192 THE SOUTH COUNTRY 



a chap who did a bit of tinkering and umbrella-mending 

 and grinding in the roving way, and a job of hoeing or 

 mowing now and then. He died not so very long after 

 in the year of the siege of Paris, and I have been alone 

 ever since. Nor I haven't been to church since, any more 

 than a blackbird would go and perch on the shoulder of 

 one of those ladies with feathers and wings and a bit of a 

 fox in their hats." 



Labourer, soldier, labourer, tinker, umbrella man, he 

 had always wandered, and knew the South Country 

 between Fordingbridge and Dover as a man knows his 

 garden. Every village, almost every farmhouse, especially 

 if there were hops on the land, he knew, and could see 

 with his blue eyes as he remembered them and spoke their 

 names. I never met a man who knew England as he 

 did. As he talked of places his eyes were alight and 

 turned in their direction, and his arm stretched out to 

 point, moving as he went through his itinerary, so that 

 verily, wherever he was, he seemed to carry in his head 

 the relative positions of all the other places where he had 

 laboured and drunk and lit his solitary fire. "Was you 



ever at H ? " he said, pointing to the Downs, through 



which he seemed to see H itself. " General - , that 



commanded us, lived there. He died there three years 

 ago at the age of eighty-eight, and till he died I was 

 always sure of a half-crown if I called there on a Christ- 

 mas Eve, as I generally managed to do." Of any place 

 mentioned he could presently remember something signifi- 

 cant the words of a farmer, a song, a signboard, a won- 

 derful crop, the good ale the fact that forty-nine years 

 ago the squire used to go to church in a smock frock. 

 All the time his face was moved with free and broad 



