To this day Abigail’s tales, to cook and co. and her friends at home, of how she goes out and catches soles as large as plaice in our own brook, and boils them for supper, equal any fish stories ever told!
But to return to the luggage and ourselves, which I left waiting at our little station.
While the luggage is being stowed into the vehicles, we take stock of the platform, that seems to fancy itself the pivot of the universe! Everybody that is going away scrambles into the train with precipitate haste, as though they were trying to catch a train on the Tube, or a sprinting motor-bus in the Strand! although they know quite well that the peaceful old engine—already twenty-five minutes behind time—won’t think of stirring again until it has had a ten minutes’ nap!
Those who have just arrived seem equally in a hurry to get somewhere else, and they try to squeeze three thick out of the small station gate—only to plant themselves in the path just outside for a long gossip with the first person they see.
There are women with empty baskets returning from market, and women seeing off friends, each carrying a huge “bookey” of flowers, built up in the approved style, from the back: first a big background rhubarb leaf, or something equally green and spacious, then some striped variegated grass—gardeners’ garters, we call it; also some southernwood—better known as Old Man’s Beard; tall flowers like foxgloves, phlox, Japanese anemones, early dahlias and sunflowers follow; the shorter stems of pinks, calceolarias, sweet williams and roses are the next in succession; finishing off with some gorgeous pansies and a very fat cabbage rose with a short stem (that persists in tumbling out), a piece of sweetbriar, and a few silver and gold everlasting flowers down low in the front. If you have a geranium in your window, etiquette demands that you add the best spray—as a special offering—to the bunch, telling your friend all about the way you got that geranium cutting, and the trouble you had to rear it.
You know the sort of complacent well-packed bunches that are the result of this combination. Not artistic, of course, according to town standards, but, all the same, they are dears; and I always feel I want every one I see.
The station itself is a flower garden. And even in the space outside, where the motor-cars await the rich, and the wagonettes and carts await the nearly-poor, primroses and violets and cowslips and bluebells grow thick on the banks.
Naturally the arrival of the train is a matter of local importance, and if you happen to be near the station about train-time you go in and sit on the platform just to see who comes or goes.
And how well everybody looks, and sturdy, and brown, after the pale anæmic faces we have left in town! You think how happy they must all be here in the fresh air and the sunshine. So they ought to be, and so most of them could be, if only they kept a look-out for happiness, and seized all that came their way. But human nature the world over seems to love to contemplate the tragic, or at least to pity itself! The result is that every other person you meet in our village will tell you a tale of woe as highly-coloured as anything you hear in town.