A Surrey Village - Page 2

five or six
ponderous horses; to meet the cows too, smelling of milk and new-mown
hay, attended by the small cow-boy. One notices in most rural districts
how stunted in growth many of the boys of the labourers are; here I was
particularly struck by it on account of the fine physique of many of
the young men. It is possible that the growing time may be later and
more rapid here than in most places. Some of the young men are
exceptionally tall, and there was a larger percentage of tall handsome
women than I have seen in any village in Surrey and Hampshire. But the
children were almost invariably too small for their years. The most
stunted specimen was a little boy I met near Hindhead. He was thin,
with a dry wizened face, and looked at the most about eight years old;
he assured me that he was twelve. I engaged this gnome-like creature to
carry something for me, and we had three or four miles ramble together.
A curious couple we must have seemed--a giant and a pigmy, the pigmy
looking considerably older than the giant. He was a heath-cutter's
child, the eldest of seven children! They were very poor, but he could
earn nothing himself, except by gathering whortleberries in their
season; then he said, all seven of them turned out with their parents,
the youngest in its mother's arms. I questioned him about the birds of
the district; he stoutly maintained that he recognised only four, and
proceeded to name them.

"Here is another," said I, "a fifth you didn't name, singing in the
bushes half a dozen yards from where we stand--the best singer of all."

"I did name it," he returned, "that's a thrush."

It was a nightingale, a bird he did not know. But he knew a thrush--it
was one of the four birds he knew, and he stuck to it that it was a
thrush singing. Afterwards he pointed out the squalid-looking cottage
he lived in. It was on the estate of a great lady.

"Tell me," I said, "is she much liked on the estate?"

He pondered the question for a few moments, then replied, "Some likes
her and some don't," and not a word more would he say on that subject.
A curious amalgam of stupidity and shrewdness; a bad observer of bird-
life, but a cautious little person in answering leading questions; he
was evidently growing up (or not doing so) in the wrong place.

Going out for a stroll in the evening, I came to a spot where two small
cottages stood on one side of the road, and a large pond fringed with
rushes and a coppice on the other. Just by the cottage five boys were
amusing themselves by throwing stones at a mark, talking, laughing and
shouting at their play. Not many yards from the noisy boys some fowls
were picking about on the turf