Windyridge

by W. Riley

The kitten in them gambols and makes fun whole-heartedly for several hours at a stretch on the afternoon of Whit Monday, and with such kindliness and good humour that one cannot help feeling that the world is very young and one's self not so very old either.

I thought the rain was going to spoil everything. Day by day for a week it had come down with a steady determination that seemed to mean the ruin of holiday prospects. The foliage certainly looked all the fresher for it, and the ash took heart to burst its black buds and help to swell the harmony of the woods. But these are æsthetic considerations which do not appeal to people who are looking forward to a good time—a time of fun and frolic for some, and harvesting of shekels for others.

When I woke on the Sunday, however, old Father Sol had shaken off his lethargy, bundled the surly clouds into the store-room, locked the door and put the key into his pocket, and strolled forth to enjoy the sight of his welcome. Meadow, pasture and moor, green hedgerow and brown road were silvered over with sunshine, and the flowers looked up and laughed the tears away from their faces, and told themselves that everything had been for the best; and the cocks crowed lustily from the walls where they had flown to greet the sun, and all the birds came out from eave and tree and lowly nest, and sang their doxology in happy and tuneful notes which told how brimful they were of joy.

Long before church-time it was so hot that the fields were steaming like drying clothes before the fire, and as I walked back from Fawkshill after the morning service I felt sure that there need be no misgiving about the dryness of the grass for the children's treat on the morrow. Everybody was concerned for the children! Young women of eighteen and young men of the same age had no real concern or interest in the weather except in so far as it involved disappointment to the children! Well, well! How easily we deceive ourselves, and how unwilling we are to acknowledge the child within the man!

In the afternoon I went to chapel with Mother Hubbard, and saw and heard that which made me want to laugh and cry at the same time, and I really do not know why I should have done either. My emotions seem to take holiday sometimes and enjoy themselves in their own peculiar way without restraint. Let me set down my experiences.

Do you know what a "sitting-up" is? If you live in Yorkshire or Lancashire no doubt you do, but if you are a southerner or a more northern northerner the probability is that you do not. When Mother Hubbard told me that the children were to "sit up" at the chapel on Whit Sunday I stared at her without understanding. "Do they usually stand up or lie down?" I inquired.

Then it occurred to me that this was, perhaps, a metaphorical way of speaking, and that there was, so to speak, a "rod in pickle" for the bairns on this special occasion, but why I could not imagine. Yet I knew that when an irate Windyridge father undertook to make his lad "sit up," it usually betokened some little difficulty in sitting at all until the soreness wore off.

This, however, foreboded nothing of so unpleasant a nature. When I entered the light and airy little sanctuary I found thirty or forty children ranged in rows one above the other, in front of the little pulpit. Not many boys were there, and there was nothing specially attractive about those who were, beyond the attractiveness that lurks within the face of every cleanly-washed child. But the girls were a picture; they were all in white, but most of them had coloured sashes round their waists, and coloured ribbons in their hair, and one or two were distinguished by black adornments, betokening the recent visit of that guest who is so seldom regarded as a friend.

Some of the frocks were new, but most of them were old; and it is safe to assume that the younger children were wearing what had served the turn of a past generation of "sitters-up." In some cases they were so inadequate to the requirements of the long-limbed, growing maidens who wore them, that it cannot be denied that the dresses "sat up" even more than their owners, so that the white cotton stockings were taxed to the utmost to maintain conventional decency.

To listen to the children's performances, rather than to the address of the preacher, the chapel was uncomfortably crowded by what the handbills called "parents, relatives and friends."