Page:The English Peasant.djvu/164

 To all, however, there surely remains one great advantage,—the situation. To live on the edge of a breezy common, where the children can scamper about all the livelong day, would seem to many a parent, compelled to bring up his family in the close street of a city, an advantage impossible to over-estimate. Glorious indeed looks one of these commons on a bright summer's morning. How vast and wide the expanse seems to stretch, skirted here and there by lines of deep green foliage. On one side, elbowing into the common land, stand a group of cottages, while afar off in the centre is a wind-mill slowly winding its sails. The heather is in full bloom, bluebells nod their pretty heads, and the wild thyme scents the breeze.

Or it is a day more in accordance with the wilder scenery of a West Surrey common. The wind blows gustily, and dark, angry clouds rapidly alternate with patches of blue sky. The rugged, broken waste is covered with black furze, while on its skirts, here and there, are little homesteads, enclosed in thick quickset hedges, and surrounded by stunted, wind-bitten trees. In the foreground here comes the donkey and the geese, and perhaps the roadside inn, with its signboard standing some distance off on the green, flapping to and fro in the breeze. Imagine such a picture, backed off with a distant horizon of purply grey pines, and what scene can be more suggestive of health and enjoyment? And doubtless, where a common is on the uplands, where the oil is sandy and pebbly, where, in fact, Nature never intended the land for a much better fate, the people who live upon it are healthy. But when a common is wet clay, only needing to be drained to become valuable land, there hideous malaria rises every autumn and winter, and woe to the unhappy people who dwell upon its borders.

One evening this summer I was passing over a common not twenty miles from London. It was a wild spot, broken up by pools of water, and skirted by tall trees, amongst which the little cots hid themselves. The great red sun was sinking over the woods which crowned the western height. As every sight was beautiful, so every sound was pleasant. The tinkle of the sheep-bell, the soft "baa" of the lambs, the merry voices of the boys playing at cricket in one corner, the sudden blow of the ball, all was suggestive of rural poetry.