Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/48

 the brook, Mickleham the great home, and Effingham is probably Upping home; but what is Darkham?"

"The dark home," said Jack, as if the question were settled.

"No, that's not it, though I think you may be right about the name. Darag or Darach is the old Celtic for oak, and Darkham is the home among the oak-trees."

"You've got it now," said Jack. "That's it for sartain."

I have had many talks with Jack, and have taken considerable interest in his humble fortunes. As soon as the leaves fall from the trees and the nights begin to grow cold and frosty, Jack retires from the busy world into his winter palace. That palace is the workhouse, or rather the workhouse infirmary; for Jack cannot work if he would, and his rheumatism or poor man's gout—he does not exactly know to which of the two names his inveterate malady is properly entitled—requires the treatment that none but the parish doctor and the parish funds will supply. But as soon as the cuckoo is heard in the woods, Jack, after a hybernation which he has shared with the flies, the bees, the dormice, and other of God's creatures, which are mercifully permitted to sleep all through the season when no food is to be found for them, emerges once again into the light of day to ply his vocation. He looks so very miserable, and so picturesque, that many kind-hearted people stop him on the road, and give him either of their own poverty or of their riches the wherewithal to make himself a little more comfortable. But he never asks for charity. For this reason he denies being a beggar—a figment, a white lie, a suppressio veri, whatever it may be called, which does no harm to anybody, while it administers very sensibly to the little pride that the world and old age and hard struggles have left in him. It is his wish to earn an honest subsistence, and he does his best in that direction, and with a very patient, humble, and uncomplaining spirit. The first objects of his solicitude as soon as he is emancipated from his winter thraldom are the primrose roots and flowers, with which he drives his small bargains in the towns and villages with people who want to ornament their little front gardens or their cottage windows, and which he sells for what he can get—for a penny or a halfpenny a root, or for a piece of bread, or, better still, for a pair of old boots or shoes, or any cast-off garment that may be too ragged for the poorest of the poor, but which is not utterly valueless to such as he. He also collects herbs, or, as he calls them, "yarbs," either for the garden or for the use of the poor people and the notable housewives among them, who have faith in simples for his treatment and cure of burns and scalds or other simple maladies. Though, unlike Milton's herbalist, he cannot

he can display some dozens of varieties in his basket, and can tell what they were supposed to be good for. One day he got an order from a village apothecary for cartloads of groundsel, if he could collect as much, and was busy on the job for a whole fortnight. It was wanted for a military hospital for the purpose of making poultices. But he never received so extensive an order again. Ferns and orchids were other sources of income, and last, but by no means the least, were watercresses and mushrooms. Jack has no faith in the new-fangled ideas about mushrooms, and does not believe that there is more than one kind in England that is edible. "Mushrooms," said he, with a conservatism strongly opposed to the radicalism of the present day, that will not allow us our ancient faith even in fungi, "have been growing in the English meadows for a thousand years, and if there were more than one sort good for eating, do you think our grandfathers and their grandfathers would not have found it out? No, no!" he added, with strong emphasis, "there is only one mushroom: all the others are toadstools: and I won't believe otherwise if all the doctors in England says the contrary."

There is a suspicion afloat, that in his early manhood, and when he first took to the road, Jack got into trouble, and was had before a justice of the peace for poaching. But the suspicion is too vague and shadowy to merit much notice. I have tried more than once to get him on the subject of the Game Laws, as affecting people in his circumstances and the rural population generally; but he has always evaded it, and expressed no opinion, or even made a remark, except "that he did not understand about that." Jack can read, and has a small, dog's-eared, and very shabby-looking and well-thumbed Bible, which he carries in his basket, and reads every Sunday in the fields, out of the public path somewhere, when the weather is fine, and he has enough bread-and-cheese or scraps of victuals in his pocket to serve for his dinner. He never goes to church in the summer when he is a free man, having been, he