nightingales as they begin to sing in the woods behind them, that
if I were to propose to deal, they would sell me anything at cost
price. On this hallowed ground has it been my happy privilege (let
me whisper it), to behold the White-haired Lady with the pink eyes,
eating meat-pie with the Giant: while, by the hedge-side, on the
box of blankets which I knew contained the snakes, were set forth
the cups and saucers and the teapot. It was on an evening in
August, that I chanced upon this ravishing spectacle, and I noticed
that, whereas the Giant reclined half concealed beneath the
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Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller
overhanging boughs and seemed indifferent to Nature, the white hair
of the gracious Lady streamed free in the breath of evening, and
her pink eyes found pleasure in the landscape. I heard only a
single sentence of her uttering, yet it bespoke a talent for modest
repartee. The ill-mannered Giant – accursed be his evil race! –
had interrupted the Lady in some remark, and, as I passed that
enchanted corner of the wood, she gently reproved him, with the
words, ‘Now, Cobby;’ – Cobby! so short a name! – ‘ain’t one fool
enough to talk at a time?’
Within appropriate distance of this magic ground, though not so
near it as that the song trolled from tap or bench at door, can
invade its woodland silence, is a little hostelry which no man
possessed of a penny was ever known to pass in warm weather.
Before its entrance, are certain pleasant, trimmed limes; likewise,
a cool well, with so musical a bucket-handle that its fall upon the
bucket rim will make a horse prick up his ears and neigh, upon the
droughty road half a mile off. This is a house of great resort for
haymaking tramps and harvest tramps, insomuch that as they sit
within, drinking their mugs of beer, their relinquished scythes and
reaping-hooks glare out of the open windows, as if the whole
establishment were a family war-coach of Ancient Britons. Later in
the season, the whole country-side, for miles and miles, will swarm
with hopping tramps. They come in families, men, women, and
children, every family provided with a bundle of bedding, an iron
pot, a number of babies, and too often with some poor sick creature
quite unfit for the rough life, for whom they suppose the smell of
the fresh hop to be a sovereign remedy. Many of these hoppers are
Irish, but many come from London. They crowd all the roads, and
camp under all the hedges and on all the scraps of common-land, and
live among and upon the hops until they are all picked, and the
hop-gardens, so beautiful through the summer, look as if they had
been laid waste by an invading army. Then, there is a vast exodus
of tramps out of the country; and if you ride or drive round any
turn of any road, at more than a foot pace, you will be bewildered
to find that you have charged into the bosom of fifty families, and
that there are splashing up all around you, in the utmost
prodigality of confusion, bundles of bedding, babies, iron pots,
and a good-humoured multitude of both sexes and all ages, equally
divided between perspiration and intoxication.
CHAPTER XII – DULLBOROUGH TOWN
It lately happened that I found myself rambling about the scenes
among which my earliest days were passed; scenes from which I
departed when I was a child, and which I did not revisit until I
was a man. This is no uncommon chance, but one that befalls some
of us any day; perhaps it may not be quite uninteresting to compare
notes with the reader respecting an experience so familiar and a
journey so uncommercial.
I call my boyhood’s home (and I feel like a Tenor in an English
Opera when I mention it) Dullborough. Most of us come from
Dullborough who come from a country town.
As I left Dullborough in the days when there were no railroads in
the land, I left it in a stage-coach. Through all the years that
have since passed, have I ever lost the smell of the damp straw in