It did not come from one of the rustic population, but from a tradesman in quite a good way of business—a considerable proportion of it in canned provisions into the bargain.
I believe that when Dr. Watson, the author of Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush, went on his first lecturing tour to America, the financial results of which were so satisfactory, an impression prevailed in certain directions that the act was unworthy of a clergyman of the Presbyterian Church, and he was made the object of a severe attack in some quarters.
One can easily appreciate the attitude of people who have lived all their lives in an English country town in regard to the restless members of a family. One has only to walk through a churchyard and read the names on the tombs to understand how deeply rooted in the soil are the people. So far as Thurs-well and Mallingham are concerned, a stroll through one of the churchyards is almost equivalent to studying a directory. The same names as are cut upon the tombs—some of them going back a hundred and fifty years—are to be seen over the shop windows to-day and on the dairy carts and the farm carts. In some cases the name of a yeoman ancestor reappears in a Grand Jury list, indicating a material advance in the social scale. The migration that has been going on in our county for the past two hundred years seems to be interparochial. Individuals moved from village to village and from village to town. It is only within the past twenty-five or thirty years that the ablest and the best have occasionally braved public opinion and set sail for a colony.
Even families that have “got on” seem to love to cling to the county which saw the very small beginnings of their ancestors. Why should they not? Love of one's county is only a subdivision of the grand virtue of love of one's country. It was only when a certain aged doctor, who had the family history of our neighbourhood at his fingers' ends for over sixty years, published a volume of interesting reminiscences, in the course of which he took occasion to refer to the very humble beginnings of some families that considered themselves very “swagger,” that we learned how tenaciously they had clung to their county. Even the slow-moving Mallingham is not without its romances of “getting on.” One of the most intrepid motorists in the borough is remembered by several middle-aged burgesses as the wearer of the green baize apron and the wielder of the broom of the caretaker and window-cleaner of a solicitor's office; and from what I know of him I am inclined to believe that that was the best kept office in the town when he had charge of it.