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Updated: June 10, 2025
He hurried along like a man feverishly anxious to make use of his last stint of strength. He was in search of food! Rochester was walking slowly along the country lane which led from the main road to Beauleys, when the hoot of a motor overtaking him caused him to slacken his pace and draw in close to the hedge-side.
"It did not matter where the people of the Lord met," he said, "so long as they did meet to worship the Lord in a proper spirit of independent resistance to any authority that had not come to them from revelation. Any hedge-side was a sufficient tabernacle for a devout Christian.
"For instance," said he, touching a long bud-laden stem of fox-glove in the hedge-side, at the bottom of which one or two crimson-speckled flowers were bursting from their green sheaths, "I dare say, you don't know what makes this fox-glove bend and sway so gracefully. You think it is blown by the wind, don't you?"
When we got to the end of the field, the custom was, to finish our handfuls there, and retrace our steps for the purpose of collecting the deposits, when each of us tied up our collected bundles at the place from which we originally started. To the lover of the picturesque, the scene while we sat resting by the hedge-side, was one of the most beautiful that can be imagined.
Walking by the hedge-side he picked and devoured the late blackberries, which were still abundant. It was a beautiful unkept hedge with scarlet and purple fruit among the many-coloured fading leaves and silver-grey down of old-man's-beard. I too picked and ate a few berries and made the remark that it was late to eat such fruit in November.
Taking care not to trample the grass, we have strolled down the hedge-side till we have reached the other end of the field, where there is a ditch. At once there is a fragrant scent in the air a scent like that of almonds. It is the Meadow Sweet which grows on the banks of streams or damp ditches. It is a beautiful plant, as well as a fragrant one.
How long ago it seemed, that time twelve years ago when a mutinous urchin fled from a truculent uncle to seek his fortune as Heaven might please to guide! Heaven guided an itinerant mime and mountebank that tramped France with his doxy to a wet hedge-side where a famished, foot-sore scrap of a lad lay like a tired dog, trying not to sob.
Then his low original and rough wild history, however much they might have subjected him to scorn had he exchanged the leathern apron for a silken one, or scrambled from the hedge-side into the high-places of the church, entailed no suspicion, and awakened much surprise, when the Bedford townsmen saw their blaspheming neighbour a new man, and in a way so disinterested preaching the faith which he once destroyed.
Ah!" added he, as he walked on by the hedge-side, looking on the ground, "possibly Josephine may have spoken the truth, and that, after all, the right way is the one which this lady points out."
Then, before he could get time to tear the pelt off for her, the Lady Desdemona, with a snappishness more suggestive of a hedge-side cur than of a hound of her rank, actually snatched away the rabbit, and with never a "Thank you," or a "By your leave," carried it right inside the cave, dropping it there and returning to bar the entrance, with a look in her red-hawed eyes and a lift of her golden flews which, if not actual snarling, was, as folks say, near enough to make no difference.
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