In a Quiet Village

by S. Baring-Gould

In the midst of such beauty, such plenty, such softness, humanity cannot be rough and harsh. It is not so. The simplest peasant has the courtesy of a noble, and the lowliest girl the grace of a princess. In that warm, soft, crumbling soil hearts are also warm, soft, and—well, we must admit it—crumbling too.

Where Nature does so much for man, man is perhaps not greatly inclined to do much for himself, and this applies especially to his intellectual faculties. What compulsory education may do I cannot tell—it may change all this; but till of late years—allow it frankly—there was astounding ignorance in this favoured land. And with ignorance goes credulity.

Now I am going to tell of the inmates of one of these cobb cottages in the paradisaical land of New Redsandstone, in which also paradisaical ignorance was to be found.

This cottage, the face of which was white-washed and crept over with monthly roses, was occupied by Richard Redlake and his wife Julia.

They were both young people. He between thirty and forty, she half-way between twenty and thirty. Julia had been quite the prettiest girl in a village where not a girl lived who was not pretty. She had dark hair, and the softest, largest, most melting eyes, like rich agate, a complexion transparent, pure, with the sweetest rose-flush in it; and her figure was slender and willowy.

Julia could neither read nor write. Possibly because she could neither read nor write she was a most neat and knowing housewife, who kept her cottage in beautiful order, and whitened her hearth-stone and threshold every day, and even twice a day, and burnished pans and candlesticks and old mustard tins on the chimney shelf till they shone as gold and silver. Most labourers’ wives possess the alchemical art of transforming soft, succulent meat over a fire into leather or indiarubber, and are peculiarly skilful in destroying the digestions of their husbands. But Julia, perhaps because unable to read and write, turned out a bit of steak, or the meat in a pasty, or a stew, soft and delicious.

I say that this was due to ignorance of the two principal R’s, because nowadays working-men’s wives are too much taken up with penny dreadfuls and writing letters on parochial gossip to be able to spare the time for such menial work as keeping their houses neat, their own persons clean, and cooking meals with all their attention devoted to the task.

With these good qualities there was a drawback—ignorance, abysmal ignorance. Although Julia could not read, she believed in printed matter as something indisputable. What stood, as she termed it, “on the paper” was to be accepted as gospel.

For a couple of years after they were married, old Jack Hannaford, her father, lived with the young couple. And see—here is another odd thing. I am going to tell you about him after he was dead and buried.

Hannaford had been a queer old file, cantankerous, cute in his way, scheming, but doing nothing with his plans, because he neither had the means nor the vigour to carry them out. Julia had believed implicitly in him, and “Alack a jimminy!” said she, “vayther were a wun’nerful clever man; if he’d only not been crippled, and had had a penny wi’ which he could speckerlate, he’d ha’ been a gem’man by now.”