"When I paused to lean on my hoe, these sounds and sights I heard and saw anywhere in the row, a part of the inexhaustible entertainment which the country offers." --THOREAU. "Life is sweet, brother.... There's night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon and stars, brother, all sweet things; there's likewise the wind on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die?" --BORROW: _Jasper Petulengro_. GRAIN AND CHAFF FROM AN ENGLISH MANOR CHAPTER I. ALDINGTON VILLAGE--THE MANOR HOUSE--THE FARM. "There's a divinity that shapes our ends." --_Hamlet_. "Deep-meadow'd, happy, fair with orchard lawns." --_Morte d'Arthur_. In recalling my earliest impressions of the village of Aldington, near Evesham, Worcestershire, the first picture that presents itself is of two chestnut-trees in full bloom in front of the Manor House which became my home, and their welcome was so gracious on that sunny May morning that it inclined me to take a hopeful view of the inspection of the house and land which was the object of my visit. The village took its name from the Celtic _Alne_, white river; the Anglo-Saxon, _ing_, children or clan; and _ton_, the enclosed place. The whole name, therefore, signified "the enclosed place of the children, or clan, of the Alne." There are many other Alnes in England and Scotland, also Allens and Ellens as river names, probably corruptions of Alne, and we have many instances of the combination of a river name with _ing_ and _ton_, such as Lymington and Dartington. The Celtic _Alne_ points to the antiquity of the place, and there were extensive traces of Roman occupation to which I shall refer later. The village was really no more than a hamlet ecclesiastically attached to the much larger village of Badsey. In addition to Celtic, Roman, and Anglo-Saxon associations, it figured before the Norman Conquest in connection with the Monastery and Abbey of Evesham, the Manor and the mill being mentioned in the Abbey records; and they were afterwards set down in Domesday Survey. The Vale of Evesham, in which Aldington is situated, lies at the foot of the Cotswold Hills, and when approached from them a remarkable change in climate and appearance is at once noticeable. Descending from Broadway or Chipping Campden--that is, from an altitude of about 1,000 feet to one of 150 or less--on a mid-April day, one exchanges, within a few miles, the grip of winter, grey stone walls and bare trees, for the hopeful greenery of opening leaves and thickening hedges, and the withered grass of the Hill pastures for the luxuriance of the Vale meadows.