s not alive to it
myself for a long time. But when I had heard of the village cows, which
used to be turned out to graze on the heaths, and had been told how
fir-timber fit for cottage roof-joists could be cut on the common, as
well as heath good enough for thatching and turf excellent for firing;
and when to this was added the talk of bread-ovens at half the old
cottages, and of little corn-crops in the gardens, and of brewing and
wine-making and bee-keeping; I understood at last that my elderly
neighbours had seen with their own eyes what I should never see--namely,
the old rustic economy of the English peasantry. In that light all sorts
of things showed a new meaning. I looked with rather changed sentiments,
for example, upon the noisome pigsties--for were they not a survival of
a venerable thrift? I viewed the old tools--hoes and spades and scythes
and fag-hooks--with quickened interest; and I speculated with more
intelligence upon those aged people of the parish whose curious habits
were described to me with so much respect. But of all the details that
now gained significance, most to be noted were the hints of the
comparative prosperity of that earlier time. For now some old woman,
half starving on her parish pay, would indicate this or that little
cottage, and remark that her grandfather had built it for her mother to
go into when she married. Or now, a decrepit man would explain that in
such and such a puzzling nook in the hillside had once stood his
father's cow-stall. Here, at the edge of the arable strip, a building
divided into two poor cottages proved to have been originally somebody's
little hop-kiln; there, on a warm slope given over to the
pleasure-garden of some "resident" like myself, a former villager used
to grow enough wheat to keep him in flour half the winter; and there
again, down a narrow by-way gone ruinous from long neglect, Master
So-and-so, whose children to-day go in fear of the workhouse, was wont
to drive his little waggon and pair of horses.

Particulars like these, pointing to a lost state of well-being,
accounted very well for the attraction which, in spite of individual
faults, I had felt towards the village folk in general. The people stood
for something more than merely themselves. In their odd ways and talk
and character I was affected, albeit unawares, by a robust tradition of
the English countryside, surviving here when the circumstances which
would have explained it had already