unters found an
historian to put them upon record, they would have read something like
the wars (without the bloodshed) between the little Greek cities,
whose population scarcely exceeded that of a village, and between
which and our old villages there exists a certain similarity. A
simplicity of sentiment, an unconsciousness as it were of themselves,
strong local attachments and hatreds, these they had in common, and
the Okebourne and Clipstone men thwacked and banged each other's broad
chests in true antique style.

Hilary said that when he was a boy almost all the cottages in the
place had a man or woman living in them who had attained to extreme
old age. He reckoned up cottage after cottage to me in which he had
known old folk up to and over eighty years of age. Of late the old
people seemed to have somehow died out: there were not nearly so many
now.

Okebourne Wick, a little hamlet of fifteen or twenty scattered houses,
was not more than half a mile from Lucketts' Place; on the Overboro'
road, which passed it, was a pleasant roadside inn, where, under the
sign of The Sun, very good ale was sold. Most of the farmers dropped
in there now and then, not so much for a glass as a gossip, and no one
from the neighbouring villages or from Overboro' town ever drove past
without stopping. In the 'tap' of an evening you might see the
labourers playing at 'chuck-board,' which consists in casting a small
square piece of lead on to certain marked divisions of a shallow
tray-like box placed on the trestle-table. The lead, being heavy,
would stay where it fell; the rules I do not know, but the scene
reminded me of the tric-trac contests depicted by the old Dutch
painters.

Young Aaron was very clever at it. He pottered round the inn of an
evening and Saturday afternoons, doing odd jobs in the cellar with the
barrels; for your true toping spirit loves to knock the hoops and to
work about the cask, and carry the jugs in answer to the cry for some
more 'tangle-legs'--for thus they called the strong beer. Sometimes a
labourer would toast his cheese on a fork in the flame of the candle.
In the old days, before folk got so choice of food and delicate of
palate, there really seemed no limit to the strange things they ate.
Before the railways were made, herds of cattle had of course to travel
the roads, and often came great distances. The drovers were at the
same time the hardiest and the roughest of men in that rough and hardy
time.