Tom Brown's School Days E-Book

Thomas Hughes

• Herausgeber: PubMe
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

IT is not often that in later years one finds any book as good as one remembers it from one’s youth; but it has been my interesting experience to find the story of Tom Brown’s School Days even better than I once thought it, say, fifty years ago; not only better, but more charming, more kindly, manlier, truer, realler. So far as I have been able to note there is not a moment of snobbishness in it, or meanness of whatever sort. Of course it is of its period, the period which people call Middle Victorian because the great Queen was then nearly at the end of the first half of her long reign, and not because she personally characterized the mood of arts, of letters, of morals then prevalent.

Leseprobe

Thomas Hughes

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Table of contents

Preface

PART I.

CHAPTER I—THE BROWN FAMILY

CHAPTER II—THE “VEAST.”

CHAPTER III—SUNDRY WARS AND ALLIANCES.

CHAPTER IV—THE STAGE COACH.

CHAPTER V—RUGBY AND FOOTBALL.

CHAPTER VI—AFTER THE MATCH.

CHAPTER VII—SETTLING TO THE COLLAR.

CHAPTER VIII—THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE.

CHAPTER IX—A CHAPTER OF ACCIDENTS.

PART II.

CHAPTER I—HOW THE TIDE TURNED.

CHAPTER II—THE NEW BOY.

CHAPTER III—ARTHUR MAKES A FRIEND.

CHAPTER IV—THE BIRD-FANCIERS.

CHAPTER V—THE FIGHT

CHAPTER VI—FEVER IN THE SCHOOL.

CHAPTER VII—HARRY EAST’S DILEMMAS AND DELIVERANCES.

CHAPTER VIII—TOM BROWN’S LAST MATCH.

CHAPTER IX—FINIS.

Preface

IT is not often that in later years one finds any book as good as one remembers it from one’s youth; but it has been my interesting experience to find the story of Tom Brown’s School Days even better than I once thought it, say, fifty years ago; not only better, but more charming, more kindly, manlier, truer, realler. So far as I have been able to note there is not a moment of snobbishness in it, or meanness of whatever sort. Of course it is of its period, the period which people call Middle Victorian because the great Queen was then nearly at the end of the first half of her long reign, and not because she personally characterized the mood of arts, of letters, of morals then prevalent. The author openly preaches and praises himself for preaching; he does not hesitate to slip into the drama and deliver a sermon; he talks the story out with many self-interruptions and excursions; he knows nothing of the modern method of letting it walk along on its own legs, but is always putting his hands under its arms and helping it, or his arm across its shoulder and caressing it. In all this, which I think wrong, he is probably doing quite right for the boys who formed and will always form the greatest number of his readers; boys like to have things fully explained and commentated, whether they are grown up or not. In much else, in what I will not say are not the great matters, he is altogether right. By precept and by example he teaches boys to be good, that is, to be true, honest, clean-minded and clean-mouthed, kind and thoughtful. He forgives them the follies of their youth, but makes them see that they are follies. I suppose that American boys’ schools are fashioned largely on what the English call their public schools; and so far as they emulate the democratic spirit of the English schools, with their sense of equality and their honor of personal worth, the American schools cannot be too like them. I have heard that some of our schools are cultures of unrepublican feeling, and that the meaner little souls in them make their account of what families it will be well to know after they leave school and restrict their school friendships accordingly, but I am not certain this is true. What I am certain of is that our school-boys can learn nothing of such baseness from the warm-hearted and large-minded man who wrote Tom Brown’s School Days. He was one of our best friends in the Civil War, when we sorely needed friends in England, and it was his magnanimous admiration which made our great patriotic poet known to a public which had scarcely heard of James Russell Lowell before. But the manners and customs painted in this book are the manners and customs of the middle eighteen-fifties. It appears from its witness that English school-boys then freely drank beer and ale, and fought out their quarrels like prize-fighters with their naked fists, though the beer was allowed and the fighting disallowed by the school. Now, however, even the ruffians of the ring put on gloves, and probably the quarrels of our own schoolboys are not fought out even with gloves. Beer and ale must always have been as clandestine vices in our schools as pitched battles with fists in English schools; water was the rule, but probably if an American boy now went to an English school he would not have to teach by his singular example that water was a better drink for boys than beer. Our author had apparently no misgiving as to the beer; he does not blink it or defend it; beer was too merely a matter of course; but he makes a set argument for fighting, based upon the good old safe ground that there always had been fighting. Even in the heyday of muscular Christianity it seems that there must have been some question of fighting and it was necessary to defend it on the large and little scale, and his argument as to fisticuffs defeats itself. Concerning war, which we are now hoping that we see the beginning of the end of, he need only have looked into The Biglow Papers to find his idolized Lowell saying: “Ez fur war I call it murder; There ye hev it plain an’ flat; An’ I don’t want to go no furder Then my Testament fur that.” I feel it laid upon me in commending this book to a new generation of readers, to guard them, so far as I may, against such errors of it. Possibly it might have been cleansed of them by editing, but that would have taken much of the life out of it, and would have been a grievous wrong to the author. They must remain a part of literature as many other regrettable things remain. They are a part of history, a color of the contemporary manners, and an excellently honest piece of self-portraiture. They are as the wart on Cromwell’s face, and are essentially an element of a most Cromwellian genius. It was Puritanism, Macaulay says, that stamped with its ideal the modern English gentleman in dress and manner, and Puritanism has stamped the modern Englishman, the liberal, the radical, in morals. The author of Toni Brown was strongly of the English Church and the English State, but of the broad church and of the broad state. He was not only the best sort of Englishman, but he was the making of the best sort of American; and the American father can trust the American boy with his book, and fear no hurt to his republicanism, still less his democracy. It is full of the delight in nature and human nature, unpatronized and unsentimentalized. From his earliest boyhood up Tom Brown is the free and equal comrade of other decent boys of whatever station, and he ranges the woods, the fields, the streams with the joy in the sylvan life which is the birthright of all the boys born within reach of them. The American school-boy of this generation will as freshly taste the pleasure of the school life at Rugby as the American school-boys of the two generations past, and he can hardly fail to rise from it with the noble intentions, the magnanimous ambitions which only good books can inspire. W. D. Howells.

PART I.

CHAPTER I—THE BROWN FAMILY

“ I’m the Poet of White Horse Vale, sir, With liberal notions under my cap.”—BalladThe Browns have become illustrious by the pen of Thackeray and the pencil of Doyle, within the memory of the young gentlemen who are now matriculating at the universities. Notwithstanding the well-merited but late fame which has now fallen upon them, any one at all acquainted with the family must feel that much has yet to be written and said before the British nation will be properly sensible of how much of its greatness it owes to the Browns. For centuries, in their quiet, dogged, homespun way, they have been subduing the earth in most English counties, and leaving their mark in American forests and Australian uplands. Wherever the fleets and armies of England have won renown, there stalwart sons of the Browns have done yeomen’s work. With the yew bow and cloth-yard shaft at Cressy and Agincourt—with the brown bill and pike under the brave Lord Willoughby—with culverin and demi-culverin against Spaniards and Dutchmen—with hand-grenade and sabre, and musket and bayonet, under Rodney and St. Vincent, Wolfe and Moore, Nelson and Wellington, they have carried their lives in their hands, getting hard knocks and hard work in plenty—which was on the whole what they looked for, and the best thing for them—and little praise or pudding, which indeed they, and most of us, are better without. Talbots and Stanleys, St. Maurs, and such-like folk, have led armies and made laws time out of mind; but those noble families would be somewhat astounded—if the accounts ever came to be fairly taken—to find how small their work for England has been by the side of that of the Browns.These latter, indeed, have, until the present generation, rarely been sung by poet, or chronicled by sage. They have wanted their sacer vates, having been too solid to rise to the top by themselves, and not having been largely gifted with the talent of catching hold of, and holding on tight to, whatever good things happened to be going—the foundation of the fortunes of so many noble families. But the world goes on its way, and the wheel turns, and the wrongs of the Browns, like other wrongs, seem in a fair way to get righted. And this present writer, having for many years of his life been a devout Brown-worshipper, and, moreover, having the honour of being nearly connected with an eminently respectable branch of the great Brown family, is anxious, so far as in him lies, to help the wheel over, and throw his stone on to the pile.However, gentle reader, or simple reader, whichever you may be, lest you should be led to waste your precious time upon these pages, I make so bold as at once to tell you the sort of folk you’ll have to meet and put up with, if you and I are to jog on comfortably together. You shall hear at once what sort of folk the Browns are—at least my branch of them; and then, if you don’t like the sort, why, cut the concern at once, and let you and I cry quits before either of us can grumble at the other.In the first place, the Browns are a fighting family. One may question their wisdom, or wit, or beauty, but about their fight there can be no question. Wherever hard knocks of any kind, visible or invisible, are going; there the Brown who is nearest must shove in his carcass. And these carcasses, for the most part, answer very well to the characteristic propensity: they are a squareheaded and snake-necked generation, broad in the shoulder, deep in the chest, and thin in the flank, carrying no lumber. Then for clanship, they are as bad as Highlanders; it is amazing the belief they have in one another. With them there is nothing like the Browns, to the third and fourth generation. “Blood is thicker than water,” is one of their pet sayings. They can’t be happy unless they are always meeting one another. Never were such people for family gatherings; which, were you a stranger, or sensitive, you might think had better not have been gathered together. For during the whole time of their being together they luxuriate in telling one another their minds on whatever subject turns up; and their minds are wonderfully antagonistic, and all their opinions are downright beliefs. Till you’ve been among them some time and understand them, you can’t think but that they are quarrelling. Not a bit of it. They love and respect one another ten times the more after a good set family arguing bout, and go back, one to his curacy, another to his chambers, and another to his regiment, freshened for work, and more than ever convinced that the Browns are the height of company.This family training, too, combined with their turn for combativeness, makes them eminently quixotic. They can’t let anything alone which they think going wrong. They must speak their mind about it, annoying all easy-going folk, and spend their time and money in having a tinker at it, however hopeless the job. It is an impossibility to a Brown to leave the most disreputable lame dog on the other side of a stile. Most other folk get tired of such work. The old Browns, with red faces, white whiskers, and bald heads, go on believing and fighting to a green old age. They have always a crotchet going, till the old man with the scythe reaps and garners them away for troublesome old boys as they are.And the most provoking thing is, that no failures knock them up, or make them hold their hands, or think you, or me, or other sane people in the right. Failures slide off them like July rain off a duck’s back feathers. Jem and his whole family turn out bad, and cheat them one week, and the next they are doing the same thing for Jack; and when he goes to the treadmill, and his wife and children to the workhouse, they will be on the lookout for Bill to take his place.However, it is time for us to get from the general to the particular; so, leaving the great army of Browns, who are scattered over the whole empire on which the sun never sets, and whose general diffusion I take to be the chief cause of that empire’s stability; let us at once fix our attention upon the small nest of Browns in which our hero was hatched, and which dwelt in that portion of the royal county of Berks which is called the Vale of White Horse.Most of you have probably travelled down the Great Western Railway as far as Swindon. Those of you who did so with their eyes open have been aware, soon after leaving the Didcot station, of a fine range of chalk hills running parallel with the railway on the left-hand side as you go down, and distant some two or three miles, more or less, from the line. The highest point in the range is the White Horse Hill, which you come in front of just before you stop at the Shrivenham station. If you love English scenery, and have a few hours to spare, you can’t do better, the next time you pass, than stop at the Farringdon Road or Shrivenham station, and make your way to that highest point. And those who care for the vague old stories that haunt country-sides all about England, will not, if they are wise, be content with only a few hours’ stay; for, glorious as the view is, the neighbourhood is yet more interesting for its relics of bygone times. I only know two English neighbourhoods thoroughly, and in each, within a circle of five miles, there is enough of interest and beauty to last any reasonable man his life. I believe this to be the case almost throughout the country, but each has a special attraction, and none can be richer than the one I am speaking of and going to introduce you to very particularly, for on this subject I must be prosy; so those that don’t care for England in detail may skip the chapter.O young England! young England! you who are born into these racing railroad times, when there’s a Great Exhibition, or some monster sight, every year, and you can get over a couple of thousand miles of ground for three pound ten in a five-weeks’ holiday, why don’t you know more of your own birthplaces? You’re all in the ends of the earth, it seems to me, as soon as you get your necks out of the educational collar, for midsummer holidays, long vacations, or what not—going round Ireland, with a return ticket, in a fortnight; dropping your copies of Tennyson on the tops of Swiss mountains; or pulling down the Danube in Oxford racing boats. And when you get home for a quiet fortnight, you turn the steam off, and lie on your backs in the paternal garden, surrounded by the last batch of books from Mudie’s library, and half bored to death. Well, well! I know it has its good side. You all patter French more or less, and perhaps German; you have seen men and cities, no doubt, and have your opinions, such as they are, about schools of painting, high art, and all that; have seen the pictures of Dresden and the Louvre, and know the taste of sour krout. All I say is, you don’t know your own lanes and woods and fields. Though you may be choke-full of science, not one in twenty of you knows where to find the wood-sorrel, or bee-orchis, which grow in the next wood, or on the down three miles off, or what the bog-bean and wood-sage are good for. And as for the country legends, the stories of the old gable-ended farmhouses, the place where the last skirmish was fought in the civil wars, where the parish butts stood, where the last highwayman turned to bay, where the last ghost was laid by the parson, they’re gone out of date altogether.Now, in my time, when we got home by the old coach, which put us down at the cross-roads with our boxes, the first day of the holidays, and had been driven off by the family coachman, singing “Dulce Domum” at the top of our voices, there we were, fixtures, till black Monday came round. We had to cut out our own amusements within a walk or a ride of home. And so we got to know all the country folk and their ways and songs and stories by heart, and went over the fields and woods and hills, again and again, till we made friends of them all. We were Berkshire, or Gloucestershire, or Yorkshire boys; and you’re young cosmopolites, belonging to all countries and no countries. No doubt it’s all right; I dare say it is. This is the day of large views, and glorious humanity, and all that; but I wish back-sword play hadn’t gone out in the Vale of White Horse, and that that confounded Great Western hadn’t carried away Alfred’s Hill to make an embankment.But to return to the said Vale of White Horse, the country in which the first scenes of this true and interesting story are laid. As I said, the Great Western now runs right through it, and it is a land of large, rich pastures bounded by ox-fences, and covered with fine hedgerow timber, with here and there a nice little gorse or spinney, where abideth poor Charley, having no other cover to which to betake himself for miles and miles, when pushed out some fine November morning by the old Berkshire. Those who have been there, and well mounted, only know how he and the stanch little pack who dash after him—heads high and sterns low, with a breast-high scent—can consume the ground at such times. There being little ploughland, and few woods, the Vale is only an average sporting country, except for hunting. The villages are straggling, queer, old-fashioned places, the houses being dropped down without the least regularity, in nooks and out-of-the-way corners, by the sides of shadowy lanes and footpaths, each with its patch of garden. They are built chiefly of good gray stone, and thatched; though I see that within the last year or two the red-brick cottages are multiplying, for the Vale is beginning to manufacture largely both bricks and tiles. There are lots of waste ground by the side of the roads in every village, amounting often to village greens, where feed the pigs and ganders of the people; and these roads are old-fashioned, homely roads, very dirty and badly made, and hardly endurable in winter, but still pleasant jog-trot roads running through the great pasture-lands, dotted here and there with little clumps of thorns, where the sleek kine are feeding, with no fence on either side of them, and a gate at the end of each field, which makes you get out of your gig (if you keep one), and gives you a chance of looking about you every quarter of a mile.One of the moralists whom we sat under in our youth—was it the great Richard Swiveller, or Mr. Stiggins—says, “We are born in a vale, and must take the consequences of being found in such a situation.” These consequences I, for one, am ready to encounter. I pity people who weren’t born in a vale. I don’t mean a flat country; but a vale—that is, a flat country bounded by hills. The having your hill always in view if you choose to turn towards him—that’s the essence of a vale. There he is for ever in the distance, your friend and companion. You never lose him as you do in hilly districts.And then what a hill is the White Horse Hill! There it stands right up above all the rest, nine hundred feet above the sea, and the boldest, bravest shape for a chalk hill that you ever saw. Let us go up to the top of him, and see what is to be found there. Ay, you may well wonder and think it odd you never heard of this before; but wonder or not, as you please, there are hundreds of such things lying about England, which wiser folk than you know nothing of, and care nothing for. Yes, it’s a magnificent Roman camp, and no mistake, with gates and ditch and mounds, all as complete as it was twenty years after the strong old rogues left it. Here, right up on the highest point, from which they say you can see eleven counties, they trenched round all the table-land, some twelve or fourteen acres, as was their custom, for they couldn’t bear anybody to overlook them, and made their eyrie. The ground falls away rapidly on all sides. Was there ever such turf in the whole world? You sink up to your ankles at every step, and yet the spring of it is delicious. There is always a breeze in the “camp,” as it is called; and here it lies, just as the Romans left it, except that cairn on the east side, left by her Majesty’s corps of sappers and miners the other day, when they and the engineer officer had finished their sojourn there, and their surveys for the ordnance map of Berkshire. It is altogether a place that you won’t forget, a place to open a man’s soul, and make him prophesy, as he looks down on that great Vale spread out as the garden of the Lord before him, and wave on wave of the mysterious downs behind, and to the right and left the chalk hills running away into the distance, along which he can trace for miles the old Roman road, “the Ridgeway” (“the Rudge,” as the country folk call it), keeping straight along the highest back of the hills—such a place as Balak brought Balaam to, and told him to prophesy against the people in the valley beneath. And he could not, neither shall you, for they are a people of the Lord who abide there.And now we leave the camp, and descend towards the west, and are on the Ashdown. We are treading on heroes. It is sacred ground for Englishmen—more sacred than all but one or two fields where their bones lie whitening. For this is the actual place where our Alfred won his great battle, the battle of Ashdown (“Aescendum” in the chroniclers), which broke the Danish power, and made England a Christian land. The Danes held the camp and the slope where we are standing—the whole crown of the hill, in fact. “The heathen had beforehand seized the higher ground,” as old Asser says, having wasted everything behind them from London, and being just ready to burst down on the fair Vale, Alfred’s own birthplace and heritage. And up the heights came the Saxons, as they did at the Alma. “The Christians led up their line from the lower ground. There stood also on that same spot a single thorn-tree, marvellous stumpy (which we ourselves with our very own eyes have seen).” Bless the old chronicler! Does he think nobody ever saw the “single thorn-tree” but himself? Why, there it stands to this very day, just on the edge of the slope, and I saw it not three weeks since—an old single thorn-tree, “marvellous stumpy.” At least, if it isn’t the same tree it ought to have been, for it’s just in the place where the battle must have been won or lost—“around which, as I was saying, the two lines of foemen came together in battle with a huge shout. And in this place one of the two kings of the heathen and five of his earls fell down and died, and many thousands of the heathen side in the same place.” * After which crowning mercy, the pious king, that there might never be wanting a sign and a memorial to the country-side, carved out on the northern side of the chalk hill, under the camp, where it is almost precipitous, the great Saxon White Horse, which he who will may see from the railway, and which gives its name to the Vale, over which it has looked these thousand years and more.* “Pagani editiorem Iocum praeoccupaverant. Christiani ab inferiori loco aciem dirigebant. Erat quoque in eodem loco unica spinosa arbor, brevis admodum (quam nos ipsi nostris propriis oculis vidimus). Circa quam ergo hostiles inter se acies cum ingenti clamore hostiliter conveniunt. Quo in loco alter de duobus Paganorum regibus et quinque comites occisi occubuerunt, et multa millia Paganae partis in eodem loco. Cecidit illic ergo Boegsceg Rex, et Sidroc ille senex comes, et Sidroc Junior comes, et Obsbern comes,” etc.— Annales Rerum Gestarum AElfredi Magni, Auctore Asserio. Recensuit Franciscus Wise. Oxford, 1722, p.23.Right down below the White Horse is a curious deep and broad gully called “the Manger,” into one side of which the hills fall with a series of the most lovely sweeping curves, known as “the Giant’s Stairs.” They are not a bit like stairs, but I never saw anything like them anywhere else, with their short green turf, and tender bluebells, and gossamer and thistle-down gleaming in the sun and the sheep-paths running along their sides like ruled lines.The other side of the Manger is formed by the Dragon’s Hill, a curious little round self-confident fellow, thrown forward from the range, utterly unlike everything round him. On this hill some deliverer of mankind—St. George, the country folk used to tell me—killed a dragon. Whether it were St. George, I cannot say; but surely a dragon was killed there, for you may see the marks yet where his blood ran down, and more by token the place where it ran down is the easiest way up the hillside.Passing along the Ridgeway to the west for about a mile, we come to a little clump of young beech and firs, with a growth of thorn and privet underwood. Here you may find nests of the strong down partridge and peewit, but take care that the keeper isn’t down upon you; and in the middle of it is an old cromlech, a huge flat stone raised on seven or eight others, and led up to by a path, with large single stones set up on each side. This is Wayland Smith’s cave, a place of classic fame now; but as Sir Walter has touched it, I may as well let it alone, and refer you to “Kenilworth” for the legend.The thick, deep wood which you see in the hollow, about a mile off, surrounds Ashdown Park, built by Inigo Jones. Four broad alleys are cut through the wood from circumference to centre, and each leads to one face of the house. The mystery of the downs hangs about house and wood, as they stand there alone, so unlike all around, with the green slopes studded with great stones just about this part, stretching away on all sides. It was a wise Lord Craven, I think, who pitched his tent there.Passing along the Ridgeway to the east, we soon come to cultivated land. The downs, strictly so called, are no more. Lincolnshire farmers have been imported, and the long, fresh slopes are sheep-walks no more, but grow famous turnips and barley. One of these improvers lives over there at the “Seven Barrows” farm, another mystery of the great downs. There are the barrows still, solemn and silent, like ships in the calm sea, the sepulchres of some sons of men. But of whom? It is three miles from the White Horse—too far for the slain of Ashdown to be buried there. Who shall say what heroes are waiting there? But we must get down into the Vale again, and so away by the Great Western Railway to town, for time and the printer’s devil press, and it is a terrible long and slippery descent, and a shocking bad road. At the bottom, however, there is a pleasant public; whereat we must really take a modest quencher, for the down air is provocative of thirst. So we pull up under an old oak which stands before the door. “ What is the name of your hill, landlord?” “ Blawing STWUN Hill, sir, to be sure.”READER. “Stuym?”AUTHOR: “Stone, stupid—the Blowing Stone.” “ And of your house? I can’t make out the sign.” “ Blawing Stwun, sir,” says the landlord, pouring out his old ale from a Toby Philpot jug, with a melodious crash, into the long-necked glass. “ What queer names!” say we, sighing at the end of our draught, and holding out the glass to be replenished. “ Bean’t queer at all, as I can see, sir,” says mine host, handing back our glass, “seeing as this here is the Blawing Stwun, his self,” putting his hand on a square lump of stone, some three feet and a half high, perforated with two or three queer holes, like petrified antediluvian rat-holes, which lies there close under the oak, under our very nose. We are more than ever puzzled, and drink our second glass of ale, wondering what will come next. “Like to hear un, sir?” says mine host, setting down Toby Philpot on the tray, and resting both hands on the “Stwun.” We are ready for anything; and he, without waiting for a reply, applies his mouth to one of the ratholes. Something must come of it, if he doesn’t burst. Good heavens! I hope he has no apoplectic tendencies. Yes, here it comes, sure enough, a gruesome sound between a moan and a roar, and spreads itself away over the valley, and up the hillside, and into the woods at the back of the house, a ghost-like, awful voice. “Um do say, sir,” says mine host, rising purple-faced, while the moan is still coming out of the Stwun, “as they used in old times to warn the country-side by blawing the Stwun when the enemy was a-comin’, and as how folks could make un heered then for seven mile round; leastways, so I’ve heered Lawyer Smith say, and he knows a smart sight about them old times.” We can hardly swallow Lawyer Smith’s seven miles; but could the blowing of the stone have been a summons, a sort of sending the fiery cross round the neighbourhood in the old times? What old times? Who knows? We pay for our beer, and are thankful. “ And what’s the name of the village just below, landlord?” “ Kingstone Lisle, sir.” “ Fine plantations you’ve got here?” “ Yes, sir; the Squire’s ‘mazing fond of trees and such like.” “ No wonder. He’s got some real beauties to be fond of. Good-day, landlord.” “ Good-day, sir, and a pleasant ride to ‘ee.”And now, my boys, you whom I want to get for readers, have you had enough? Will you give in at once, and say you’re convinced, and let me begin my story, or will you have more of it? Remember, I’ve only been over a little bit of the hillside yet—what you could ride round easily on your ponies in an hour. I’m only just come down into the Vale, by Blowing Stone Hill; and if I once begin about the Vale, what’s to stop me? You’ll have to hear all about Wantage, the birthplace of Alfred, and Farringdon, which held out so long for Charles the First (the Vale was near Oxford, and dreadfully malignant—full of Throgmortons, Puseys, and Pyes, and such like; and their brawny retainers). Did you ever read Thomas Ingoldsby’s “Legend of Hamilton Tighe”? If you haven’t, you ought to have. Well, Farringdon is where he lived, before he went to sea; his real name was Hamden Pye, and the Pyes were the great folk at Farringdon. Then there’s Pusey. You’ve heard of the Pusey horn, which King Canute gave to the Puseys of that day, and which the gallant old squire, lately gone to his rest (whom Berkshire freeholders turned out of last Parliament, to their eternal disgrace, for voting according to his conscience), used to bring out on high days, holidays, and bonfire nights. And the splendid old cross church at Uffington, the Uffingas town. How the whole countryside teems with Saxon names and memories! And the old moated grange at Compton, nestled close under the hillside, where twenty Marianas may have lived, with its bright water-lilies in the moat, and its yew walk, “the cloister walk,” and its peerless terraced gardens. There they all are, and twenty things beside, for those who care about them, and have eyes. And these are the sort of things you may find, I believe, every one of you, in any common English country neighbourhood.Will you look for them under your own noses, or will you not? Well, well, I’ve done what I can to make you; and if you will go gadding over half Europe now, every holidays, I can’t help it. I was born and bred a west-country man, thank God! a Wessex man, a citizen of the noblest Saxon kingdom of Wessex, a regular “Angular Saxon,” the very soul of me adscriptus glebae. There’s nothing like the old country-side for me, and no music like the twang of the real old Saxon tongue, as one gets it fresh from the veritable chaw in the White Horse Vale; and I say with “Gaarge Ridler,” the old west-country yeoman,— “ Throo aall the waarld owld Gaarge would bwoast, Commend me to merry owld England mwoast; While vools gwoes prating vur and nigh, We stwops at whum, my dog and I.”Here, at any rate, lived and stopped at home Squire Brown, J.P. for the county of Berks, in a village near the foot of the White Horse range. And here he dealt out justice and mercy in a rough way, and begat sons and daughters, and hunted the fox, and grumbled at the badness of the roads and the times. And his wife dealt out stockings, and calico shirts, and smock frocks, and comforting drinks to the old folks with the “rheumatiz,” and good counsel to all; and kept the coal and clothes’ clubs going, for yule-tide, when the bands of mummers came round, dressed out in ribbons and coloured paper caps, and stamped round the Squire’s kitchen, repeating in true sing-song vernacular the legend of St. George and his fight, and the ten-pound doctor, who plays his part at healing the Saint—a relic, I believe, of the old Middle-age mysteries. It was the first dramatic representation which greeted the eyes of little Tom, who was brought down into the kitchen by his nurse to witness it, at the mature age of three years. Tom was the eldest child of his parents, and from his earliest babyhood exhibited the family characteristics in great strength. He was a hearty, strong boy from the first, given to fighting with and escaping from his nurse, and fraternizing with all the village boys, with whom he made expeditions all round the neighbourhood. And here, in the quiet old-fashioned country village, under the shadow of the everlasting hills, Tom Brown was reared, and never left it till he went first to school, when nearly eight years of age, for in those days change of air twice a year was not thought absolutely necessary for the health of all her Majesty’s lieges.I have been credibly informed, and am inclined to believe, that the various boards of directors of railway companies, those gigantic jobbers and bribers, while quarrelling about everything else, agreed together some ten years back to buy up the learned profession of medicine, body and soul. To this end they set apart several millions of money, which they continually distribute judiciously among the doctors, stipulating only this one thing, that they shall prescribe change of air to every patient who can pay, or borrow money to pay, a railway fare, and see their prescription carried out. If it be not for this, why is it that none of us can be well at home for a year together? It wasn’t so twenty years ago, not a bit of it. The Browns didn’t go out of the country once in five years. A visit to Reading or Abingdon twice a year, at assizes or quarter sessions, which the Squire made on his horse with a pair of saddle-bags containing his wardrobe, a stay of a day or two at some country neighbour’s, or an expedition to a county ball or the yeomanry review, made up the sum of the Brown locomotion in most years. A stray Brown from some distant county dropped in every now and then; or from Oxford, on grave nag, an old don, contemporary of the Squire; and were looked upon by the Brown household and the villagers with the same sort of feeling with which we now regard a man who has crossed the Rocky Mountains, or launched a boat on the Great Lake in Central Africa. The White Horse Vale, remember, was traversed by no great road—nothing but country parish roads, and these very bad. Only one coach ran there, and this one only from Wantage to London, so that the western part of the Vale was without regular means of moving on, and certainly didn’t seem to want them. There was the canal, by the way, which supplied the country-side with coal, and up and down which continually went the long barges, with the big black men lounging by the side of the horses along the towing-path, and the women in bright-coloured handkerchiefs standing in the sterns steering. Standing I say, but you could never see whether they were standing or sitting, all but their heads and shoulders being out of sight in the cozy little cabins which occupied some eight feet of the stern, and which Tom Brown pictured to himself as the most desirable of residences. His nurse told him that those good-natured-looking women were in the constant habit of enticing children into the barges, and taking them up to London and selling them, which Tom wouldn’t believe, and which made him resolve as soon as possible to accept the oft-proffered invitation of these sirens to “young master” to come in and have a ride. But as yet the nurse was too much for Tom.Yet why should I, after all, abuse the gadabout propensities of my countrymen? We are a vagabond nation now, that’s certain, for better for worse. I am a vagabond; I have been away from home no less than five distinct times in the last year. The Queen sets us the example: we are moving on from top to bottom. Little dirty Jack, who abides in Clement’s Inn gateway, and blacks my boots for a penny, takes his month’s hop-picking every year as a matter of course. Why shouldn’t he? I’m delighted at it. I love vagabonds, only I prefer poor to rich ones. Couriers and ladies’-maids, imperials and travelling carriages, are an abomination unto me; I cannot away with them. But for dirty Jack, and every good fellow who, in the words of the capital French song, moves about, “ Comme le limacon, Portant tout son bagage, Ses meubles, sa maison,”on his own back, why, good luck to them, and many a merry roadside adventure, and steaming supper in the chimney corners of roadside inns, Swiss chalets, Hottentot kraals, or wherever else they like to go. So, having succeeded in contradicting myself in my first chapter (which gives me great hopes that you will all go on, and think me a good fellow notwithstanding my crotchets), I shall here shut up for the present, and consider my ways; having resolved to “sar’ it out,” as we say in the Vale, “holus bolus” just as it comes, and then you’ll probably get the truth out of me.

CHAPTER II—THE “VEAST.”

“ And the King commandeth and forbiddeth, that fromhenceforth neither fairs nor markets be kept in Churchyards,for the honour of the Church.”—STATUTES : 13 Edw. I. Stat.II. cap. vi.As that venerable and learned poet (whose voluminous works we all think it the correct thing to admire and talk about, but don’t read often) most truly says, “The child is father to the man;” a fortiori, therefore, he must be father to the boy. So as we are going at any rate to see Tom Brown through his boyhood, supposing we never get any farther (which, if you show a proper sense of the value of this history, there is no knowing but what we may), let us have a look at the life and environments of the child in the quiet country village to which we were introduced in the last chapter.Tom, as has been already said, was a robust and combative urchin, and at the age of four began to struggle against the yoke and authority of his nurse. That functionary was a good-hearted, tearful, scatter-brained girl, lately taken by Tom’s mother, Madam Brown, as she was called, from the village school to be trained as nurserymaid. Madam Brown was a rare trainer of servants, and spent herself freely in the profession; for profession it was, and gave her more trouble by half than many people take to earn a good income. Her servants were known and sought after for miles round. Almost all the girls who attained a certain place in the village school were taken by her, one or two at a time, as housemaids, laundrymaids, nurserymaids, or kitchenmaids, and after a year or two’s training were started in life amongst the neighbouring families, with good principles and wardrobes. One of the results of this system was the perpetual despair of Mrs. Brown’s cook and own maid, who no sooner had a notable girl made to their hands than missus was sure to find a good place for her and send her off, taking in fresh importations from the school. Another was, that the house was always full of young girls, with clean, shining faces, who broke plates and scorched linen, but made an atmosphere of cheerful, homely life about the place, good for every one who came within its influence. Mrs. Brown loved young people, and in fact human creatures in general, above plates and linen. They were more like a lot of elder children than servants, and felt to her more as a mother or aunt than as a mistress.Tom’s nurse was one who took in her instruction very slowly—she seemed to have two left hands and no head; and so Mrs. Brown kept her on longer than usual, that she might expend her awkwardness and forgetfulness upon those who would not judge and punish her too strictly for them.Charity Lamb was her name. It had been the immemorial habit of the village to christen children either by Bible names, or by those of the cardinal and other virtues; so that one was for ever hearing in the village street or on the green, shrill sounds of “Prudence! Prudence! thee cum’ out o’ the gutter;” or, “Mercy! drat the girl, what bist thee a-doin’ wi’ little Faith?” and there were Ruths, Rachels, Keziahs, in every corner. The same with the boys: they were Benjamins, Jacobs, Noahs, Enochs. I suppose the custom has come down from Puritan times. There it is, at any rate, very strong still in the Vale.Well, from early morning till dewy eve, when she had it out of him in the cold tub before putting him to bed, Charity and Tom were pitted against one another. Physical power was as yet on the side of Charity, but she hadn’t a chance with him wherever headwork was wanted. This war of independence began every morning before breakfast, when Charity escorted her charge to a neighbouring farmhouse, which supplied the Browns, and where, by his mother’s wish, Master Tom went to drink whey before breakfast. Tom had no sort of objection to whey, but he had a decided liking for curds, which were forbidden as unwholesome; and there was seldom a morning that he did not manage to secure a handful of hard curds, in defiance of Charity and of the farmer’s wife. The latter good soul was a gaunt, angular woman, who, with an old black bonnet on the top of her head, the strings dangling about her shoulders, and her gown tucked through her pocket-holes, went clattering about the dairy, cheese-room, and yard, in high pattens. Charity was some sort of niece of the old lady’s, and was consequently free of the farmhouse and garden, into which she could not resist going for the purposes of gossip and flirtation with the heir-apparent, who was a dawdling fellow, never out at work as he ought to have been. The moment Charity had found her cousin, or any other occupation, Tom would slip away; and in a minute shrill cries would be heard from the dairy, “Charity, Charity, thee lazy huzzy, where bist?” and Tom would break cover, hands and mouth full of curds, and take refuge on the shaky surface of the great muck reservoir in the middle of the yard, disturbing the repose of the great pigs. Here he was in safety, as no grown person could follow without getting over their knees; and the luckless Charity, while her aunt scolded her from the dairy door, for being “allus hankering about arter our Willum, instead of minding Master Tom,” would descend from threats to coaxing, to lure Tom out of the muck, which was rising over his shoes, and would soon tell a tale on his stockings, for which she would be sure to catch it from missus’s maid.Tom had two abettors, in the shape of a couple of old boys, Noah and Benjamin by name, who defended him from Charity, and expended much time upon his education. They were both of them retired servants of former generations of the Browns. Noah Crooke was a keen, dry old man of almost ninety, but still able to totter about. He talked to Tom quite as if he were one of his own family, and indeed had long completely identified the Browns with himself. In some remote age he had been the attendant of a Miss Brown, and had conveyed her about the country on a pillion. He had a little round picture of the identical gray horse, caparisoned with the identical pillion, before which he used to do a sort of fetish worship, and abuse turnpike-roads and carriages. He wore an old full-bottomed wig, the gift of some dandy old Brown whom he had valeted in the middle of last century, which habiliment Master Tom looked upon with considerable respect, not to say fear; and indeed his whole feeling towards Noah was strongly tainted with awe. And when the old gentleman was gathered to his fathers, Tom’s lamentation over him was not unaccompanied by a certain joy at having seen the last of the wig. “Poor old Noah, dead and gone,” said he; “Tom Brown so sorry. Put him in the coffin, wig and all.”But old Benjy was young master’s real delight and refuge. He was a youth by the side of Noah, scarce seventy years old—a cheery, humorous, kind-hearted old man, full of sixty years of Vale gossip, and of all sorts of helpful ways for young and old, but above all for children. It was he who bent the first pin with which Tom extracted his first stickleback out of “Pebbly Brook,” the little stream which ran through the village. The first stickleback was a splendid fellow, with fabulous red and blue gills. Tom kept him in a small basin till the day of his death, and became a fisherman from that day. Within a month from the taking of the first stickleback, Benjy had carried off our hero to the canal, in defiance of Charity; and between them, after a whole afternoon’s popjoying, they had caught three or four small, coarse fish and a perch, averaging perhaps two and a half ounces each, which Tom bore home in rapture to his mother as a precious gift, and which she received like a true mother with equal rapture, instructing the cook nevertheless, in a private interview, not to prepare the same for the Squire’s dinner. Charity had appealed against old Benjy in the meantime, representing the dangers of the canal banks; but Mrs. Brown, seeing the boy’s inaptitude for female guidance, had decided in Benjy’s favour, and from thenceforth the old man was Tom’s dry nurse. And as they sat by the canal watching their little green-and-white float, Benjy would instruct him in the doings of deceased Browns. How his grandfather, in the early days of the great war, when there was much distress and crime in the Vale, and the magistrates had been threatened by the mob, had ridden in with a big stick in his hand, and held the petty sessions by himself. How his great-uncle, the rector, had encountered and laid the last ghost, who had frightened the old women, male and female, of the parish out of their senses, and who turned out to be the blacksmith’s apprentice disguised in drink and a white sheet. It was Benjy, too, who saddled Tom’s first pony, and instructed him in the mysteries of horsemanship, teaching him to throw his weight back and keep his hand low, and who stood chuckling outside the door of the girls’ school when Tom rode his little Shetland into the cottage and round the table, where the old dame and her pupils were seated at their work.Benjy himself was come of a family distinguished in the Vale for their prowess in all athletic games. Some half-dozen of his brothers and kinsmen had gone to the wars, of whom only one had survived to come home, with a small pension, and three bullets in different parts of his body; he had shared Benjy’s cottage till his death, and had left him his old dragoon’s sword and pistol, which hung over the mantelpiece, flanked by a pair of heavy single-sticks with which Benjy himself had won renown long ago as an old gamester, against the picked men of Wiltshire and Somersetshire, in many a good bout at the revels and pastimes of the country-side. For he had been a famous back-swordman in his young days, and a good wrestler at elbow and collar.Back-swording and wrestling were the most serious holiday pursuits of the Vale—those by which men attained fame—and each village had its champion. I suppose that, on the whole, people were less worked then than they are now; at any rate, they seemed to have more time and energy for the old pastimes. The great times for back-swording came round once a year in each village; at the feast. The Vale “veasts” were not the common statute feasts, but much more ancient business. They are literally, so far as one can ascertain, feasts of the dedication—that is, they were first established in the churchyard on the day on which the village church was opened for public worship, which was on the wake or festival of the patron saint, and have been held on the same day in every year since that time.There was no longer any remembrance of why the “veast” had been instituted, but nevertheless it had a pleasant and almost sacred character of its own; for it was then that all the children of the village, wherever they were scattered, tried to get home for a holiday to visit their fathers and mothers and friends, bringing with them their wages or some little gift from up the country for the old folk. Perhaps for a day or two before, but at any rate on “veast day” and the day after, in our village, you might see strapping, healthy young men and women from all parts of the country going round from house to house in their best clothes, and finishing up with a call on Madam Brown, whom they would consult as to putting out their earnings to the best advantage, or how best to expend the same for the benefit of the old folk. Every household, however poor, managed to raise a “feast-cake” and a bottle of ginger or raisin wine, which stood on the cottage table ready for all comers, and not unlikely to make them remember feast-time, for feast-cake is very solid, and full of huge raisins. Moreover, feast-time was the day of reconciliation for the parish. If Job Higgins and Noah Freeman hadn’t spoken for the last six months, their “old women” would be sure to get it patched up by that day. And though there was a good deal of drinking and low vice in the booths of an evening, it was pretty well confined to those who would have been doing the like, “veast or no veast;” and on the whole, the effect was humanising and Christian. In fact, the only reason why this is not the case still is that gentlefolk and farmers have taken to other amusements, and have, as usual, forgotten the poor. They don’t attend the feasts themselves, and call them disreputable; whereupon the steadiest of the poor leave them also, and they become what they are called. Class amusements, be they for dukes or ploughboys, always become nuisances and curses to a country. The true charm of cricket and hunting is that they are still more or less sociable and universal; there’s a place for every man who will come and take his part.No one in the village enjoyed the approach of “veast day” more than Tom, in the year in which he was taken under old Benjy’s tutelage. The feast was held in a large green field at the lower end of the village. The road to Farringdon ran along one side of it, and the brook by the side of the road; and above the brook was another large, gentle, sloping pasture-land, with a footpath running down it from the churchyard; and the old church, the originator of all the mirth, towered up with its gray walls and lancet windows, overlooking and sanctioning the whole, though its own share therein had been forgotten. At the point where the footpath crossed the brook and road, and entered on the field where the feast was held, was a long, low roadside inn; and on the opposite side of the field was a large white thatched farmhouse, where dwelt an old sporting farmer, a great promoter of the revels.Past the old church, and down the footpath, pottered the old man and the child hand-in-hand early on the afternoon of the day before the feast, and wandered all round the ground, which was already being occupied by the “cheap Jacks,” with their green-covered carts and marvellous assortment of wares; and the booths of more legitimate small traders, with their tempting arrays of fairings and eatables; and penny peep-shows and other shows, containing pink-eyed ladies, and dwarfs, and boa-constrictors, and wild Indians. But the object of most interest to Benjy, and of course to his pupil also, was the stage of rough planks some four feet high, which was being put up by the village carpenter for the back-swording and wrestling. And after surveying the whole tenderly, old Benjy led his charge away to the roadside inn, where he ordered a glass of ale and a long pipe for himself, and discussed these unwonted luxuries on the bench outside in the soft autumn evening with mine host, another old servant of the Browns, and speculated with him on the likelihood of a good show of old gamesters to contend for the morrow’s prizes, and told tales of the gallant bouts of forty years back, to which Tom listened with all his ears and eyes.But who shall tell the joy of the next morning, when the church bells were ringing a merry peal, and old Benjy appeared in the servants’ hall, resplendent in a long blue coat and brass buttons, and a pair of old yellow buckskins and top-boots which he had cleaned for and inherited from Tom’s grandfather, a stout thorn stick in his hand, and a nosegay of pinks and lavender in his buttonhole, and led away Tom in his best clothes, and two new shillings in his breeches-pockets? Those two, at any rate, look like enjoying the day’s revel.They quicken their pace when they get into the churchyard, for already they see the field thronged with country folk; the men in clean, white smocks or velveteen or fustian coats, with rough plush waistcoats of many colours, and the women in the beautiful, long scarlet cloak—the usual out-door dress of west-country women in those days, and which often descended in families from mother to daughter—or in new-fashioned stuff shawls, which, if they would but believe it, don’t become them half so well. The air resounds with the pipe and tabor, and the drums and trumpets of the showmen shouting at the doors of their caravans, over which tremendous pictures of the wonders to be seen within hang temptingly; while through all rises the shrill “root-too-too-too” of Mr. Punch, and the unceasing pan-pipe of his satellite. “ Lawk a’ massey, Mr. Benjamin,” cries a stout, motherly woman in a red cloak, as they enter the field, “be that you? Well, I never! You do look purely. And how’s the Squire, and madam, and the family?”Benjy graciously shakes hands with the speaker, who has left our village for some years, but has come over for “veast” day on a visit to an old gossip, and gently indicates the heir-apparent of the Browns. “ Bless his little heart! I must gi’ un a kiss.—Here, Susannah, Susannah!” cries she, raising herself from the embrace, “come and see Mr. Benjamin and young Master Tom.—You minds our Sukey, Mr. Benjamin; she be growed a rare slip of a wench since you seen her, though her’ll be sixteen come Martinmas. I do aim to take her to see madam to get her a place.”And Sukey comes bouncing away from a knot of old school-fellows, and drops a curtsey to Mr. Benjamin. And elders come up from all parts to salute Benjy, and girls who have been madam’s pupils to kiss Master Tom. And they carry him off to load him with fairings; and he returns to Benjy, his hat and coat covered with ribbons, and his pockets crammed with wonderful boxes which open upon ever new boxes, and popguns, and trumpets, and apples, and gilt gingerbread from the stall of Angel Heavens, sole vender thereof, whose booth groans with kings and queens, and elephants and prancing steeds, all gleaming with gold. There was more gold on Angel’s cakes than there is ginger in those of this degenerate age. Skilled diggers might yet make a fortune in the churchyards of the Vale, by carefully washing the dust of the consumers of Angel’s gingerbread. Alas! he is with his namesakes, and his receipts have, I fear, died with him.And then they inspect the penny peep-show—at least Tom does—while old Benjy stands outside and gossips and walks up the steps, and enters the mysterious doors of the pink-eyed lady and the Irish giant, who do not by any means come up to their pictures; and the boa will not swallow his rabbit, but there the rabbit is waiting to be swallowed; and what can you expect for tuppence? We are easily pleased in the Vale. Now there is a rush of the crowd, and a tinkling bell is heard, and shouts of laughter; and Master Tom mounts on Benjy’s shoulders, and behold [...]