saunter by

There must be a smack of the country, its scenes and its cares, about them all. You walk in shady lanes: you stand and look at the rugged bark of old trees: you help to prune evergreens: you devise flower-gardens and winding walks. You talk to pigs, and smooth down the legs of horses. You sit on mossy walls, and the river side, and through woodland paths. You grow familiar with the internal arrangements of poor men's dwellings you see much of men and women in those solemn seasons when all pretences are laid aside; and they speak with confidence to you of their little cares and fears, for this world and the other. You kneel down and pray by the bedside of many sick; and you know the look of the dying face well. Young children whom you have humbly sought to instruct in the best of knowledge, have passed away from this life in your presence, telling you in interrupted sentences whither they trusted they were going, and bidding you not forget to meet them there. You feel the touch of the weak fingers still; the parting request is not forgotten. You mark the spring blossoms come back; and you walk among the harvest sheaves in the autumn evening. And when you ride up the parish on your duty, you feel the influence of bare and lonely tracts, where, ten miles from home, you sometimes dismount from your horse, and sit down on a grey stone by the wayside, and look for an hour at the heather at your feet, and at the sweeps of purple moorland far away. You go down to the churchyard frequently: you sit on the gravestone of your predecessor who died two hundred years since; and you count five, six, seven spots where those who served the cure before you sleep. Then, leaning your head upon your hand, you look thirty years into the future, and

2

wonder whether you are to grow old. You read, through moss-covered letters, how a former incumbent of the parish died in the last century, aged twenty-eight. That afternoon, coming from a cottage where you had been seeing a frail old woman, you took a flying leap over a brook near, with precipitous sides; and you thought that some day, if you lived, you would have to creep quietly round by a smoother way. And now you think you see an aged man, tottering and grey, feebly walking down to the churchyard as of old, and seating himself hard by where you sit. The garden will have grown weedy and untidy it will not be the trim, precise dwelling which youthful energy and hopefulness keep it now.

Let it be hoped that the old man's hat is not seedy, nor his coat threadbare: it makes one's heart sore to see that. And let it be hoped that he is not alone. But you go home, I think, with a quieter and kindlier heart.

You live in a region, mental and material, that is very entirely out of the track of worldly ambition. You do not blame it in others: you have learnt to blame few things in others severely, except cruelty and falsehood: but you have outgrown it for yourself. You hear, now and then, of this and the other school or college friend becoming a great man. One is an Indian hero: one is attorney-general: one is a cabinet minister. You like to see their names in the newspapers. You remember how, in college competitions with them, you did not come off second-best. You are struck at finding that such a man, whom you recollect as a fearful dunce, is getting respectably on through life: you remember how at school you used to wonder whether the difference between the clever boy and the booby would be in after days the same great gulf that it was then. Your life

goes on very regularly, each week much like the last. And, on the whole, it is very happy. You saunter for a little in the open air after breakfast: you do so when the evergreens are beautiful with snow as well as when the warm sunshine makes the grass white with widelyopened daisies. Your children go with you wherever you go. You are growing subdued and sobered; but they are not and when one sits on your knee, and lays upon your shoulder a little head with golden ringlets, you do not mind very much though your own hair (what is left of it) is getting shot with grey. You sit down in your quiet study to your work: what thousands of pages you have written at that table! You cease your task at one o'clock: you read your Times: you get on horseback and canter up the parish to see your sick or you take the ribbons and tool into the county town. You feel the stir of even its quiet existence: you drop into the bookseller's: you grumble at the venerable age of the Reviews that come to you from the club. Generally, you cannot be bothered with calls upon your tattling acquaintances: you leave these to your wife. You drive home again, through the shady lanes, away into the green country: your man-servant in his sober livery tells you with pride, when you go to the stable-yard for a few minutes before dinner, that Mr. Snooks, the great judge of horse-flesh, had declared that afternoon in the inn-stable in town, that he had not seen a better-kept carriage and harness anywhere, and that your plump steed was a noble creature. It is well when a servant is proud of his belongings: he will be a happier man, and a more faithful and useful. When you next drive out you will see the silver blazing in the sun with increased brightness. And now you have the pleasant evening,

before you. You never fail to dress for dinner: living so quietly as you do, it is especially needful, if you would avoid an encroaching rudeness, to pay careful attention to the little refinements of life. And the great event of the day over, you have music, books, and children: you have the summer saunter in the twilight: you have the winter evening fireside: you take perhaps another turn at your sermon for an hour or two. The day has brought its work and its recreation: you can look back each evening upon something done: save when you give yourself a holiday which you feel has been fairly toiled for. And what a wonderful amount of work, such as it is, you may, by exertion regular but not excessive, turn off in the course of the ten months and a-half of the working year!

And thus, day by day, and month by month, the life of the country parson passes quietly away. It will be briefly comprehended on his tombstone, in the assurance that he did his duty, simply and faithfully, through so many years. It is somewhat monotonous, but he is too busy to weary of it: it is varied by not much society, in the sense of conversation with educated men with whom the clergyman has many common feelings. But it is inexpressibly pleasing when, either to his own house or to a dwelling near, there comes a visitor with whom an entire sympathy is felt, though probably holding very antagonistic views: then come the 'good talks' with delighted Johnson: genial evenings, and long walks of afternoons. The daily post is a daily strong sensation, sometimes pleasing, sometimes painful, as he brings tidings of the outer world. You have your daily Times: each Monday morning brings your Saturday Review and the Illustrated London News comes not

merely for the children's sake. You read all the Quarterlies, of course: you skim the monthlies: but it is with tenfold interest and pleasure that month by month you receive that magazine which is edited by a dear friend who sends it to you, and in which sometimes certain pages have the familiar look of a friend's face. You draw it wet from its big envelope: you cut its leaves with care: you enjoy the fragrance of its steam as it dries at the study fire: you glance at the shining backs of that long row of volumes into which the pleasant monthly visitants have accumulated: you think you will have another volume soon. Then there is a great delight in occasionally receiving a large bundle of books which have been ordered from your bookseller in the city a hundred miles off: in reading the address in such big letters that they must have been made with a brush in stripping off the successive layers of immensely thick brown paper: in reaching the precious hoard within, all such fresh copies (who are they that buy the copies you turn over in the shop, but which you would not on any account take?): such fresh copies, with their bran-new bindings and their leaves so pure in a material sense in cutting the leaves at the rate of two or three volumes an evening, and in seeing the entire accession of literature lying about the other table (not the one you write on) for a few days ere they are given to the shelves. You are not in the least ashamed to confess that you are pleased by all these little things. You regard it as not necessarily proving any special pettiness of mind or You regard it as no proof of greatness in any man, that he should appear to care nothing for anything. Your private belief is that it shows him to be either a humbug or a fool.

heart.