watery June, has so favoured the grass as to make us nearly secure of a timely haymaking; and our July pleasures are laid out with a confidence which we must hope will not be disappointed.
Little Master Harry, after all, decides what our first trip of this month shall be. He bursts in upon mamma with news that he is going to ride in a cart,—going a long way off, to see beautiful flowers and gooseberries,—going to see a great many people in a great town. Nanny told him so,—his dear Nanny, the nursemaid, who married away from us in April, but contrives to see her pet Harry several times a week. Nanny appears, and explains that her husband has some flowers and some wonderful gooseberries at the horticultural show at N, and that she begs to be allowed to take Harry with her in the donkey-cart for the ride and the show. It is settled at once that not only Harry, but everybody shall go. My wife will drive two in the pony-carriage from the Crown, and three will ride.
The three who ride will make a circuit by bridle paths: and the others start early, to avoid the dust of the high road at mid-day, when the county is crowding to the show. The dust is still laid with the dew in the avenue as we pace down it after our early breakfast, and the grass is fresh in the broad lane we first turn into from the high-road.
Some people are here before us, however. There are three or four girls, with a woman in the midst of them, crouched down by the ditch, and half-hidden in the hedge, and so busy that they do not notice us till some jingle of stirrup or rein—as we are passing on the grass—makes them look round all at once.
They are herb-gathering. The herbalists have a notion that deadly night-shade, for instance, and several other materials for medicines, are of better quality in their wild state than when grown for sale. What a quantity of that night-shade there is in this lane! There are bundles of other plants, too, in the woman’s basket. She has been at work since before four o’clock, and is going home now the sun is drying up the last of the dew.
How rich the hedges are! For half a mile together they are starred over with wild roses, and the foxgloves are taller than ever: honeysuckles dangle forth in streamers from the hazel-stems and the thorns, and the bindweed chains up everything in its tangles. On the bank are the meadowsweet, and mallows out of number, and the ladies’ bed-straw, and spreading borage, and long trails of wild strawberry, with its scarlet fruit peeping out here and there; and running vetches, and scabious standing up stiff; and under them, for the searching eye of herb-gatherers, there is a wondrous mosaic of tiny blossoms,—scarlet, yellow, blue, white, and purple. The ditch is nearly dry; but, in the moister places, there is forget-me-not, and yellow loose-strife, and rushes enough to supply dragon-flies to glance about the lane.
Bell turns on her saddle to look once more at the woman and her brood, and thinks it must be pleasant to be a herb-gatherer: at least, on a sweet fragrant morning in July. I remark that there
are other occupations for children which look highly agreeable on a summer morning. We must remember the evil of uncertain crops to herb-gatherers, and of changeable weather which makes their calling a very precarious one. It is fatiguing too: Whether it be from superstition or experience, some of the gathering is done in the night, and some in the hot noon, as well as the dewy morning; and many plants lie wide apart—low down in swamps and high up in rocky places, and in the depths of woods, or sprinkled scantily over wild moors.
But Charles wants to know what other children’s occupations have such an agreeable appearance in summer. He is advised to look about him this very morning, and see whether he can observe any. In the midst of his guesses, he is about to dismount to open a gate when he sees there is a girl running to save him that trouble. There is also a boy, but we do not see him till we are just upon him. He lies on his face in the thick grass. As we look back, we see him motion his little sister to him, twist the halfpenny out of her hand and pocket it, and then dismiss her with a kick to her post. She clearly wishes to sit down in the shade; but he thrusts her to the sunny side, whence a longer stretch of the lane is visible. Charles volunteers the observation that he should not like to be either that girl or that boy; but the occupation might be a pleasant one enough. All boys in lanes are not tyrants, he supposes, nor all girls slaves.
Next, he points with his whip to a field on the left, observing that the field is ugly enough, but not the work, he should fancy. It is a brick-field; and, as far as the clay-heaps, and the holes, and the puddles go, nothing can be uglier; but the sheds have a cool appearance; just a picturesque thatch of furze and heather, laid on four poles; and a wattled aide, moveable as the sun travels round. The boys and girls under those sheds have a cool material in clay and water; it must be pretty work moulding the bricks, and turning out the smooth slabs, and ranging them for drying in the form of a perforated wall. Besides, the wages are good and certain, till the winter frost shuts up the season. Still, as Bell observes, it is dirty work, and there is no beauty in wet clay.
“What do you say to this?” I ask, as we see a long, low roof in a turning of the lane, some way before us. We hear a wheel first, and then we look into a very long shed, entirely open throughout its length, and at present chequered with moving shadows from a row of elder bushes on the further side. It is a rope walk; and half-a-dozen men and women are walking backwards, with each a great coil of tow about the waist, while at either end is a wheel, one turned by a boy and the other by a girl. The girl looks hot, the boy looks dull; and when we consider that they will be at their wheels till evening, except at meals, we think it no bad thing for children that the twisting of ropes will soon cease to be done by human hands.
Some real out-door work, something to do in field, or wood, or garden, is what Bell inquires for, to compare with herb-gathering.
Before we have ridden many yards further, we