At this season of new-bursting life we, too, catch a glimpse of the Beyond, and underlying all our delight in the material beauty of spring, is there not the still deeper joy arising from the promise it brings of greater beauty yet unfulfilled—beauty that transcends all earthly imaginings? The heart, whether conscious of it or not, assuredly finds comfort in the reminder of the Resurrection that Nature whispers wheresoever we may turn.
It is no mere haphazard chance that Easter falls about the time of the blossoming of the bare blackthorn bough.
One very satisfying feature of the landscape, about this part of the river side, is the sight of the cottages, yellow-washed or white, that seem literally to nestle in the hollows on the hillside. While crowded streets hold no charm for me, and modern mansions leave me unmoved, there is something very appealing about a little homestead standing in its own bit of garden, with its couple of beehives beside a towering sunflower, its few gnarled apple trees, its cow and hayrick maybe, if there is a bit of pasture land about the cottage that has been redeemed by the hardest of labour from the rocky hillside, its fowls clucking about on the fringe of the small holding, its wood pile, its cabbages and marrows and rhubarb and black currants, all according to the season, its hedge draped with washing—too white ever to have come into touch with that modern improvement the steam laundry. In looking at all this, you are looking for the most part at the total worldly wealth of the cottager, wealth, too, that has often been acquired by the genuine sweat of his (and her) brow. It may not seem much to you when you run your eye over it; but it speaks of home in a way that no city dwelling has ever yet attained to. Here is not merely shelter, or just a place wherein to spend the night; it is the very centre of life to the inmates; the major portion of their food is either growing in, or running about, the garden. The side of bacon on the rack in the kitchen came from their own pigsty; the potatoes, the onions, the swedes in the outhouse grew from their own planting; the big yellow vegetable marrows hanging up in the kitchen, and the pots of black currant and plum jam in the cupboard, originated in their garden. The little plot is endeared to them because it provides them with the necessities of life, and the dwellers in the cottages live very close to the fundamental things that really matter, even though they may lack some of the items that over-civilization has ticketed the refinements of life.
And after a winter in town spent in a stern wrestle for coal, potatoes, butter and milk and bacon and many of the other necessities of life, it is bliss indeed to land in this haven of sufficiency, where queues are unknown, and where the cow and the hen do their duty in life each according to her station, and the garden and the forests do much of the rest!
Even then, one has not gone to the root of the matter. Many of these cottages are the ancestral homes of the people who live in them, homes that were literally wrested from the hillside by the forefathers of those who are now living in them. And in such cases the roots go far deeper than the surface soil. An ancestral home, no matter how small, can mean more to the inmates than the most gorgeous pile that the newly-rich millionaire can raise.
And to my mind, by no means the least of the many hideous sins for which the Germans will ultimately be called to account at the world’s Bar of Justice, will be the violation of the homes, the landmarks, and the ancient birthrights of unoffending peoples, while they themselves sat smug and sanctimonious under their own vines and fig trees, self-complacent in the knowledge that they were protected from deserved retribution by their devil-driven guns.
When at last we reached the little white gate, leading into the cottage garden, we stood for a moment, as we always do, and looked at the peak beyond peak, and the deep lying valleys.