“Mount and follow! stout and cripple!
Horse and hattock, ‘but and ben;’[157]
Horses for the Pixie people,
Hattock for the Brownie men.”
People may talk if they please about the march of agriculture, and they may boast that by the discoveries of science a man will soon be able to carry into a large field enough manure for its soil in his coat-pocket, but there has been the ready answer, “Yes, and bring away the produce in his fob.” I am half inclined to agree with an old parishioner of mine, who used often to say, “It was an unlucky time for England when the phrase ‘gentleman farmer’ came up, and folks began to try their new-fangled plans—such as clover for horses and turnips for sheep.” “Rents,” he declared, “were never lower than when a tenant would pare and burn,[158] and take their crops out of every field, so as to carry off the land as much as he brought on it”—a theory on which, being a renter himself, he had thriven, and put by money for full fifty years. Equally original, by the way, were the devices cherished by my aged friend for the repair of roads. When Macadam had driven his first turnpike through the West, a public dinner was given in honour of the event; and being presented with a free ticket, and well coaxed into the bargain, Old Trevarten made his appearance as a guest. But it was observed that, amid all the jingling of glasses and cheering of toasts, he sat motionless and mute, if not actually sulky. At length the engineer, somewhat piqued at his silence, said, during a pause, “Why, sir, I am afraid that I have not had the honour of gaining your approval in this undertaking of mine.”
“To tell you the truth, sir,” was the slow and sturdy answer, “I don’t like your road at all, by no means.”
“Well, but what are your reasons, sir, for disliking what most people are pleased with?”
“Why, sir, you have had a brave lot of money out of the country, and there’s nothing as I see to show for it—’tis all gone!”
“Gone, sir, gone! Why, bless me, isn’t there the road—the fine, wide, level road?”
“Well, yes, sartainly; but where’s they matereyals that cost such a sight of taxes? You’ve smashed mun to nort: there’s pilm [dust] in the drought, and there’s mucks [mud] in the rain, but nowt else that I see. Now, when I wor way-warden of Wide Widger, I let the farmers have something to show for their money. Why, sir, ’tis ten year agone come Candlemas that I wor in office for the ways, and I put down stones as big as beehives, and there they be now!”
Access to such a living volume of bygone usages and notions was an advantage not to be despised, and it was long my custom to resort to “mine ancient” for information difficult to be obtained elsewhere. Once “I do remember me” that I encountered him in the middle of a reedy marsh on his farm. He paused, and awaited my approach, leaning on his staff just where the path crossed a bed of the cotton-rush, then in full bloom. I had gathered a handful of the stalks, each with its pod of fine white gossamer threads, like a bunch of snowy silk.
“Ha!” said he, with a kind of half alarm, “you bean’t afeared to pick that there?”
“Afraid? No; why should I be?”