320 FIELD AND HEDGEROW. 



told which belonged to the village and which did not. 

 They drifted into various tithings, and yet it was all the 

 same place. They were all thatched. It was a thatched 

 village. This is strictly accurate and strictly inaccurate, 

 for I think there were one or two tiled and one ' slated,' 

 and perhaps a modern one slated. Nothing is ever 

 quite rigid or complete that is of man ; all rules have a 

 chip in them. The way they builded the older thatched 

 farmhouses was to put up a very high wall in front and 

 a very low one behind, and then the roof in a general 

 way sloped down from the high wall to the low wall, 

 an acre broad of thatch. These old thatched houses 

 seemed to be very healthy so long as the old folk lived 

 in them in the old-fashioned way. Thatch is believed 

 to give an equable temperature. The air blew all round 

 them, and it might be said all through them ; for the 

 front door was always open three parts of the year, and 

 at the back the dairies were in a continual blow. 

 Upstairs the houses were only one room thick, so that 

 each wall was an outside wall, or rather it was a wall 

 one side and thatched the other, so that the wind went 

 through if a window was open. Modern houses are 

 often built two rooms thick, so that the air does not 

 circulate from one side to the other. No one seemed to 

 be ill, unless he brought it home with him from some 

 place where he had been visiting. The diseases they 

 used to have were long-lived, such as rheumatism, which 

 may keep a man comfortably in aches and pains forty 

 years. My dear old friend, however, taking them one 

 by one, went through the lot and told me of the ghosts. 

 The forefathers I knew are all gone — the stout man, the 

 lame man, the paralysed man, the gruff old stick : not 

 one left. There is not one left of the old farmers, not a 

 bingle one. The fathers, too, of our own generation 



