Round About a Great Estate

by Richard Jefferies

'It be th' clover and th' thyme, and summat in the air. There bean't no hedges for um to fly up against, and so um carries home a bigger load.'

'How many hives have you?' I inquired.

'Let's see'—he counted them up, touching a finger for each twenty—'There be three score and sixteen; I have a' had six score years ago, but folk don't care for honey now sugar be so cheap.'

'Let us go and see them,' said Cicely. We went out and looked at the hives; they were all in a row, each protected by large 'pan-sherds' from heavy rain, and placed along beneath the wall of the garden, which sheltered them on one side. Uncle Bennet chatted pleasantly about his bees for an hour, and would, I believe, have gossiped all day, notwithstanding that he had so little time for anything. Nothing more was said about the delayed visit, but just as we were on the point of departure, and Cicely had already taken the reins, he said to her, as if it were an afterthought, 'Tell your mother, I s'pose I must look down that way next week.'

We passed swiftly through the little hamlet; the children had gathered by a gateway to watch us. Though so far from the world, they were not altogether without a spice of the impudence of the city arab. A tall and portly gentleman from town once chanced to visit this 'coombe-bottom' on business, and strolled down the 'street' in all the glory of shining boots, large gold watch-chain, black coat and high hat, all the pomp of Regent-street; doubtless imagining that his grandeur astonished the rustics. A brown young rascal, however, looking him up—he was a tall man—with an air of intelligent criticism, audibly remarked, 'Hum! He be very well up to his ankles—and then a' falls off!'

That evening was one of the most beautiful I remember. We all sat in the garden at Lucketts' Place till ten o'clock; it was still light and it seemed impossible to go indoors. There was a seat under a sycamore tree with honeysuckle climbing over the bars of the back; the spot was near the orchard, but on slightly higher ground. From our feet the meadow sloped down to the distant brook, the murmur of whose stream as it fell over a bay could be just heard. Northwards the stars were pale, the sun seems so little below the horizon there that the glow of the sunset and the glow of the dawn nearly meet. But southwards shone the dull red star of summer—Antares, seen while the wheat ripens and the ruddy and golden tints come upon the fruits. Then nightly describing a low curve he looks down upon the white shimmering corn, and carries the mind away to the burning sands and palms of the far south. In the light and colour and brilliance of an English summer we sometimes seem very near those tropical lands.

So still was it that we heard an apple fall in the orchard, thud on the sward, blighted perhaps and ripe before its time. Under the trees as the months went on there would rise heaps of the windfalls collected there to wait for the cider-mill. The mill was the property of two or three of the village folk, a small band of adventurers now grown old, who every autumn went round from farm to farm grinding the produce of the various orchards. They sometimes poured a quantity of the acid juice into the mill to sharpen it, as cutting a lemon will sharpen a knife. The great press, with its unwieldy screw and levers, squeezed the liquor from the cut-up apples in the horse-hair bags: a cumbersome apparatus, but not without interest; for surely so rude an engine must date back far in the past. The old fellows who brought it and put it up with slow deliberative motions were far, far past the joy with which all the children about the farm hailed its arrival. With grave faces and indifferent manner they ground the apples, and departed as slowly and deliberately as they came; verily men of the autumn, harbingers of the fall of the year.

As I dreamed with the honeysuckle over my shoulder, and Antares southwards, Hilary talked at intervals about his wheat as usual and the weather, but I only caught fragments of it. All the signs were propitious, and as it had been a fine harvest under similar conditions before, people said it would be fine this time. But, unlike the law, the weather acknowledged no precedent, and nobody could tell, though folk now thought they knew everything. How all things had changed since the Queen ascended the throne! Not long since Hilary was talking with a labourer, an elderly man, who went to the feast in Overboro' town on the day of the coronation. The feast was held in the market-place, and the puddings, said the old fellow regretfully, were so big they were brought in on hand-barrows.

It was difficult since he himself remembered even to learn the state of the markets. So few newspapers came into country places that before service on Sundays the farmers gathered round anybody in the churchyard who was known to take in a paper, to get particulars from this fortunate individual. Letters rarely came to the farmhouse door then. The old postman made a very good thing of his office—people were so eager for news, and it was easy to take a magpie glance at a newspaper. So he called at the butcher's before he started out, and in exchange for a peep at the paper got a little bit of griskin, or a chop, and at the farmhouses as he passed they gave him a few eggs, and at the inns a drop of gin. Thus a dozen at least read scraps before it reached the rightful owner.

If anything very extraordinary had happened he would shout it out as he went through the hamlet. Hilary said he well remembered being up on the roof of the house one morning, mending the thatch, when suddenly a voice—it was the postman's—cried from the road, 'Royal Exchange burned down!' In this way news got about before the present facilities were afforded. But some of the old folk still regretted the change and believed that we should some day be punished for our worship of steam. Steam had brought us to rely on foreign countries for our corn, and a day would come when through a war, or a failure of the crops there, the vast population of this country would be in danger of famine. But 'old folk' are prone to prophesy disaster and failure of all kinds.