Tom Browns School Days | Page 5

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last ghost was laid by the parson, they're gone out of date altogether.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