considered a companion to the last drawing we
have spoken of, the "Lancaster Sands," presents as interesting an
example as we could find of Turner's feeling in this respect. The
subject is a simple north-country village, on the shore of Morecambe
Bay; not in the common sense, a picturesque village: there are no pretty
bow-windows, or red roofs, or rocky steps of entrance to the rustic
doors, or quaint gables; nothing but a single street of thatched and
chiefly clay-built cottages, ranged in a somewhat monotonous line, the
roofs so green with moss that at first we hardly discern the houses from
the fields and trees. The village street is closed at the end by a
wooden gate, indicating the little traffic there is on the road through
it, and giving it something the look of a large farmstead, in which a
right of way lies through the yard. The road which leads to this gate is
full of ruts, and winds down a bad bit of hill between two broken banks
of moor ground, succeeding immediately to the few enclosures which
surround the village; they can hardly be called gardens; but a decayed
fragment or two of fencing fill the gaps in the bank; and a
clothes-line, with some clothes on it, striped blue and red, and a
smock-frock, is stretched between the trunks of some stunted willows; a
_very_ small haystack and pigstye being seen at the back of the cottage
beyond. An empty, two-wheeled, lumbering cart, drawn by a pair of horses
with huge wooden collars, the driver sitting lazily in the sun, sideways
on the leader, is going slowly home along the rough road, it being about
country dinner-time. At the end of the village there is a better house,
with three chimneys and a dormer window in its roof, and the roof is of
stone shingle instead of thatch, but very rough. This house is no doubt
the clergyman's; there is some smoke from one of its chimneys, none
from any other in the village; this smoke is from the lowest chimney at
the back, evidently that of the kitchen, and it is rather thick, the
fire not having been long lighted. A few hundred yards from the
clergyman's house, nearer the shore, is the church, discernible from the
cottage only by its low-arched belfry, a little neater than one would
expect in such a village; perhaps lately built by the Puseyite
incumbent;[265] and beyond the church, close to the sea, are two
fragments of a border war-tower, standing on their circular mound, worn
on its brow deep into edges and furrows by the fee