Ch. 3: Winterbourne Bishop - Page 2

beneath its ancient beeches and its one
wide-branching yew, or sit on a tomb in the sun when you wish for warmth
and brightness. The trees growing by or near the street are mostly ash
or beech, with a pine or two, old but not large; and there are small or
dwarf yew-, holly-, and thorn-trees. Very little fruit is grown; two or
three to half a dozen apple- and damson-trees are called an orchard, and
one is sorry for the children. But in late summer and autumn they get
their fruit from the hedges. These run up towards the downs on either
side of the village, at right angles with its street; long, unkept
hedges, beautiful with scarlet haws and traveller's-joy, rich in bramble
and elder berries and purple sloes and nuts--a thousand times more nuts
than the little dormice require for their own modest wants.

Finally, to go back to its disadvantages, the village is waterless; at
all events in summer, when water is most wanted. Water is such a
blessing and joy in a village--a joy for ever when it flows throughout
the year, as at Nether Stowey and Winsford and Bourton-on-the-Water, to
mention but three of all those happy villages in the land which are
known to most of us! What man on coming to such places and watching the
rushing, sparkling, foaming torrent by day and listening to its
splashing, gurgling sounds by night, does not resolve that he will live
in no village that has not a perennial stream in it! This unblessed,
high and dry village has nothing but the winter bourne which gives it
its name; a sort of surname common to a score or two of villages in
Wiltshire, Dorset, Somerset, and Hants. Here the bed of the stream lies
by the bank on one side of the village street, and when the autumn and
early winter rains have fallen abundantly, the hidden reservoirs within
the chalk hills are filled to overflowing; then the water finds its way
out and fills the dry old channel and sometimes turns the whole street
into a rushing river, to the immense joy of the village children. They
are like ducks, hatched and reared at some upland farm where there was
not even a muddy pool to dibble in. For a season (the wet one) the
village women have water at their own doors and can go out and dip pails
in it as often as they want. When spring comes it is still flowing
merrily, trying to make you believe that it is going to flow for ever;
beautiful, green water-loving plants and grasses spring up and flourish
along the roadside, and you may see comfrey and water forget-me-not in
flower. Pools, too, have been formed in some deep, hollow places; they
are fringed with tall grasses, whitened over with bloom of
water-crowfoot, and poa grass grows up from the bottom to spread its
green tresses over the surface. Better still, by and by a couple of