Page:Tom Brown's School Days (6th ed).djvu/40

 of science, not one in twenty of you knows where to find the wood-sorrel or bee-orchis which grows in the next wood or on the down three miles off, or what the bog-bean and wood-sage are good for. And as for the country legends, the stories of the old gable-ended farm-houses, the place where the last skirmish was fought in the civil wars, where the parish butts stood, where the last highwayman turned to bay, where the last ghost was laid by the parson, they're gone out of date altogether.

Now, in my time, when we got home by the old coach which put us down at the cross-roads with our boxes, the first day of the holidays, and had been driven off by the family coachman, singing Dulce Domum at the top of our voices, there we were, fixtures, till black Monday came around. We had to cut out our own amusements within a walk or ride of home. And so we got to know all the country folk, and their ways and songs and stories by heart, and went over the fields and woods and hills again and again till we made friends of them all. We were Berkshire, or Gloucestershire, or Yorkshire boys, and you're young cosmopolites, belonging to all countries and no countries. No doubt it's all right—I dare say it is. This is the day of large views and glorious humanity, and all that; but I wish backsword play hadn't gone out in the Vale of White Horse, and that that confounded Great Western hadn't carried away Alfred's Hill to make an embankment.

But to return to the said Vale of White Horse, the country in which the first scenes of this true and interesting story are laid. As I said, the Great Western now runs right through it, and it is a land of large, rich pastures, bounded by fox-fences and covered with fine hedgerow timber, with here and there a nice little gorse or spinney, where abideth poor Charley, having no other cover to which to betake himself for miles and miles when pushed out some fine November morning by the Old Berkshire. Those who have been there, and well mounted, only know how he and the stanch little pack who dash after him—heads high and sterns low,