about in proportion as they were overgrown; and gates have been left swinging. Dead leaves and decayed plants choke the channels in which the waters should run, from the church spout to the field drains. The beasts get through every gap, and break every gate, and poach every damp path, and stir up the mud, so as to give broad hints that it is time they were kept at home, and all made tight behind them.
Now is the great brewing time for those who have to provide large households, or gangs of labourers, with beer. The best beer for keeping, the farmers say, is made in October, and hence the name of our ancestors’ best ale. In the hop counties this is a busy time for clearing the grounds, and taking away the poles to stack. In other counties, nearer to the seats of our great textile manufactures, the woodland of a farm is now the most interesting part of it. Under the constant demand for bobbins, certain coppice woods are more valuable than ever before; and great landowners aim at having twenty coppices, in order to cut down one each year in turn for ever,—a twenty years’ growth being the best. Farmers who cannot achieve anything like this may yet have some to dispose of one year with another; and they may be now seen either taking the speculative purchaser to their woodlands, to count and mark the young trees, and bid for the lot, as it stands, to be removed at his own cost, or the farm-labourers are at work, under their master, or his woodman, cutting down and trimming the coppice wood, for the market. It is a somewhat dreary sight, in our hill districts, to see every year some wooded upland or ravine in every valley cleared out,—laid bare,—only stumps and refuse left of the feathery foliage which had pleased the eye in all lights, and which will be missed by every household below. In the next year the ruin will be somewhat covered over by the sprouting of the coming copse from that which is gone; and the stumps make the finest preserve for primroses that can be. Every year now helps to restore the beauty; but every year some other spot is laid waste,—so entirely as a matter of course, that none but fresh observers take much notice of it. For some weeks to come, however, there will be movement enough on the hill-sides to attract the eye, and remind the observer that the time has arrived for the league between the factory and the bobbin-mill and the woodland portion of the farm.
It is no wonder that the neighbours who can find or make time hang about the spot. The boys find cast snake skins in the grass, and peer about to discover where the snakes and vipers are burying themselves for the winter. The squirrels are a far prettier sport—always pretty at their play, and even more interesting when they are collecting and hiding their winter store. They rustle among the fallen leaves when seizing a beech-nut; and patiently they sit in wait for acorns; and deftly they pick up any hazel-nut, lost from a child’s pocket, or swept down by the breeze. Then there are the wood pigeons, making themselves at home for the winter; and the rooks carrying on a close examination of their nesting trees, as if with clear foresight of St. Valentine’s season. These stirrings in the woodlands, with the mournful charm of falling leaves, and the beauty of variegated foliage, may well draw thither all who love pleasures not the less for their being calm and grave.
In a small way these young woods remind one of the old woods where the ancient customs of the swineherds still exist. We do not rival Germany in either the extent of our forests or the docility of our pigs. We do not train our swine to understand the horn or obey the whip; but there are forest ranges still in England where acorns and beechmast are plentiful, and where racy pork is bred, as good as any in Westphalia or Ohio. I am unpoetical enough to believe that the very best pork is that reared on meal and milk as the staple food; but I own to a feeling of gratification when my boys come home with a basketful of beechnuts for the pig, or the village children offer acorns for sale. We buy all they bring. My wife says it is because “Ivanhoe” came out when we were children, investing swine feeding with a perpetual charm. However that may be, the farmers’ pigs are out in the beech and oak woods at this time, in all good mast and acorn seasons. Every year at this season, too, our children ask once more whether our ancestors really ate acorns, and taste, and try again, and cannot conceive it possible. If told the tradition of sweet acorns, they inquire why our pigs have not the advantage of them at this day.
October is so charming a month to us at home that we envy neither the Alpine climber, nor the angler in Norway, nor the contemplative philosopher in London, nor the Lincolnshire fowler, nor the swineherd in the New Forest, or the Black Forest, or “the primeval forest” across the Atlantic, or any other. Our hands are full of business; but we enjoy it. I am superintending the planting of new fruit trees, and the setting up of a new evergreen hedge, while the girls are taking up their geraniums and making a spring bed, dressed with the finest soil, and filled with hyacinth bulbs, and tulips, and anemones, and hepaticas—a border of crocuses of all colours running round it. In the pleasure of this preparation for spring, they can bear the sight and scent of dying leaves, and blossoms that fall with a touch, or without one. A few hollyhocks and asters and starworts, set off with bright holly sprays, and red vine leaves, and yellow ash and birch sprays, and dark ivy, and the scarlet and purple berries of the season, make a good substitute in the house for summer bouquets; and outside the house, the Virginia-creeper, relieved against the ivy, with bunches of clematis hanging from the angles, and a China rose or two beside the door, may well satisfy us in these shortening days. The old women from the village have daily employment now in keeping the lawn and the green walk clear of leaves; and the compost heap beside the orchard becomes something vast. The gardener is ridging his vacated beds, and thinning his turnips and spinach, and earthing up the celery. He is, perhaps, a little jealous of my wife’s notion of what clean glass is. Now that the greenhouse has been thoroughly examined, and every chink mended, my wife proceeds to have every pane there, and