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Updated: June 26, 2025
Behind them Castle Raincy itself stood up finely from the plain of corn-land and green park, an artificial lake in front, deep trees all about, patterned gardens, the fiery flash of hot-house glass where the sun struck, and pinnacles high in air, above all the tall tower from which Margaret de Raincy had defied the English invader during the minority of James the Fifth.
A lonely shepherd can live on his flocks without help; a single family can provide for its own agricultural subsistence, and the normal holding of the primitive English family, the "hide" as it was called, was really a share in all the means of livelihood, corn-land, pasture-land, rights of common and of cutting wood.
Neither the grottoes and cascades of Tivoli, the cypress and ilex gardens of Frascati and Albano, nor the ruins of Tusculum, were ever so pleasant to her eyes as the poplar-fringed banks of the Indre, the corn-land sand hedgerows of Berry, and the rocky borders of the Creuse at Crozant and Argenton. She had not ceased making fresh picturesque discoveries in her own neighborhood.
For though it did not seem very adventurous at the time it had a great influence on my subsequent career, both in France and afterwards. It is a most romantic spot, with one of the finest castles in England. The heather hills run down through corn-land towards the seashore; and the general features of the countryside reminded me much of my own home in the West Yorkshire hills.
At length I am almost ashamed to say it but I even brought my mind to give acre for acre of my good corn-land for this barren spot. But then it was a national concern; and when the scene of so celebrated an event became my own, I was overpaid. Whose patriotism would not grow warmer, as old Johnson says, on the plains of Marathon?
The lush green water-meadows speckled with the heavy-fleeced sheep, the acres of corn-land reclaimed from heather and bracken, the vineyards on the southern slope of Crooksbury Hill, the rows of Hankley fish-ponds, the Frensham marshes drained and sown with vegetables, the spacious pigeon-cotes, all circled the great Abbey round with the visible labors of the Order.
This is human life, real human life no rest, no calm enjoyment of the scene, no generous gift of food and wine lavishly offered by the gods the hard fist of necessity for ever battering man to a shapeless and hopeless fall. The whole village lived in the field; a corn-land village is always the most populous, and every rood of land thereabouts, in a sense, maintains its man.
It calls to mind the pastoral bleat on the hillsides, the kirkbells of a summer Sabbath, the song of the lark in the sunrise, the cry of the quail in the corn-land, the low of cattle, and the blithe carol of milkmaids "when the kye come hame" at gloaming.
But when she had reached the wheat, the booming, like a will-o'-the-wisp, had been temptingly farther on; and she had turned back to the newly marked corn-land. Her big brothers had sent her out to drop and cover eighty rows, the last corn-planting to be done that year on the big Dakota farm.
Now he saw house upon house, patches of yellow corn-land and green meadows; and food was so scarce that a gentlemanly old raven had to fly miles and miles for a paltry sow's ear. Oh, those men! those men! The old bird knew them. He had grown up among men, and, what was more, among the aristocracy. He had passed his childhood and youth at the great house close to the town.
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