160 FIELD AND HEDGEROW. 



At the edge of the trees stands an old timbered 

 farmstead, whose gables and dark lines of wood have 

 not been painted in the memory of man, dull and 

 weather-beaten, but very homely ; and by it rises the 

 delicate cone of a new oast-house, the tiles on which are 

 of the brightest red. Lines of bluish smoke ascend 

 from among the bracken of the wild open ground, where 

 a tribe of gipsies have pitched their camp. Three of 

 the vans are time-stained and travel-worn, with dull red 

 roofs ; the fourth is brightly picked out with fresh yellow 

 paint, and stands a marked object at the side. Orange- 

 red beeches rise beyond them on the slope ; two hoop- 

 tents, or kibitkas, just large enough to creep into, are 

 near the fires, where the women are cooking the gipsy's 

 bouillon^ that savoury stew of all things good : vege- 

 tables, meat, and scraps, and savouries, collected as it 

 were in the stock-pot from twenty miles round. Hodge, 

 the stay-at-home, sturdy carter, eats bread and cheese 

 and poor bacon sometimes ; he looks with true British 

 scorn on all scraps and soups, and stock-pots and 

 bouillons — not for him, not he ; he would rather munch 

 dry bread and cheese for every meal all the year round, 

 though he could get bits as easy as the other and without 

 begging. The gipsy is a cook. The man with a gold 

 ring in his ear ; the woman with a silver ring on her 

 finger, coarse black snaky hair like a horse's mane ; the 

 boy with naked olive feet ; dark eyes all of them, and 

 an Oriental, sidelong look, and a strange inflection of 

 tone that turns our common English words into a foreign 

 language — there they camp in the fern, in the sun, their 

 Eastern donkeys of Syria scattered round them, their 

 children rolling about like foals in the grass, a bit out of 

 the distant Orient under uur Western oaks. 



It is the nature of the oak to be still, it is the nature 



