Page:The Galaxy (New York, Sheldon & Co.) Volume 24 (1877).djvu/681

 "It draws ten feet of water," he at last went on. "How much water is there?" said the young girl. She spoke in a charming voice. "There are thirty feet of water," said the young man. "Oh, that's enough," said the young girl. I had had an idea they were flirting. It was an ancient room and extremely picturesque; everything was polished over with the brownness of centuries. The chimney-piece was carved a foot thick, and the windows bore, in colored glass, the quarterings of ancestral couples. These had stopped two hundred years before; there was nothing newer than that date. Outside the windows was a deep, broad moat, which washed the base of gray walls—gray walls spotted over with the most delicate yellow lichens.

In such a region as this mellow, conservative Warwickshire an appreciative American finds the small things quite as suggestive as the great. Everything, indeed, is suggestive, and impressions are constantly melting into each other and doing their work before he has had time to ask them where they came from. He cannot go into a vine-covered cottage to see a genial gentlewoman and a "nice girl" without being reminded forsooth of "The Small House at Allington." Why of "The Small House at Allington"? There is a larger house at which the ladies come up to dine; but that is surely an insufficient reason. That the ladies are charming—even that is not reason enough; for there have been other nice girls in the world than Lily Dale, and other mellow matrons than her mamma. Reminded, however, he is—especially when he goes out upon the lawn. Of course there is lawn-tennis, and it seems all ready for Mr. Crosbie to come and play. This is a small example of the way in which I caught my impertinent imagination constantly at play. In driving and walking, in looking and listening, everything seemed in some degree or other characteristic of a rich, powerful, old-fashioned society. One had no need of being told that this is a conservative county; the fact seemed written in the hedgerows and in the verdant acres behind them. Of course the owners of these things were conservative; of course they were stubbornly unwilling to see the great, harmonious edifice of Church and State the least bit shaken. I had a feeling, as I went about, that I should find some very ancient and curious opinions still comfortably domiciled in the fine old houses whose clustered gables and chimneys appeared here and there, at a distance, above their ornamental wards. Self-complacent British Toryism, viewed in this vague and conjectural fashion—across the fields and behind the oaks and birches—is by no means a thing the irresponsible stranger would wish away; it deepens the local color; it may be said to enhance the landscape. I got a sort of constructive sense of its presence in the picturesque old towns of Coventry and Warwick, which appear to be filled with those institutions—chiefly of an eleemosynary order—that Toryism takes a genial comfort in. There are ancient charities in these places—hospitals, almshouses, asylums, infant schools—so quaint and venerable that they almost make the existence of poverty a delectable and satisfying thought. In Coventry in especial, I believe, these pious foundations are so numerous as almost to place a premium upon misery. Invidious reflections apart, however, there are few things that speak more quaintly and suggestively of the old England that an American loves than these clumsy little monuments of ancient benevolence. Such an institution as Leicester's hospital at Warwick seems indeed to exist primarily for the sake of its spectacular effect upon the American tourists, who, with the dozen rheumatic old soldiers maintained in affluence there, constitute its principal clientèle.

The American tourist usually comes straight to this quarter of England—chiefly for the purpose of paying his respects to Shakespeare's birthplace. Being here, he comes to Warwick to see the castle; and being at Warwick, he