Hoe! hoe! who is heare?
I Robin of Doncaster and Margaret my feare.
That I spent I had,
That I gave I have,
That I left I lost. A.D. 1579.
A near relation to this may be found on a brass at Foulsham near Reepham in Norfolk, that reads:—
Of all I had, this only now I have,
Nyne akers wh unto ye poore I gave,
Richard Fenn who died March ye 6. 1565.
But now that I have got upon the attractive subject of epitaphs again, I must control my pen or I shall fill up pages unawares: already I find I have strayed far away from Lincolnshire.
CHAPTER XI
A pleasant road—Memories—Shortening of names—Health-drinking—A miller and his mill—A rail-less town—Changed times and changed ways—An Elizabethan church clock—A curious coincidence—Old superstitions—Satire in carving—“The Monks of Old.”
From Bourn we decided to drive to Sleaford, an easy day’s stage of eighteen miles, baiting half-way at Falkingham. Upon asking the ostler about the road, it struck us as curious to hear him remark that it was a hilly one; so accustomed had we become to the level roads of the Fens that for the moment we had forgotten that Lincolnshire is a county of heaths, hills, and waving woods as well as of fens, dykes, and sluggish streams.
The aspect of the country we passed through that morning had completely changed from that of yesterday; it was pleasantly undulating, and even the brake was brought into requisition once or twice, for the first time since we left London. Hedges again resumed their sway, and we realised their tangled beauties all the more for our recent absence from them; sturdy oaks and rounded elms took the place of the silvery flickering willows and of the tall thin poplars, and smooth-turfed meadows that of the coarse-grassed marsh-lands. The general forms and outlines of the country were more familiar, but it seemed a little wanting in colour after the rich tints of the lowlands; by contrast it all appeared too green: green fields, green trees, green crops, for these, with the winding road, chiefly composed the prospect. Moreover, we missed the constant and enlivening accompaniment of water that we had become so accustomed to, with its soft, silvery gleaming under cloud and its cheerful glittering under sun. Water is to the landscape what the eye is to the human face; it gives it the charm of expression and vivacity. At first, also, our visions seemed a little cramped after the wide and unimpeded prospects of the Fens; and the landscape struck us as almost commonplace compared with that we had so lately passed through, which almost deserved the epithet of quaint, at least to non-Dutch eyes. There was no special feature in the present scenery beyond its leafy loveliness. Truly it might be called typically English, but there was nothing to show that it belonged to any particular portion of England—no distant peep of downs, or hills, or moors, that seems so little, but which to the experienced traveller means so much, as by the character and contour of distant hill, or moor, or down he can tell fairly well whether he be in the north or south, the east or west, and may even shrewdly guess the very county he is traversing.
A PASTORAL LAND
It was, however, a lovely country, full of pastoral peacefulness, sunshine, and grateful sylvan shadiness, lovely yet lonely—a loneliness that aroused within us a feeling akin to melancholy: it may have been our mood that saw it so that day, and that the fault lay in ourselves and not in the landscape. Does not the poet say, “Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought”? So may not the sweetest scenery, in certain minds, and under certain conditions, arouse a sentiment of sadness? There is a peacefulness that is restful beyond words, especially to the town-wearied brain; but there is also a peacefulness so deep as to become actually oppressive. However, all the feelings of loneliness and melancholy vanished, like the mist before the sun, at the sight of an old-fashioned windmill painted a cheerful white and picturesquely situated at the top of a knoll by the side of our road, its great sails whirling round and round with a mighty sweep and a swishing sound as they rushed through the air in their never-completed journey. This busy mill gave just the touch of needful life to the prospect; we hailed it as we would have hailed an old friend, and at once our spirits rose to a gleesome point. What trifles may thus suddenly change the current of thought and feeling! It may even be so small a matter as the scent of a wild flower, or the sound of the wind in the trees, recalling past days and far-away scenes. So this old mill brought up before us a rush of pleasant memories, the poetry of many a rural ramble, of chats with merry meal-covered millers, for millers I have ever found to be the merriest of men, and never yet have I come upon a crusty one. All those to whom I have talked, and they have not been few, without exception appeared to take a rosy view of life, not even grumbling with cause. I wish I knew the miller’s secret of happiness!