A Shepherds Life | Page 3

even to feel a little sorry for him, alone
there in his high, dreary world, but presently thought he was better off
and better employed than most of his fellows poring over miserable
books in school, and I wished we had a more rational system of
education for the agricultural districts, one which would not keep the
children shut up in a room during all the best hours of the day, when to
be out of doors, seeing, hearing, and doing, would fit them so much
better for the life-work before them. Squeers' method was a wiser one.
We think less of it than of the delightful caricature, which makes
Squeers "a joy for ever," as Mr. Lang has said of Pecksniff. But
Dickens was a Londoner, and incapable of looking at this or any other
question from any other than the Londoner's standpoint. Can you have
a better system for the children of all England than this one which will
turn out the most perfect draper's assistant in Oxford Street, or, to go
higher, the most efficient Mr. Guppy in a solicitor's office? It is true
that we have Nature's unconscious intelligence against us; that by and
by, when at the age of fourteen the boy is finally released, she will set
to work to undo the wrong by discharging from his mind its
accumulations of useless knowledge as soon as he begins the work of
life. But what a waste of time and energy and money! One can only
hope that the slow intellect of the country will wake to this question
some day, that the countryman will say to the townsman, Go on making

your laws and systems of education for your own children, who will
live as you do indoors; while I shall devise a different one for mine,
one which will give them hard muscles and teach them to raise the
mutton and pork and cultivate the potatoes and cabbages on which we
all feed.
To return to the downs. Their very emptiness and desolation, which
frightens the stranger from them, only serves to make them more
fascinating to those who are intimate with and have learned to love
them. That dreary aspect brings to mind the other one, when, on
waking with the early sunlight in the room, you look out on a blue sky,
cloudless or with white clouds. It may be fancy, or the effect of contrast,
but it has always seemed to me that just as the air is purer and fresher
on these chalk heights than on the earth below, and as the water is of a
more crystal purity, and the sky perhaps bluer, so do all colours and all
sounds have a purity and vividness and intensity beyond that of other
places. I see it in the yellows of hawkweed, rock-rose, and
birds'-foot-trefoil, in the innumerable specks of brilliant colour--blue
and white and rose--of milk-wort and squinancy-wort, and in the large
flowers of the dwarf thistle, glowing purple in its green setting; and I
hear it in every bird-sound, in the trivial songs of yellow-hammer and
corn-bunting, and of dunnock and wren and whitethroat.
The pleasure of walking on the downs is not, however, a subject which
concerns me now; it is one I have written about in a former work,
"Nature in Downland," descriptive of the South Downs. The theme of
the present work is the life, human and other, of the South Wiltshire
Downs, or of Salisbury Plain. It is the part of Wiltshire which has most
attracted me. Most persons would say that the Marlborough Downs are
greater, more like the great Sussex range as it appears from the Weald:
but chance brought me farther south, and the character and life of the
village people when I came to know them made this appear the best
place to be in.
The Plain itself is not a precisely denned area, and may be made to
include as much or little as will suit the writer's purpose. If you want a
continuous plain, with no dividing valley cutting through it, you must

place it between the Avon and Wylye Rivers, a distance about fifteen
miles broad and as many long, with the village of Tilshead in its
centure; or, if you don't mind the valleys, you can say it extends from
Downton and Tollard Royal south of Salisbury to the Pewsey vale in
the north, and from the Hampshire border on the east side to Dorset and
Somerset on the west, about twenty-five to thirty miles each way. My
own range is over this larger Salisbury Plain, which includes the River
Ebble, or Ebele, with its numerous interesting villages, from Odstock
and Combe Bisset, near Salisbury and "the Chalks," to pretty
Alvediston near the Dorset line, and all those