S. Baring-Gould

“ Not one remains. Every hedge has been levelled, every mound spread, and with them have gone all those flowers that once made the battlefield like a garden.
Our old English hedges are the Poor Man's conservatory, are the playground of his children. How starred they are in spring with primroses! How they flush with red robin! How they mantle with bluebell! How they wave with foxglove! Talking of the latter, I was driving one day in Cornwall, when my coachman pointed to a range of foxgloves, and said: "Look there, sir! They are just like girls!" ”

“ In one that is well-conducted, the court in which pigs wallow, bullocks poach the litter, ducks waddle, and find nutriment in what would be death to all other creatures, is the nucleus and treasury, the cream of the whole farm. Having considered the plan of the Walloon Manoir, look at a plan of an old English farm congeries of buildings. Is it not clear that—omitting the church—the type is the same?
The old-fashioned farmer, like the old-fashioned squire, did not ask to have a view of distant horizons from his windows, but sought to look upon his stock and see that it throve. ”

“ The other day the church bell was tolling. It was for this ne'er-do-weel. He had returned [289] home to die. The sole wish in the heart of the man with a wasted life was to lie, to cast down the wreck of his body, in the earth of the native parish which had bred him, and to have no headstone to mark the mound under which lay naught but the ashes of a ne'er-do-weel. ”

“ Over the squatter's cottage he has no control whatever.
Listen to the note of the agricultural, downtrodden labourer, his wail of anguish under the heel of the squire and farmer.
"When the day's work is ended and over, he'll go
To fair or to market to buy him a bow,
And whistle as he walks, O! and shrilly too will sing,
There's no life like the ploughboy's all in merry spring.
"Good luck to the ploughboy, wherever he may be,
A fair pretty maiden he'll take on his knee,
He'll drink the nut-brown ale, and this song the lad will sing,
O the ploughboy is happier than the noble or the king." ”

“ I cannot say whether it was this which causes me always, on entering a room, to direct my eyes to the ceiling—but I do, and observe it always with much interest.
The ceiling of the world is not one blank space; it is sprinkled with stars at night, and strewn with clouds by day. Why then should the ceilings of our rooms be blank surfaces? We spread carpets of colour on our floors. We decorate richly our walls. Why should the ceiling alone be left in hideous baldness, in fact, absolutely plain? ”

“ And when we chance in some secret compartment to light on a bundle of their letters, and look into them, then it is just like the opening of their corner-cupboards, out pours a sweet and spicy fragrance—that of the generous thoughts and kind wishes of their dear old honest and God-fearing hearts. ”

“ He at once went down with two carpenters and ripped strips through the lovely ceiling from one end of the room to the other, utterly destroying this incomparable work, that must have occupied the artist months of patient labour, and which had called forth the best efforts of his genius.
That is how mulish stupidity is every day destroying the achievements of genius. ”

“ My wife and I strolled down the side aisle, looking at the pictures, and still the impassioned harangue pealed through the church. As we passed the sacristan he began to laugh. We went further, and, having seen all that was to be seen in the north aisle, emerged into the nave, with the purpose of crossing the church to look at the pictures in the south aisle, when we saw a young curé in the pulpit, gesticulating, pouring forth a fervid address to his dearly beloved brethren—who were conspicuously absent. ”

“ Though the village mill usually—almost always—presents a pleasant picture in one's memory, a picture of cheerfulness and content, of good nature and neatness, it is not always so. I remember one mill which carries with it a sadness whenever I recall it. Not that the mill was gloomy in itself, but that the story connected with it was such as to make one sad.
The miller, whom we will call Pike, was unhappily somewhat inclined to drink. He [182] was not an intemperate man at home, far from it; and in his mill, at his work, he was always sober. ”

“ CHAPTER XII. Every family and village has had its scapegrace. The family ne'er-do-weel has been its greatest curse, and has torn down and dissipated in a few years what it has taken generations to set up; any fool can destroy—only the wise can build.
But it is not so much folly as lack of principle which constitutes the ne'er-do-weel. Many a good man is a stupid one, and his goodness saves his stupidity from carrying him and his family to ruin. And sometimes a clever man is a ne'er-do-weel, because his cleverness is undirected by principle. ”

“ There was a dear old rector I remember, who said once: "I never can be brought to believe that there will be music in heaven, for if there be music there, there must be choirs and orchestra; and if choirs and orchestra, then there can be no harmony."
The bickerings, the heart-burnings, in the west gallery were a constant source of trouble to the parson, and if he seized on a means of establishing peace by abolishing the orchestra, he was not altogether to blame.
The first stage in getting rid of the village orchestra was taken by the introduction of the barrel-organ. ”

“ He does not like to part with them, and he spends his life bowed over them. Worse than this, unable to avert the further dismemberment of his estate on his death, he resolves in compact with his wife to have no more than one, or at the most two children. Now, with us, the younger son of a landed proprietor knows he must push his way in the world, and from the moment his intelligence begins to act he looks about him for openings. Our labourers also, unchained to the soil, go about wherever work may be had. ”

“ Stale ballad news, cashiered the city, must now ride fast for the country, where it is no less admired than a giant in a pageant: till at last it grows so common there, too, as every poor milkmaid can chant and chirp it under her cow, which she useth as a harmless charm to make her let down her milk. ”

“ Timber and plaster belong to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The oak turns hard as iron and is perhaps more enduring than iron, for the latter is eaten through in time with rust.
That which is destroying the old cottage is not the tooth of time, but the insurance office, which imposes heavy rates on thatched buildings, and when the thatch goes and its place is taken by slate, the beauty of the cottage is gone. ”

“ As a bit of shelter a screen was run up, but only of timber, and the passage boxed in. Above was the minstrels' gallery; and in the screen were, of course, doors into the hall, and a buttery hatch, as on the further side of the passage was either kitchen or cellar, or both.
To almost every hall was a slit or eye and earlet hole communicating with a lady's chamber. The tyrant Dionysius of Syracuse had a prison which was so constructed that every whisper in it from one prisoner to another was carried through a tube to his private apartment, where he sat and listened to what his captives said. ”

“ Reformers have roundly abused, and striven to break down our land system, especially the right of primogeniture, and to resolve the land into small holdings to be cultivated by small owners. There are, as in all social and political questions, two sides to this. I do not deny for a moment that much is to be said in favour of equal partition of land among all the children, and of the multiplication of peasant proprietors. ”

“ He affected the oddity—to be a little rough and domineering, he put on an acerbity of manner that belied his real sweetness of temper, assumed a roughness at variance with his real gentleness of heart. Those of us who have lived all our lives in the country must look back with a smile rising to the lips, at the recollection of the village doctors we have met and made acquaintance with. ”

“ In many a humbler family it is the same. It would seem as though occasionally a sport of some ignoble, sordid, selfish element broke out in a stock that has been noted for its self-respect, its goodness and generosity, and the wretched creature in which is this vein of baseness undoes in a few years everything that it has taken his ancestors many years of prudence, self-sacrifice, and forethought to construct. ”

“ There are not many labourers now who understand how to wield the flail. The steam thrasher travels from farm to farm and thrashes and winnows, relieving man of the labour. The flail is only employed for the making of "reed," i.e., straw for thatching the rick.
What a robust, rubicund, hearty fellow is our old English farmer. The breed is not extinct, thank God! At one time, when it was the fashion to run two and three farms into one, and let this conglomerate to a man reputed warm and knowing, then it did seem as if the "leather pocketed" farmer was doomed to extinction. ”

“ It roared and boomed in the ears of the choir; and if the service is to be an elaborate performance, in which the congregation takes the part of audience only, then it is in the right place. But if the divine worship is to be congregational, if all are to be encouraged to sing, then the organ is out of place.
Consequently in a good many cases there is a talk of moving back the organ into a west gallery.
Unhappily, an organ is a very expensive [139] traveller. An individual can tour round the globe at about the same cost that will move an organ from one end of a church to another. ”

“ I at once asked the rector what had become of the old pulpit, which, by the way, had been hewn out of the trunk of an enormous oak tree. He replied that he knew nothing about it—except that he thought some scraps of the carving were in the National School. I then went to the school-house and questioned the master about it. He said that he believed there was some old carving in a cupboard—and there we found it, with dusters, old reading books, a dirty sponge, and any amount of cobwebs and filth. ”

“ But the mining engineer sent down to see this mine and report on it to the investors was too shrewd for him. The projected mine was not in Cornwall, but in Devon. "Halloa!" said he, "how comes this tin here? It is Cornish metal."
So that mine never got on all fours.
In a great number of cases, in the large majority, in fact, the captain is himself the dupe, and dupe of his own ambition. Mining is a speculation; it is a bit of gambling. No one can see an inch into solid rock, and no one can say for certain that indications that promise may not prove deceptive. ”

“ So I contend that we in the South-West of England are quite right in using for the banks that enclose our fields the term hedge.
It is a great hardship to the poor cattle on the Continent to be stall-fed, and how poor is the meat from such beasts every Englishman knows who has travelled. If we glory in the Roast Beef of Old England, it is because our cattle are able to roam about the pastures, and are healthy and vigorous, and their flesh sound and juicy accordingly. And this is due to our hedges. ”

“ Our hedges are probably as ancient as our civilization. We know of a few only that have been erected within the memory of man; the majority have existed from the period when our land was first put into cultivation. And it is remarkable that in the north of Germany, in Westphalia, the Saxon region whence came our Teutonic ancestors, there the hedge with which we are familiar in England is to be met with as well, as an institution of the country, and a feature of the landscape. ”

“ I used to look at a patent bacon-toaster, and resolve, when I was a man and independent, to have a curved settle formed of burnished tin, and to sit before a roaring fire in the focus of all the converging rays, and never stir therefrom from Michaelmas till Lady Day. ”

“ In these restless and impatient days, when everyone has a theory and a scheme, and desires to do what is contrary to what has been done, the hardest of lessons to acquire, and that entailing most self-restraint, but that which is least costly, and most calculated to give a man peace at the last, is to let well alone.
And now before we leave the old church, something must be said about the tower and bells.
On the Continent there is absolutely no art in bell-ringing—it is what any fool can do ”