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Updated: May 20, 2025
We know a wayside station, on a certain line of railway, about an hour and a half from town, where we can alight, find eggs and bacon at the village inn and hayricks in a solitary meadow, and where we can chew the cud of these delights with the cattle in well-wooded pastures. Judith has a passion for eggs and bacon and hayricks.
From every direction spirals of smoke rose into the crystal air, barns and farmhouses, mills, fences, hayricks, and monster heaps of Federal stores set on fire in that memorable "change of base." For all the sunshine of the June morning, the rain-washed air, the singing birds in the jewelled green of the forest, there was something in the time and place inexpressibly sinister and sad.
If it chanced to be summer and good harvest weather, Ysätter-Kaisa would sit quietly until the first hayricks had been loaded, then down she would come with a couple of heavy showers, which put an end to the work for that day. It was only too true that she seldom thought of anything else than raising mischief.
But however, what with the beasts and the men, and the scattered red-tiled roofs and the big hayricks, it does not make a bad holiday to get a quiet pony and ride about there on a sunny afternoon of autumn, and look over the river and the craft passing up and down, and on to Shooters' Hill and the Kentish uplands, and then turn round to the wide green sea of the Essex marsh-land, with the great domed line of the sky, and the sun shining down in one flood of peaceful light over the long distance.
They were an army of tramps, of women and children tramps, sleeping in the open fields, beneath the hayricks seeking shelter from the rain, living on the raw turnips and carrots they had plucked from the deserted vegetable gardens. The peasants were not the only ones who suffered. The rich and the noble-born were as unhappy and as homeless.
They were running along at such a rate that every object which in turn presented itself, first ahead of the train, then alongside and then behind, became speedily but `a dot in the distance, to use Bob's words over again; the snugly secluded seats of the county gentry, the scattered villages and sparse red-roofed farmhouses, with their outposts of hayricks and herds of cattle and other stock, that one moment appeared and the next disappeared from view behind masses of foliage, all dancing a wild Sir Roger de Coverley sort of country dance, `down the valleys and over the hills, until poor Nellie's eyes became quite dazed in watching them.
In regard to lunch, I suppose that in prosaically paying our way for bed and board as we fared along we fell short of the Arcadian theory of walking-tours in which the wayfarer, like a mendicant friar, takes toll of lunch and dinner from the hospitable farmer of sentimental legend, and sleeps for choice in barns, hayricks or hedgesides.
I will tell you of the inglorious way in which one man spent this momentous day, the wonderful hours in which the tide turned, and a Continent was saved in chasing chickens! He was the Mess Sergeant, and it was his duty. Anyway, the Mess dined gloriously off the chickens he caught, and as a couple of hayricks had been dismantled and distributed, everybody spent a tolerably comfortable night.
She comes there at times and stays for two or three days. Folks do say that she expects John Morgan to walk in some evening. They were lovers, ye know." "Ah!" said Johnnie, with a catch in his breath. "Yon's the house, behind the hayricks. Fine harvest Master Morgan had last year. All the lads in this part of the forest looked after his fields in turns.
Whether he looked to one side of the road, or to the other over distant landscape, with its smooth undulations, wind-mills, corn, grass, bean fields, wild-flowers, farm-yards, hayricks, and the spire among the wood or upwards in the sunny air, where butterflies were sporting round his head, and birds were pouring out their songs or downward, where the shadows of the branches interlaced, and made a trembling carpet on the road or onward, where the overhanging trees formed aisles and arches, dim with the softened light that steeped through leaves one corner of his eye was ever on the formal head of Mr Dombey, addressed towards him, and the feather in the bonnet, drooping so neglectfully and scornfully between them; much as he had seen the haughty eyelids droop; not least so, when the face met that now fronting it.
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