CHAPTER III

VILLAGE NEIGHBOURS

In one of Miss Mitford’s tales entitled _A Country Barber_ she describes a humble neighbour whose tiny shop adjoined their own “handsome and commodious dwelling.” This tiny shop has long since disappeared, having given place to the “adjoining house” already mentioned.

“The barber’s shop,” we are told, “consisted of a low-browed cottage with a pole before it, and a half-hatch always open, through which was visible a little dusty hole where a few wigs, on battered wooden blocks, were ranged round a comfortable shaving chair. There was a legend, over the door in which ‘William Skinner, wig-maker, hairdresser, and barber’ was set forth in yellow letters on a blue ground.”

After speaking of her happy early recollections of “Will Skinner,” Miss Mitford remarks: “So agreeable indeed is the impression which he has left in my memory that I cannot help regretting the decline and extinction of a race which, besides figuring so notably in the old novels and comedies, formed so genial a link between the higher orders of society, supplying to the rich the most familiar of followers and most harmless of gossips.”

How vividly these words recall to our mind Sir Walter Scott’s old Caxon the barber and familiar follower of Mr. Oldbuck, “who was accustomed to bring to his patron each morning along with the powder and pomatum his version of the politics or the gossip of the neighbourhood.

“‘Heeh, sirs!’ he exclaims, ‘nae wonder the commons will be discontent, when they see magistrates, and bailies, and deacons, and the provost himsell wi’ heads as bald and as bare as one o’ my blocks!’

“It certainly was not Will Skinner’s beauty,” writes Mary Mitford, “that caught my fancy. His person was hardly of the kind to win a lady’s favour, even although that lady were only four years of age.... Good old man! I see him in my mind’s eye at this moment: lean, wrinkled, shabby, poor, slow of speech, and ungainly of aspect, yet pleasant to look at and delightful to recollect. It was the overflowing kindness of his temper that rendered Will Skinner so general a favourite. Poor he was certainly and lonely, for he had been crossed in love in his youth, and lived alone in his little tenement, with no other companions than his wig blocks and a tame starling. ‘Pretty company’ he used to call them.

[Illustration: MARY RUSSELL MITFORD

_From a miniature_]

“His fortunes had at one time assumed a more flourishing aspect when the Bishop of Exeter and Rector of Alresford had employed him to superintend the ‘posting’ of his wig, and had also promoted him to the posts of sexton and of deputy parish clerk. But on the death of the Bishop, and on the advent of the French Revolution, when cropped heads came into fashion and powder and hairdressing went out, poor Will found himself nearly at his wit’s end. In this dilemma he resolved to turn his hand to other employments, and, living in the neighbourhood of a famous trout stream, he applied himself to the construction of artificial flies.

“This occupation he usually followed in his territory the churchyard, a place ... occupying a gentle eminence by the side of Cranley Down—a down on which the cricketers of that cricketing country used to muster two elevens for practice, almost every fine evening, from Easter to Michaelmas. Thither Will, who had been a cricketer himself in his youth, and still loved the wind of a ball, used to resort on summer afternoons, perching himself on a large square raised monument, a spreading lime tree above his head, Izaak Walton before him, and his implements of trade at his side. There he sat, now manufacturing a cannon-fly, and now watching Tom Taylor’s unparagoned bowling.

“On this spot our intimacy commenced. A spoilt child and an only child, it was my delight to escape from nurse and nursery and to follow everywhere the dear papa, [even] to the cricket ground, in spite of all remonstrance, causing him no small perplexity as to how to bestow me in safety during the game. Will and the monument seemed to offer exactly the desired refuge, and our good neighbour readily consented to fill the post of deputy nursery-maid for the time, assisted in his superintendence by our very beautiful and sagacious black Newfoundland dog called Coe....

“Poor dear old man, what a life I led him!—now playing at bo-peep on one side of the great monument and now on the other; now crawling away amongst the green graves; now gliding round before him, and laughing up in his face as he sat.... How he would catch me away from the very shadow of danger if a ball came near; and how often did he interrupt his own labours to forward my amusement, sliding from his perch to gather lime branches to stick in Coe’s collar, or to collect daisies, buttercups, or ragged-robins to make what I used to call daisy-beds for my doll.”

Here is another pretty incident of the Alresford life recorded by Miss Mitford.

“Before we left Hampshire,” she writes, “my maid Nancy married a young farmer, and nothing would serve her but I must be bridesmaid. And so it was settled.

“I remember the whole scene as if it were yesterday! How my father took me himself to the churchyard gate, where the procession was formed, and how I walked next to the young couple hand-in-hand with the bridegroom’s man, no other than the village blacksmith, a giant of six feet three, who might have served as a model for Hercules. Much trouble had he to stoop low enough to reach down to my hand, and many were the rustic jokes passed upon the disproportioned pair....

“In this order, followed by the parents on both sides, and a due number of uncles, aunts and cousins, we entered the church, where I held the glove with all the gravity and importance proper to my office; and so contagious is emotion that when the bride cried, I could not help crying for company. But it was a love-match, and between smiles and blushes Nancy’s tears soon disappeared, and so did mine. The happy husband helped his pretty wife into her own chaise-cart, my friend the blacksmith lifted me in after her, and we drove gaily to the large, comfortable farm-house where her future life was to be spent.

“The bride was [soon] taken to survey her new dominions by her proud bridegroom, and the blacksmith, finding me, I suppose, easier to carry than to lead, followed close upon their steps with me in his arms.

“Nothing could exceed the good nature of my country beau; he pointed out bantams and pea-fowls, and took me to see a tame lamb and a tall, staggering calf, born that morning; but for all that I do not think I should have submitted to the indignity of being carried if it had not been for the chastening influence of a little touch of fear. Entering the poultry yard I had caught sight of a certain turkey-cock, who erected that circular tail of his, and swelled out his deep red comb and gills after a fashion familiar to that truculent bird, but which up to the present hour I am far from admiring....

“[At last] we drew back to the hall, a large square bricked apartment, with a beam across the ceiling and a wide yawning chimney, where many young people being assembled, and one of them producing a fiddle, it was agreed to have a country dance until dinner should be ready, the bride and bridegroom leading off, and I following with the bridegroom’s man.

“Oh! the blunders, the confusion, the merriment of that country dance! No two people attempted the same figure; few aimed at any figure at all; each went his own way; many stumbled, some fell, and everybody capered, laughed and shouted at once!”

[Illustration]