewarded for my disbelief by four lardy cakes for threepence-halfpenny not many yards from his accursed threshold. Lardy cakes, I now discover for the first time, have this merit besides their excellent taste and provision of much pleasant but not finical labour for the teeth, that one is enough at a time, and that four will, therefore, take a man quite a long way upon the roads of England.
At the next inn three labourers and the landlord are heated in conversation about some one not present.
“Quite right,” says one, a sober carter whose whip leans against the counter, “’tis the third time this week that a tramp has been to his door, and by the looks of them they didn’t call for naught.”
“One of them didn’t, I know,” says the landlord. “He came in here once and asked for a job and left without a drink, but after he’d been to Stegbert’s Cottage he came straight here and ordered a pint of mild. And I heard as he let a chap and a woman sleep two nights running in that rough patch behind the house. Don’t you think the parson ought to hear of that? And what does he do for a living? He looks poor enough himself.”
“I don’t know. Mr. Jones is a kind-hearted fellow. He stopped my youngest in the street the other day and gave her a penny and measured her hair, and told her she’d have a yard of it some day. They tell me he hasn’t a carpet on the floor anywhere, and no parlour, and not even a chest of drawers; and the postman says he hasn’t a watch or a clock. What does he do with himself?”