CHAPTER XV 



AN OUTCAST WILTSHIRE 



Not far from " The White Horse " is a h'ttle town 

 upon a stream that waves myriads of reeds and tall purple 

 flowers of hemp agrimony. These are the last shops I 

 am likely to pass in Wiltshire, and it occurs to me that 

 I should like to taste lardy cakes — which I last bought 

 in Wroughton fifteen years ago — before I leave the 

 county. Richard Jefferies' grandfather was "My Lord 

 Lardy Cake " in old Swindon sixty years ago, and his 

 memory is kept alive by those tough, sweet slabs of larded 

 pastry which, in his generous ovens, gathered all the best 

 essences of the other cakes, pies, tarts and joints which 

 were permitted to be baked with them. In "Amaryllis 

 at the Fair " they are mentioned with some indignity as 

 a ploughboy's delicacy. My lips water for them, and 



at the first bakery in I a$k for some. The baker 



tells me he has sold the last one. He is a small, white- 

 haired and white-bearded man with an expression of 

 unctuous repose, assuredly a pillar of his chapel and pos- 

 sibly its treasurer, and though he himself will, by his 

 own telling, have no more lardy cakes until the next 

 morning, he stiffly tries to persuade me that none of his 

 fellow-townsmen bakes them. I disbelieve the man of 

 dough for all his conscious look of sagacity and virtue, and 

 am rewarded for my disbelief by four lardy cakes for 

 threepence-halfpenny not many yards from his accursed 

 threshold. Lardy cakes, I now discover for the first time, 



245 



