CHAPTER III.
PHYSICAL EDUCATION.—A RUSTIC VILLAGE.—FARM-HOUSE KITCHEN.—AN ORCHARD.—STABLES.—LEOMINSTER.—A TROUT BROOK.—FRUIT CULTURE.
Monday, June 10th.
After breakfasting with the Independent minister, (the term clergyman is never applied in England except to those of the established church,) he walked with us for six miles out of town upon our road. Three little boys and girls, the youngest six years old, also accompanied us. They were romping and rambling about all the while, and their morning’s walk must have been as much as fifteen miles; but they thought nothing of it, and, when we parted, were apparently as fresh as when they started, and very loath to return.
After looking at several objects of interest near the road, we were taken by a narrow, crooked lane to a small hamlet of picturesque old cottages, in one of which a farmer lived who was a parishioner of our friend’s. It was a very pretty, many-gabled, thatched-roofed timber-house, almost completely covered with vines and creepers. We were sorry to find the farmer not at home; his wife, an elderly, simple-minded dame, received us joyfully, however. In entering the house, as we have noticed to be usual in old buildings, whatever their purpose, we found that the stone floor of the narrow hall was a step below the street and general surface of the ground outside. The kitchen, to which we were at once conducted, was a large square room, lighted by a single broad window, and having a brilliant display of polished metal utensils upon and about a great chimney, all as neat and nice as a parlour.
a linen cloth was spread upon it, and coarse but excellent wheat bread, butter, and cheese, brought from the pantry, and cider and perry from the cellar. The cider was “hard” enough; the perry, (fermented juice of pears,) a beautiful, bright, golden liquid, tasted much like weak vinegar and water. We had entered the district of cider and apple trees, for these liquors were home-made, and the first extensive orchard that we have seen adjoined the rear of the house: during the rest of our day’s walk the road was frequently lined with them for long distances.
The trees, in a considerable part of this orchard, were of every age, and stood very irregularly at various distances from each other. It appeared as if when an old tree was blown down, or became worthless from age and decay, and an unshaded space was thus left, or likely to be, two young trees were planted at a little distance on each side of it, and thus perhaps the orchard had been renovated and continued on the same ground for several generations. Two hundred years ago it was considered that “the best way to plant an orchard is to set some kernels of the best and soundest apples and pears, a finger deep, and at a foot distance, and to leave the likeliest plants only in the natural place, removing the others only as time and occasion shall require.” The orchards of the Rhine, at the present day, in which apple, pear, cherry, and nut-trees are intermingled, seem to have been planted with as little regard to regularity of distance. The grafts were commonly inserted at from six to eight feet from the ground, and the limbs trimmed so as to allow free passage to cattle beneath them. The land was in an old weedy sward, and was pastured by horses and cows. It had not been in any way drained, and was in some parts boggy. In these, willows, and sallows or osiers, (basket willows,) were growing. The trees all appeared to me unhealthy, mossy, and stunted. A few pear trees grew here and there, indiscriminately, among the apples. The cider-mill was just like the old-fashioned ones, with a stone wheel, common in New England.
After seeing the orchard in such condition, I was surprised to find excellent, neat, and well-ordered stables. The horse-stalls were large, with iron racks and mangers, and a grating and drain to carry off the liquid. The manure in the yard was piled up in a large, oblong heap, covered with earth, to prevent evaporation, with a space of clean pavement, wide enough for a cart to pass all around it. The liquid overflow of the yard was conducted off by a drain, so as to flow over the orchard pasture.
We reached Leominster at noon, after a few miles further of walking through a pleasant country, remarkable for its pretty old cottages. At Leominster, (pronounced Leminster,) there are also more than usually quaint old houses, grotesquely carved; and on the market-house, an odd old building, there are some singular inscriptions. I recollect only one, which runs in this way: “As columnes do pprope up” a house, so do a gentry support a state.
In the afternoon we walked for some distance on the banks of a trout brook, in which a good many ladies and gentlemen were angling, with but poor success. The trout were small, and, if I recollect rightly, rather lighter coloured than ours, and not so prettily mottled. Some of the anglers called the stream “the Arrow,” and some “the Harrow,” and I do not now remember which way it is printed on the map.
The field-bean is a common crop here; it is now in blossom, and a peculiarly sweet scent from it, every now and then, comes in a full, delicious flood over the hedges.
The country over which we walked in the afternoon, between Leominster and Hereford, was in some parts extremely beautiful: considerable hills, always, when too steep or rocky or sterile for easy cultivation, covered with plantations of trees; the lesser hills and low lands shaded by frequent orchards. These were generally of apples, sometimes with pears intermixed—somewhat rarely entirely of pears. Many of them appeared much like the one I have described, and occasionally there was a regularly planted one of fine, thrifty trees. In the poorer orchards, where the trees were of all ages, they frequently were planted not more than fifteen feet apart, and when so, as far as I observed, were invariably small in size and unhealthy. In the better ones, the trees stood oftenest thirty feet apart one way, and twenty another; rarely at much greater distance than this, but sometimes as much as forty.