we shall see, a sort of remnant of
provincial costume, and it has the handsomest population in the
Lowlands....

FOOTNOTE:

[41] William Abercrombie. See _Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae_, under
"Maybole" (Part iii.).

VIII

FOREST NOTES

(1875-6)

ON THE PLAIN

Perhaps the reader knows already the aspect of the great levels of the
Gatinais, where they border with the wooded hills of Fontainebleau. Here
and there a few grey rocks creep out of the forest as if to sun
themselves. Here and there a few apple-trees stand together on a knoll.
The quaint, undignified tartan of a myriad small fields dies out into
the distance; the strips blend and disappear; and the dead flat lies
forth open and empty, with no accident save perhaps a thin line of trees
or faint church-spire against the sky. Solemn and vast at all times, in
spite of pettiness in the near details, the impression becomes more
solemn and vast towards evening. The sun goes down, a swollen orange, as
it were into the sea. A blue-clad peasant rides home, with a harrow
smoking behind him among the dry clods. Another still works with his
wife in their little strip. An immense shadow fills the plain; these
people stand in it up to their shoulders; and their heads, as they stoop
over their work and rise again, are relieved from time to time against
the golden sky.

These peasant farmers are well off nowadays, and not by any means
overworked; but somehow you always see in them the historical
representative of the serf of yore, and think not so much of present
times, which may be prosperous enough, as of the old days when the
peasant was taxed beyond possibility of payment, and lived, in
Michelet's image, like a hare between two furrows. These very people now
weeding their patch under the broad sunset, that very man and his wife,
it seems to us, have suffered all the wrongs of France. It is they who
have been their country's scape-goat for long ages; they who, generation
after generation, have sowed and not reaped, reaped and another has
garnered; and who have now entered into their reward, and enjoy their
good things in their turn. For the days are gone by when the Seigneur
ruled and profited. "Le Seigneur," says the old formula, "enferme ses
manants comme sous porte et gonds, du ciel a la terre. Tout est a lui,
foret chenue, oiseau dans l'air, poisson dans l'eau, bete au buisson,
l'onde qui coule, la cloche dont le son au loin roule." Such was his o