Page:The English Peasant.djvu/260

 cheese for our supper. Her fire was made of turf cut from the neighbouring heath; and her evening light was a rush dipped in grease."

Cobbett's description of the locality of his grandmother's cottage, more than once repeated, is so exact that there is not much difficulty in deciding where it once stood. About a half-mile on the road from Farnham to Waverley is a turning to the left, which leads across a wild, sandy Surrey common, rich with brake, and heather, and ling, and broken up everywhere into dells and lanes. Two paths cross each other at right angles, and the cottages, which are scattered all over the common, have to some extent taken their line in connection with these paths. Each stands in its own little garden, or sometimes large garden. On the verge of this common, looking across the valley of the Wey, about a mile from Farnham, just where the road from Moor Park runs into the Farnham Road, stood two little cottages, one of which would, in all probability, have been Grandmother Cobbett's.

What a playground was that wild bit of common for the sturdy little Surrey urchin! It was such a spot as this, if not this very spot, which he pointed out to his son as the sand-hill to which he owed so much. Down its steep sides he and his two brothers rolled each other until their hair, eyes, ears, nose, and mouth were filled with sand, each roll ending in shouts of laughter "Happy as a sand-boy on a Surrey common" is his own description of the culmination of all human felicity, and probably it was the sense of the unending stock of health and good spirits which he then laid in that made him affirm with his usual emphasis that it was owing to the education received on that sand-hill that he was so vastly superior to "the frivolous idiots" turned out from "those dens of dunces called colleges and universities."

No pinching hunger stunted his mind or body. His father was well-to-do, as one may see from his birthplace. It is impossible to read his books, and doubt that he had a soul all alive to the influences of Nature. Up at early dawn, what sights such a boy would see and unconsciously treasure up in his memory! The hill on which his grandmother's cottage stood rises between the two noble demesnes of Moor Park and Waverley Abbey. The road in front immediately curved beneath the woods of Waverley;