nct or
tradition--will have it that the well-developed woman is richest in
the purely womanly qualities--the wifely and maternal feelings. The
luxuriant types that abound most in Devonshire are not common here.

It will be understood that the women described are those that live
in cottages. Here, as elsewhere, as you go higher in the social
scale--further from the soil as it were--the type becomes less and less
distinct. Those of the "higher class," or "better class," are few, and
always in a sense foreigners.

Chapter Twenty-Four: Troston

I doubt if the name of this small Suffolk village, remote from towns and
railroads, will have any literary associations for the reader, unless
he be a person of exceptionally good memory, who has taken a special
interest in the minor poets of the last century; or that it would
help him if I add the names of Honington and Sapiston, two other small
villages a couple of miles from Troston, with the slow sedgy Little
Ouse, or a branch of it, flowing between them. Yet Honington was the
birthplace of Robert Bloomfield, known as "the Suffolk poet" in the
early part of the last century (although Crabbe was living then and was
great, as he is becoming again after many years); while at Sapiston, the
rustic village on the other side of the old stone bridge, he acquired
that love of nature and intimate knowledge of farm life and work which
came out later in his Farmer's Boy. Finally, Troston, the little village
in which I write, was the home of Capel Lofft, a person of importance in
his day, who discovered Bloomfield, found a publisher for his poems, and
boomed it with amazing success.

I dare say it will only provoke a smile of amusement in readers of
literary taste when I confess that Bloomfield's memory is dear to me;
that only because of this feeling for the forgotten rustic who wrote
rhymes I am now here, strolling about in the shade of the venerable
trees in Troston Park-the selfsame trees which the somewhat fantastic
Capel knew in his day as "Homer," "Sophocles," "Virgil," "Milton," and
by other names, calling each old oak, elm, ash, and chestnut after one
of the immortals.

I can even imagine that the literary man, if he chanced to be a personal
friend, would try to save me from myself by begging me not to put
anything of this sort into print. He would warn me that it matters
nothing that Bloomfield's verse was exceedingly popular for a time, that
twenty-five or thirty edit