APPENDIX VII 



Miss Frances Jennings to Miss Elizabeth Lawrence 



Your long letter did put some spirit into me. So few say to me " go on " 

 to St. Winefreds Well; — they all say "stay," "stop," "you can't." I am 

 feeling my way in that direction, but just now I am not moving fast. I've 

 discovered a splendid way of getting through the mid-winter, I am trav- 

 elling from farm to farm, making my houses of great barns. Outside I 

 hear the storms raving, but my great beams don't even creak. They are 

 such beautiful houses, great oak beams, with the scales of the bark in their 

 hollows, and with beautiful curves in their bodies, and I see the barn-cats 

 run and sit along the beams ; and spots of sun, and often in the same 

 house with me are milky calves and wooden chests of meal and gold straw 

 and cider casks that bubble like a spring, or as if a mouse jumped under 

 the water. And heaps of red apple must, which they use to bank up their 

 fires with, the same as with peat. Then in the same house are many little 

 mice, and big rats; and in the Spring they say they ?re full of singing 

 wild birds making their nests above. I am in the cider country now 

 (Herefordshire). As soon as I crossed the border I heard the talk of 

 cider, and beautiful apple dumplings and apple cake. They say the farm 

 hands here know of nothing but cider ; it is their whole world. They rise 

 to drink it, and they would not work without the cider. They think of 

 cider alone ! What a simplicity of thought ! They are cider, body and 

 soul, so they are a queer people. I drank mulled cider (warmed in a 

 copper cup like a dunce's cap, to push deep inside the fire) with spoons 

 of honey in it and a lump of butter out of a lustre basin. 



The man here tells me: "Apples for sleeplessness — apples clear the 

 brain, apples for the brain — juice of apple dabbed in the eye makes you 

 see beautiful — apples give you appetite. Cider makes you eat — cider 

 makes you hearty," etc. 



My small cart is put inside the barns, they usually have three bays, and 

 I have a cask (an " apple-pot " they call it here) turned up for a table, and 

 a bundle of straw for a seat — most often I am on the stone threshing 

 floor of the barns or on an earthern floor. 



I am not feeling the cold at all and now have friends by the hundreds 

 in the country I have passed across ; but few as yet in front. 



I have stayed with shepherds, cowmen, blacksmiths, bakers, a poet, a 

 barber, a cobbler, at the village shop, applemen, nurses, basket makers, 

 waggoners. 



I am going to move now from Hereford to Aberystwith, then around 

 the coast to Holywell, and to see a certain mountain they tell me is shaped 

 like a pyramid ; and is not a mountain but is a God ! 



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