Vagabond and Other Poems from Punch | Page 4

Exodus and Leviticus.?He enjoys himself like a hearty boy?Who finds his life for his needs the aptest;?But the poisoned drop in his cup of joy?Is the Revd. Joshua Fall, the Baptist,?An earnest man with a tongue that stings--?The Vicar calls him a child of schism--?Who has dared to utter some dreadful things?On the vices of sacerdotalism,?And the ruination?Of education?By the Church of England Catechism.
Set in a circle of oak and beech,?North of the village lies Cragwell Hall;?And stretching far as the eye can reach,?Over the slopes and beyond the fall?Of the hills so keeping their guard about it?That the north wind never may chill or flout it,?Through forests as dense as that of Arden,?With orchard and park and trim-kept garden,?And farms for pasture and farms for tillage,?The Hall maintains its rule of the village.
And in the Hall?Lived the lord of all,?Girt round with all that our hearts desire?Of leisure and wealth, the ancient Squire.?He was the purplest-faced old man?Since ever the Darville race began,?Pompous and purple-faced and proud;?With a portly girth and a voice so loud?You might have heard it a mile away?When he cheered the hounds on a hunting day.?He was hard on dissenters and such encroachers,?He was hard on sinners and hard on poachers;?He talked of his rights as one who knew?That the pick of the earth to him was due:?The right to this and the right to that,?To the humble look and the lifted hat;?The right to scold or evict a peasant,?The right to partridge and hare and pheasant;?The right to encourage discontent?By raising a hard-worked farmer's rent;?The manifest right to ride to hounds?Through his own or anyone else's grounds;?The right to eat of the best by day?And to snore the whole of the night away;?For his motto, as often he explained,?Was "A Darville holds what a Darville gained."?He tried to be just, but that may be?Small merit in one who has most things free;
And his neighbours averred,?When they heard the word,?"Old Darville's a just man, is he? Bust his?Gills, we could do without his justice!"
II
The village itself runs, more or less,?On the sinuous line of a letter S,?Twining its little houses through?The twists of the street, as our hamlets do,?For no good reason, so far as I know,?Save that chance has arranged it so.?It's a quaint old ramshackle moss-grown place,?Keeping its staid accustomed pace;?Not moved at all by the rush and flurry,?The mad tempestuous windy hurry?Of the big world tossing in rage and riot,?While the village holds to its old-world quiet.
There's a family grocer, a family baker,?A family butcher and sausage-maker--?A butcher, proud of his craft and willing?To admit that his business in life is killing,?Who parades a heart as soft as his meat's tough--?There's a little shop for the sale of sweet stuff;?There's a maker and mender of boots and shoes?Of the sort that the country people use,?Studded with iron and clamped with steel,?And stout as a ship from toe to heel,?Who announces himself above his entry?As "patronised by the leading gentry."
There's an inn, "The George";?There's a blacksmith's forge,?And in the neat little inn's trim garden?The old men, each with his own churchwarden,?Bent and grey, but gossipy fellows,?Sip their innocent pints of beer,?While the anvil-notes ring high and clear?To the rushing bass of the mighty bellows.?And thence they look on a cheerful scene?As the little ones play on the Village Green,
Skipping about?With laugh and shout?As if no Darville could ever squire them,?And nothing on earth could tame or tire them.
On the central point of the pleasant Green?The famous stone-walled well is seen?Which has never stinted its ice-cold waters?To generations of Cragwell's daughters.?No matter how long the rain might fail?There was always enough for can and pail--?Enough for them and enough to lend?To the dried-out rivals of Cragwell End.?An army might have been sent to raise?Enough for a thousand washing days?Crowded and crammed together in one day,?One vast soap-sudded and wash-tubbed Monday,?And, however fast they might wind the winch,?The water wouldn't have sunk an inch.?For the legend runs that Crag the Saint,?At the high noon-tide of a summer's day,?Thirsty, spent with his toil and faint,?To the site of the well once made his way,?And there he saw a delightful rill?And sat beside it and drank his fill,?Drank of the rill and found it good,?Sitting at ease on a block of wood,?And blessed the place, and thenceforth never?The waters have ceased but they run for ever.?They burnt St. Crag, so the stories say,?And his ashes cast on the winds away,?But the well survives, and the block of wood?Stands--nay, stood where it always stood,?And still was the village's pride and glory?On the day of which I shall tell my story.?Gnarled and knotty and weather-stained,?Battered and cracked, it still remained;
And thither came,?Footsore and lame,?On an autumn evening a year ago?The wandering pedlar, Gipsy Joe.?Beside the block he stood and