The Three Strangers

[From Wessex Tales.]

(1840)

Among the few features of agricultural England which retain an
appearance but little modified by the lapse of centuries, may be
reckoned the high, grassy and furzy downs, coombs, or ewe-leases,
as they are indifferently called, that fill a large area of certain
counties in the south and southwest. If any mark of human occupation
is met with hereon, it usually takes the form of the solitary cottage
of some shepherd.

Fifty years ago such a lonely cottage stood on such a down, and may
possibly be standing there now. In spite of its loneliness, however,
the spot, by actual measurement, was not more than five miles from
a county-town. Yet that affected it little. Five miles of irregular
upland, during the long inimical seasons, with their sleets, snows,
rains, and mists, afford withdrawing space enough to isolate a Timon
or a Nebuchadnezzar; much less, in fair weather, to please that less
repellent tribe, the poets, philosophers, artists, and others who
"conceive and meditate of pleasant things."

Some old earthen camp or barrow, some clump of trees, at least some
starved fragment of ancient hedge is usually taken advantage of in the
erection of these forlorn dwellings. But, in the present case, such a
kind of shelter had been disregarded. Higher Crowstairs, as the house
was called, stood quite detached and undefended. The only reason for
its precise situation seemed to be the crossing of two footpaths at
right angles hard by, which may have crossed there and thus for a good
five hundred years. Hence the house was exposed to the elements on
all sides. But, though the wind up here blew unmistakably when it did
blow, and the rain hit hard whenever it fell, the various weathers of
the winter season were not quite so formidable on the coomb as they
were imagined to be by dwellers on low ground. The raw rimes were
not so pernicious as in the hollows, and the frosts were scarcely so
severe. When the shepherd and his family who tenanted the house were
pitied for their sufferings from the exposure, they said that upon the
whole they were less inconvenienced by "wuzzes and flames" (hoarses
and phlegms) than when they had lived by the stream of a snug
neighboring valley.

The night of March 28, 182-, was precisely one of the nights that
were wont to call forth these expressions of commiseration. The level
rainstorm smote walls, slopes, and hedges like the clothyard shafts
of Senlac and Crecy. Such sheep and outdoor animals as had no shelter
stood with their buttocks to the winds; while the tails of little
birds trying to roost on some scraggy thorn were blown inside-out like
umbrellas. The gable-end of the cottage was stained with wet, and the