Page:The English Peasant.djvu/154

 upper windows gave them the appearance of two ill-matched eyes peeping out from under heavy humorous eyebrows.

As I sat, I heard the voices of a number of little children all repeating together their catechism. "To submit myself to my pastors and masters, and to order myself lowly and reverently to all my betters," were, singular to say, the words which caught iHy ear.

Leaving Minestead, I crossed Squire Compton's Park, where the cottages, models of beauty, comfort, and picturesqueness, stand in their own Httle grounds in the midst of their lord's larger ones. They were occupied by the labourers on the manor, and were let to them according to size, from one to two shillings a week. On the outskirts of the Forest, near Lyndhurst, I came on a little hamlet, and seating myself on some logs of wood which lay on the corner of the sward, watched its life. Before me on one side of the road stood a row of blind-eyed, brown-bonnetted cots; then a wheelwright's shop, where the furnace was burning and the hammer twanging; next a smithy, where the horse stood quietly while the farrier tapped his shoe; last of all, an old cot under the shade of a large tree, with a man on a ladder mending the roof. Opposite was a little road-side inn, with wondrous attractions both for the waggoner and his horse. In the inn-yard were stacks of fern and hay, the former being used for litter, as straw would be elsewhere. Along the edge of the grass, a couple of black sows, followed by their numerous progeny, went nosing about with a most unsatisfied grunt, while a company of geese with nervous quack-quack strutted over the green.

Twang of hammer, quack of geese, and grunt of mother porker, with sudden squeal of horror from every little pigling if horse or carriage wheel too suddenly approached; loud talk of men and women rising fully with the wind, and you have the sights and sounds which go to make up a picture of out-door life in these secluded spots.

It is quite possible that in the less frequented parts of the Forest one might meet with uncouthness and suspicion, but for my part, I found them not only civil but friendly; and this experience is corroborated by those who know them well, and who protest against a character for unusual rudeness being ascribed