Vagabond and Other Poems from Punch | Page 4

ease,
With a row of elms thick-trunked and high,
And a bevy of
rooks to caw in these.
'Tis there that the Revd. Salvyn Bent
(No tie could be neater or whiter
than his tie)
Maintains the struggle against dissent,
An Oxford
scholar ex Aede Christi;
And there in his twenty-minute sermons

He makes mince-meat of the modern Germans,
Defying their
apparatus criticus
Like a brave old Vicar,
A famous sticker
To Genesis, 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