Page:Once a Week Volume 7.djvu/507

 . 25, 1862.] “Whose?” she exclaimed, in a sharp voice, her tone changing. And Dan spoke a little louder.

“It was Mr. Frederick Massingbird’s!”

this title suggests anything but the right man in the right place, it is no fault of mine. A bishop at a prize fight, a bull in a china shop, a fish out of water, or a nigger in the Senate of the United States, might perhaps, to an unreflecting person, seem equally at home. But the days are long passed away, when the metropolitan idea of the country was formed merely by acquaintance with St. Giles’s Fields or Islington Green. Is it necessary for me to vindicate my self-election to the post of cicerone by giving testimonials of fitness for the place, or will you follow my description of a scene just now very common throughout England, content with the assurance that although I date from Pump Court, Temple, I have whistled at the plough, and have really some good claims to be regarded as a practical farmer?

Suppose we lay the scene in Kent, not a hundred miles from London, in one of those wide and shallow valleys which diversify the Weald of this and of the adjoining county of Sussex. Ethnologically it is a most interesting corner of England, for here the Saxon element is purest, witness the fair hair and blue eyes of the peasants, the sons of those brave men who formed the van of Harold’s army at Hastings. It is also worth remarking that Weald is but the German Wald. But I am going to write concerning the events of last week, not of those which occurred before the Conquest, and if I do not begin at the commencement of my journey, it is only because an express train on the South-Eastern is a very common-place and prosaic affair, unless treated after the manner of Mr. Turner’s “Speed, Steam, and Snow,” a style which no amount of word painting can imitate.

However, the mail train deposited me at Oakford, and my friend’s carriage quickly conveyed me and my luggage to Park.

I don’t know anything more refreshing to an unhappy bachelor, wearied with his own society, and with all the gloom of three hours’ travelling in no other company full upon him, than suddenly to enter upon the refined luxury of a warm and bright drawing-room, well furnished with ladies. “This is irrelevant,” you say, “this is not ploughing,—we know all about this.” I must plead guilty; but surely you would not have a picture all of one colour; if we are to be of the earth, earthy, don’t be so unreasonable as to exclude that which must do duty for the blue sky in my landscape. A drawing-room may look into a plough-field, and surely “a Londoner at a ploughing-match” may glance at a piano. As it happens that I am quite as partial to drawing-rooms as to ploughing-fields I might perhaps stay here if not ordered to move on, so, accepting the correction, we will consider that in the company of some charming young ladies I have studied the programme of the Oakford Agricultural Association, from which were gathered the facts that my good friend and host is the President, and that the ploughing takes place the next morning in a field about two miles distant.

It was proposed that we should see the ploughs start, which involved the necessity of leaving Park by eight o’clock, and probably no ambitious ploughman desired a fine to-morrow more than I, who awoke to find the sun shining through my windows, encircled by the precise density of mist which is the most certain sign of fair weather at this season of the year. You would take but slight interest in knowing what I had for breakfast, or in my opinion of girls in riding-habits, or in the kindly remarks which their lady-mother may have exchanged with me across the urn; so we will turn out of doors at once.

It has always been my opinion that the Strand is a pleasant place enough, and that there is not a mile of country in broad England to compare with it for varied scenery. Its ever-changing pictures of busy human life are to me a delightful study; but a fine autumn morning in the country, with every tree dropping diamonds of dew, where velvety meadows seem strewn with brilliants, beats it hollow. Add to these beauties of Nature, three of her fairest productions in the similitude of my companions, and then the no less pleasant company of the President, their papa, a model of that invaluable race of country gentlemen, which the soil of England alone seems capable of supporting, and we are ready for a start to the scene of action. Having performed the pleasant office of stirrup-jack for the ladies, an operation in which I fear I am rather a clumsy practitioner, I mounted my horse, a little uncertain if five years’ absence from a saddle had not made it a dangerous eminence for me to climb to.

As we approached the place in something like a cavalcade, the road was blocked with teams and ploughs, some of the horses gaily decked with ribbons of bright colours; and the men wearing the working-dress of their every-day life, except where a clean white frock marked an attempt at gala costume. On entering the field, which lay fallow and ready to yield, almost too easily, to the pressure of the plough, we found that the working staff of the Association had already set out the requisite number of “cants” (the technical term for the piece of work allotted to each competitor), and soon the ploughmen and their mates, as the drivers are called, were busy in laying out the line of their first furrow. Groups of labourers stood about, watching the operation with that stolid look of supreme indifference which a real bucolic wears as his holiday face. They rarely conversed with each other, but were content with now and then throwing out observations, one after another, without much coherence or relevancy. Pulling up near a party which seemed to be much interested in the proceedings, but sorely hindered in their pleasure by the difficulty of hiding their hands, the sight of which appears hateful to a labourer at leisure, I heard the remark:

“That ere man a’ won six prizes.”

This was addressed to no one in particular, and referred, if I might judge by the direction of the speaker’s face, to a sunburnt, black-haired and