Country life -- England -- Fiction; Pastoral fiction; Villages -- England -- Fiction
A sudden turn round one of these magnificent beeches brings us to the
boundary of the Shaw, and leaning upon a rude gate, we look over an open
space of about ten acres of ground, still more varied and broken
than that which we have passed, and surrounded on all sides by thick
woodland. As a piece of colour, nothing can be well finer. The ruddy
glow of the heath-flower, contrasting, on the one hand, with the
golden-blossomed furze--on the other, with a patch of buck-wheat,
of which the bloom is not past, although the grain be ripening, the
beautiful buck-wheat, whose transparent leaves and stalks are so
brightly tinged with vermilion, while the delicate pink-white of the
flower, a paler persicaria, has a feathery fall, at once so rich and so
graceful, and a fresh and reviving odour, like that of birch trees
in the dew of a May evening. The bank that surmounts this attempt at
cultivation is crowned with the late foxglove and the stately mullein;
the pasture of which so great a part of the waste consists, looks as
green as an emerald; a clear pond, with the bright sky reflected in it,
lets light into the picture; the white cottage of the keeper peeps from
the opposite coppice; and the vine-covered dwelling of Hannah Bint rises
from amidst the pretty garden, which lies bathed in the sunshine around
it.
The living and moving accessories are all in keeping with the
cheerfulness and repose of the landscape. Hannah's cow grazing quietly
beside the keeper's pony; a brace of fat pointer puppies holding
amicable intercourse with a litter of young pigs; ducks, geese, cocks,
hens, and chickens scattered over the turf; Hannah herself sallying
forth from the cottage-door, with her milk-bucket in her hand, and her
little brother following with the milking-stool.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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