CHAPTER XXI.
RURAL POLICE.—THE “ANCHOR” INN.—THE GARDEN.—“OLD COACHING TIMES.”—HEATH LAND.—A DREARY LANDSCAPE.—MURDER AND A HIGHWAY ADVENTURE.—HUMAN VANITY.
Liphook, June 20th.
Walked hither from Portsmouth to-day. For twenty miles the road is through a hilly chalk country, much of it unenclosed downs, generally interesting, and the walk at this season agreeable.
We had, for a short distance, the company of a rural policeman. He had his quarters, with several others, in a small cottage in a village, was paid $4.70 a-week, and furnished with three suits of clothes every year—one for winter, one for summer, and one for Sundays, besides gloves, &c. The uniform is of blue cloth, of a simple, semi-military fashion. He said no one was employed in the force who was less than six feet high, and that they were exercised in the use of small-arms. Of duties he seemed to have no definite idea himself, but was ready to do any thing he could in the way of fighting roguery, when he should be called upon by the officers. The only crime which he seemed to apprehend in the neighbourhood was rick-burning—labourers who were discontented and envious, or who had for any reason become angry with the farmers who employed them, setting fire to their stacks of grain. This was common.
We spent the night at the “Anchor,” a good, large, old inn, with a finely-shaven plot of turf and well-kept gravelled walks, and a good vegetable and fruit garden, with famous gooseberry and apple bushes (apples on dwarf stocks), in the rear. The landlord, a bluff, stout, old man, a little while ago brought us in samples of five different sorts of malt liquor that he had in his cellar. They vary in strength in the proportions from 8 to 32, and somewhat more in price.
Before the railways, thirty-two four-horse coaches stopped at this house daily, besides post-coaches, which, when the fleet was about to sail from Portsmouth, passed through the village “like a procession.” He then kept 100 horses, and had usually ten postboys to breakfast, that had been left during the night. Now, there was but one coach and one van that passed through the town.
June 21st.
Near Liphook, instead of the broad, bleak chalk-downs, with their even surface of spare green grass, we find extensive tracts of a most sterile, brown, dry, sandy land, sometimes boggy, (moory,) producing even more scanty pasturage than the downs, but with scattered tufts of heath or ling. Most of this is in commons, and a few lean sheep, donkeys, and starveling ponies are earnestly occupied in seeking for something to eat upon it. Very little of it, for miles that we have passed over, is enclosed or improved, except that there are extensive plantations of trees. Timber grows slowly upon it; but the shade of the foliage and the decay of leaves so improves the soil that it is worth cultivating after its removal. It is also improved so as to bear tolerable crops, by paring and burning and sheep-folding—as described on the downs of Wiltshire.
We had walked half-a-dozen miles this morning, when I discovered I had lost my watch, and turned back. When about three miles from Liphook, I met our landlord of “The Anchor.” He had found the watch in my room, and immediately mounted a horse, and rode hard to overtake us. He refused any compensation, unless it were “a glass of grog to drink my health.” I had happened to show him one of those villainous Spanish quarters that so successfully hold their place against our legitimate currency, which I had had left in my pocket on leaving New York, and he said, if I didn’t value it, he would be glad to take it as a keepsake of us. I have no doubt he will always remember us as the three gentlemen that had the good taste not to go from Portsmouth to London by “the infernal railways.”
It was a day of thick, rapidly-passing clouds, and in a part of my walk, which was through a well-wooded, rolling country with very steep hill-sides and deep narrow valleys, I saw some most charming effects of broad shadows, chasing over waving foliage, with angel-flights of sunshine, often disclosing long, narrow vistas of distant, deep glens, or glances of still water, becalmed and warm under high, dark, quivering, leafy bluffs. But the greater part of this country (but a day’s walk from London) is the most dreary, desolate, God-forsaken-looking land that I ever saw or imagined. Hills and dales, picturesque enough in form, high, deep, and broad; all brown, gray, and black; sterile, parched, uninhabited—dead: the only sign of life or vegetation a little crisp moss, or singed, prostrate, despairing ling—seeming exactly as if an intense fire had not long since swept over it.
Such was the whole dreary landscape, far and near—only this “blasted heath.” A great black squall-cloud had for some time thrown additional gloom—a new intensity of gloom—over it; and I was walking slowly, in bereavement of all sympathizing life in this sepulchral ground of Nature, when my eye fell upon a block of stone, bearing inscription—“In detestation of the murder of a sailor on this spot by [three persons whose names are given], who were hung near here. ‘Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.’ Look on the other side.”
I was still half kneeling and musing before this monument, when I heard myself gruffly addressed, “Wull tell me what’s the time o’ day?”
Without rising, I turned my head and saw over my shoulder a tall, heavily-whiskered, ruffianly-faced fellow, half sportsman, half sailor in dress, carrying a stout stick and a bundle in a handkerchief. How did he get there? I must have seen him before if he had come either way by the road; he must have approached from over the hill behind me, and that cautiously; apparently he had been concealed there. I confess that I wished for a moment that I had in “my interior reservoirs a sufficient Birmingham horse-pistol,” wherewith to make myself alike tall with him if he should give me need; but, still bending over the memorial of murder, I drew my watch and answered him civilly, whereupon, without even a “growl,” he “sidled off,” and soon passed from my sight. My friends had seen the same man, in company with another, near the same place, an hour and a-half before.
On “the other side”—oh, human vanity!—was the name of the man who had caused the stone to be placed there. Posterity is requested to remember the murderers and the murdered, and especially not to forget the detester.