This short survey of coincidences in the experience of one person may be useful in more ways than one. Smaller occurrences have happened, but it did not seem worth while to note them. They seem to have produced a sort of feeling that my ‘luck’ was considerable, and accordingly I have thought it worth while to record them in the hope of discovering whether they have any value beyond that of interest for the curious.
RAMBLER’S LICHEN.
BY SIR JAMES H. YOXALL, M.P.
With trunk, limbs, and branches of travel an English country highway lies on the land like the section or vertical slice of a tall felled tree; fringes of hedge its foliage and fields its clouds of air. Never straight-ruled on the map, no Roman cypress nor close, unerring poplar, it is rather some indigenous great beech or elm, that swayed to the winds with a not too ready yielding, and grew up in lines hardly gaunt enough to be angular yet too clean-run to be curves.
Rooted at Sherborne, say, one of these great arboriferous road-systems wends north by east, towards camps of the present and earthworks of the past. At a widening of bole it forks, pushing one arm out easterly and another south-westerly; such is the swayed posture here that you glimpse the dryad in it, as you do the Venus de Milo in some real tree-trunk that ivy swathes to the hip. The eastward limb, if you cleave to that, will become stem itself, and sway out curved arms of its own to woo you; take one of those rustling prongs for a mile or two and it bifurcates, so that soon, like the squirrel, you must choose your branch. From bough to bough you may leap (so to speak) by agile footpaths, but if you keep on along a lean lane that presently thins into a mere rut, you attain to the extremest twig. It is thus that afoot from Sherborne you reach to Sandford Orcas, say, or if your wayfaring tree be rooted at Yeovil, to that extremity of path a foredraught (to use the old Worcestershire name for an approach to a farm), which brings you to Barrington Court.
And all along your way there will have been bivouacs of blossoms, fruit, seed for the next blooming; or in every footprint of Primavera you may have seen the primrose lichening the banks, some morning still covered with dew. Pray do not remark that the primroses are primulaceous—it is the occulter analogies a true loiterer likes to ramble into—nor declare that lichens are parasites which stifle their billets: maybe, maybe. But they are gentle intruders anyhow, no Prussians in Belgium, and the householder lives long, on excellent terms with his guest. Lichens are dowerings; indeed, our own wrinkles might be glad of them—they prank and enrich; even the sad coloured ones do, and the black. ‘These weeds are memories,’ Lear said, and fair lichen of remembrance, musing emotions of pity or relish, and dew of tears, even, may alight upon a rambler as he goes his discursive, his essayist’s way. Though he latterly gad at a slackening pace, and the extreme twig bring him, chief mourner for himself, at the head of a dark procession, to some short, shallow trench and clay cot, I think he will have been the happier and the longer-lived for his lichening; he may also have become wealthy meanwhile, in memorabilia, the thiefless hoard that never lessens; he may even have been hallowed somewhat, not left untouched at heart as the true ungodly, they whom neither the beauty of this world nor the dream of another can impassion, or the ‘sense of tears in mortal things’ soften inside. With a venial, reverent Pharisaism, therefore, that in truth is but gratitude, a rambler may thank his wandering stars that he has been no man unlichenable, upon whom no charm of place, or quip of illusion, nor the lacrymae rerum gat hold.
Lovely are the swayed bodies of dryad and Venus trees in silvery April, before they have hung their leafy mantillas and aprons about them, as if shrinking from gaze. But beautiful as September sunshine is the lichen upon them too, itself a veil; so goodly to look at that county men quarrel across their small frontiers about it—I remember Sir William Harcourt saying at Malwood that whenever Mr. Gladstone and he met in the country they contended whether Hawarden or Malwood trees were lichened the better. Yet I think it is upon stone walls and roofs, in Dorset, say, that the fungi-algae look best of all. Pickthanks and esurient flatterers of trees they may be, perhaps, but like Danaë gold and silver they descend upon masonry, giving, not taking, and finely wrought as coins that were minted at Syracuse. With nothing of Sir Gorgius Midas in their profusion, they do not pretend to be county people, exclusive, and as soon will gild a hamlet gable as a mansion coat-of-arms. Like sunshine spattered through meshes of leaves they descend upon their billets, but to last there after sunset, and to endure through winter, like our men entrenched in Flanders. The lodging they prefer is stone, I say—a brown stone that empurples; they seldom select the wattle-and-daub of a washed, half-timbered wall.
Few dwellings of that architecture linger on in stone counties now, however—I mean the prototypal make, the human nest built of mud; masonry has almost everywhere ousted the caked stuff which Shakespeare so often saw ‘stop a hole, to keep the wind away.’ In Warwickshire, Wilts, and other river-bed counties a rambler still happens upon this primal type of cottage sometimes; as he does at Clifden Hampden, in the aged building called the ‘Barley Mow’ near Wallingford Bridge. He recognises the ancient cot, cote, hutch, hut, or whatever its earliest English name was, by the inwardly-slanting timbers of its ends, cloven tree-trunks, which lean up into the gables from the floor corners, in couples that meet as if to embrace, beneath the watershed of the roof. Two pairs of such tree-trunks, starting from right distances at the base, and tied together at the top by a ridge-tree, formed the skeleton of the prototypal house; perhaps in the earliest huts the four supports were living saplings, still growing in pairs at convenient spots, for these could be yoked into service—bent while still green, to be then beheaded; maybe our word ‘roof-tree’ began in that.
We think of the famous half-timbered house at Stratford-on-Avon as ‘Elizabethan,’ but Beowulf may have had some such a habitation as that: this primal type must be inconceivably aged;