Читать книгу Tom Brown at Rugby - Thomas Smart Hughes - Страница 12

But to return to the said Vale of White Horse, the country in which the first scenes of this true and interesting story are laid. As I said, the Great Western now runs right through it, and it is a land of large rich pastures, bounded by ox-fences, and covered with fine hedgerow timber, with here and there a nice little gorse[35] or spinney,[36] where abideth poor Charley,[37] having no other cover[38] to which to betake himself for miles and miles, when pushed out some fine November morning by the Old Berkshire.[39] Those who have been there, and well mounted, only know how he and the staunch little pack who dash after him—heads high and sterns low, with a breast-high scent—can consume the ground at such times. There being little plow-land, and few woods, the Vale is only an average sporting country, except for hunting. The villages are straggling, queer old-fashioned places, the houses being dropped down without the least regularity, in nooks and out-of-the-way corners, by the sides of shadowy lanes and footpaths, each with its patch of garden. They are built chiefly of good gray-stone and thatched;[40] though I see that within the last year or two the red brick cottages are multiplying, for the Vale is beginning to manufacture largely both bricks and tiles. There are lots of waste ground by the side of the roads in every village, amounting often to village greens, where feed the pigs and ganders of the people; and these roads are old-fashioned, homely roads very dirty and badly made, and hardly endurable in winter, but pleasant jog-trot roads, running through the great pasture lands, dotted here and there with little clumps of thorns, where the sleek kine are feeding, with no fence on either side of them, and a gate at the end of each field, which makes you get out of your gig (if you keep one), and gives you a chance of looking about you every quarter of a mile.

One of the moralists whom we sat under in our youth—was it the great Richard Swiveller,[41] or Mr. Stiggins?[42] says, "We are born in a vale, and must take the consequences of being found in such a situation." These consequences, I for one am ready to encounter. I pity people who wern't born in a vale. I don't mean a flat country, but a vale; that is, a flat country bounded by hills. The having your hill always in view, if you choose to turn toward him, that's the essence of a vale. There he is forever in the distance, your friend and companion; you never lose him as you do in hilly districts.