resounded with the echoes of the thank-kisses which were bestowed on him by every man of the company.
One singular custom has yet to be noticed. The shepherds sitting alone on the hill-tops have found means of communicating with each other, by adopting such a modulation of their voice as will make it audible at a great distance. The pitch is that of a deep howl, and travellers continually hear drawling sounds floating around them, which, though incomprehensible to them, are quite plain to the initiated half a mile off, and which perhaps give a full account of themselves. For not only is this practice adopted to relieve loneliness, but it has become a regular telegraphic system. If a message has to be conveyed to a distant part, it is echoed from mountain-top to mountain-top in an incredibly short time. If marauders have attacked a district, the alarm is spread all round, and in an hour or two, hundreds of armed warriors have assembled to pursue and punish the enemy. Or in peaceful times, often, the wild heroic songs of the country are repeated from voice to voice, through the quiet moonlit, starlit nights, till the whole region is filled with sounds, which, if strange and meaningless to the alien ear, are choice music to the patriot soul, or a fierce incentive to his flagging spirits.
HIGH ELMS.
High Elms, on a hot July day, is the place to which I wish to lead the reader. High Elms, the little Surrey market-town, with its small but pleasant world, including a parish church, an Ebenezer chapel, a dozen or two of more or less thriving shops, a decaying pair of stocks, two inns, and some hundred habitations of all degrees of rank, from the portly rector’s down to the dirty one room of Silly-Billy, the idiot-butt, the messenger and general odd-man of High Elms.
I take the place at about eleven a.m., before the cool morning shadows have yet furled their tents—before King Sunshine has entire dominion over it—while still one half of most of the streets are cool, and in the shade, wearing (if the fancy may be allowed me) a parti-coloured suit of grey and gold. This is the hopeful youth of the day; but presently the town will be deluged with sun, and will become a silent burning desert, with nothing to be seen but the rustling swallows that will interweave like flying shuttles round the market-cross. The hour I choose is the hour when industrious people, like Butcher Thorns, seem to enjoy their work, and no one yet stops to lean over half-doors or counters and complain of the heat.
By the bye, Butcher Thorns’ shop is quite a pretty sight this morning. Behind those three young limes that flutter breezily, some twenty feet from his door, there hang on high hooks four carcases of sheep, the fat showing here and there in oval white slashes on the pink, and suggesting innumerable good dinners. Thorns himself, lively and jolly, is cleaving out chops on the big block, or is tossing red flabs of steaks into his large greasy oscillating scales; the while, Joe, his boy, puffing in blue linen suit, is preparing that smart fast-going cart for the morning’s tour; the dog Blucher is leaping up at the horse’s chin in pure delight; and, through the half-open door of the back-shop, I see Thorns’ last baby playing with a large sheep’s head with professional delight.
But men of gentler trades are busy too this morning in High Elms. There, I see, is Collingwood, the bookseller, busy binding some books for the rector. Now he heats his roulettes on a circular gas-stove, now he tries their heat with his damp finger, and all this while little escaped flecks of gold-leaf flutter about the outer shop like little gilt butterflies. Now he tortures a long suffering book in his screw-press; now he shaves the leaves even with his “plough:” not a handier workman in the county than our friend Collingwood—and he works from dark to dark.
High Elms is a sporting place, and of course the chief inn goes by the name of Flying Childers. I am glad to say that it is just now quite empty, unless I count Silly-Billy (who, by the bye, when drunk, calls himself “champion of the light weights,”) and who is now discussing a pint of ale with a lazy groom of Squire Harcourt’s—a very ill-disposed, vicious fellow, who has been in the town lock-up more than once. Silly-Billy has a great admiration for Jack Hughes, he runs for him to the saddler’s, borrows cards for him, and makes himself generally indispensable; otherwise the inn is quiet, the sanded parlour is lonely, and the pot-boy, meditative and serious about last night’s skittles, is scouring pewter pots in the back yard.
Harding, the chemist, preserves a neatness about his place, almost Dutch-like: the gilt-labelled bottles are trim and even; the green, yellow, and crimson globes in the window glow like enormous rubies and topazes. At the present moment Harding is instructing the boy how to work the pill machine with celerity, and yet with efficiency; after which that smooth-faced boy will be put through a course of Dog Latin, so that he may understand the shop drawers one from another, on which knowledge hangs undoubtedly the lives of many High Elms worthies.
Further up the street the shop of Mr. Dawson, upholsterer, haberdasher, and undertaker, is now rapidly waking into full life. The young men are running about with rolls of carpet and arms full of gay silks; for Mr. Dawson, having a grand funeral on hand, is in the best possible spirits, which makes all the shop in a good humour, even down to the last new boy, who does not yet know where anything is, and is always making his appearance in the crape department, looking for cap ribbons, and is abused accordingly.
The saddler, Day, a little further on, at the end of High Street, is more than preparing work; he and his men are at it, heads down. I can see them through the Chiffney bits and the steel trappings in the window; and humbler men, too, are busy, for up that narrow passage up which the curate has just gone to read to old Goody Rayner, I can hear the old shoemaker’s hammer tapping like the note of a woodpecker.
Yonder, just beyond the stocks, where the pigeons are sunning their purple necks, is the basket shop, over which is the drill-room and armoury of the High Elms Rifles: beyond there is
