WILD LIFE IN A SOUTHERN COUNTY. 91 



weather. Cottagers are frequently really squatters, 

 building on the waste land beside the highway close 

 to the hedgerow, and consequently under the trees. 

 This dripping on the roof is very bad for thatch. Straw 

 is remarkably durable, even when exposed to the 

 weather, if good in the first place and well laid on. It 

 may be reckoned to last twenty years on an average, 

 perhaps more. Five thatchings, then, made, eighty 

 years ; add three years since the last thatching ; and 

 the old lady supposed she was seventeen or eighteen 

 at the first that is, just a century since. But in all 

 likelihood her recollections of the first thatching were 

 confused and uncertain : she was perhaps eight dr 

 ten at that time, which would reduce her real age to 

 a little over ninety. A great part of the village had 

 twice been destroyed by fire since she could remember. 

 These fires are, or were, singularly destructive in vil- 

 lages, the flames running from thatch to thatch, and, 

 as they express it, " wrastling " across the intervening 

 spaces. A pain is said to " wrastle," or shoot and 

 burn. Such fires are often caused by wood ashes 

 from the hearth thrown on the dust-heap while yet 

 some embers contain sufficient heat to fire straw or 

 rubbish. 



The old woman's memories were wholly of gossipy 

 family history ; I have often found that the very aged 

 have not half so much to tell as those of about sixty 

 to seventy years. The next oldest was a man about 

 eighty ; all he knew of history was that once on a time 

 some traitor withdrew the flints from the muskets of 



