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 
cach 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 ta 
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 
sirgle one. The fathers, too, of our own generation 
