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Updated: August 14, 2024
Papa's first nervousness is over: his noble voice clears, warms to his sermon: he kindles: he takes his pocket-handkerchief out: he is coming to that exquisite passage which has made them all cry at the parsonage: he has begun it! Ah! What is that humming noise, which fills the edifice, and causes hob-nailed Melibaeus to grin at smock-frocked Tityrus?
Seeing that I took notice of a smock-frocked rustic employed in foddering the cattle, a rustic whose legs and accent were to me exclusively reminiscent of the pleasant roads and lanes of cheery Somersetshire, Farmer informed me that he was a newish importation, having made his appearance about there early in the previous winter.
"There was old Miss Scantlebury," said another guest, a smock-frocked gaffer of seventy, with a grizzled shock of hair. "You remember Miss Scantlebury?" "O' course, o' course." "Well, she did it better 'n anybody I've heard tell of. When she fell into redooced circumstances she sold the eight-day clock that was the only thing o' value she had left.
We can imagine, or try to imagine, the roads and streets leading to the market-place thronged with traders and chapmen, the sellers of ribbons and cakes, minstrels and morris-dancers, smock-frocked peasants and sombre-clad monks and friars.
Here they were followed by the keepers and beaters, who kept gently driving them along. Occasionally one got up, and was instantly knocked over by one of the guns; but it was evident that the "hot corner" would be at the end of this hedgerow, where there was stationed a smock-frocked rustic who, down on his knees, was gently tapping with a bit of stick.
Now and then a shot sounded far away, but clear and sharp, from where the guests of my lord of Barfield were killing time in the warren. A labouring man, smock-frocked, billy-cocked, gaitered, and hob-nailed, was clamping down the frozen lane, the earth ringing like iron under iron as he walked.
Not the smock-frocked man, getting out of the forwardmost Third, with his stick and bundle, thinks of him, or stops a moment to see him back out and turn into the stable. With all the practical advantages of this machine propulsion at bird speed over space, it confounds and swallows up the poetical aspects and picturesque sceneries that were the charm of old-fashioned travelling in the country.
You must have seen a tall platform in front of the migratory edifice, and on that platform you must have delighted your visual orb with the clown, the pantaloon, the harlequin, the dancing ladies, the walking dandy, the king with his crown, the queen in her rabbit-skin robes, the smock-frocked countryman, the top-booted jockey, and all the dramatis personae of the performance that every moment of every day, during every fair, is for ever "going to begin."
Through the midnight-like stillness of the street rose the tumult around the Rectory; and by the light of a few lanterns, and from the upper windows, they could see a mass of old hats, smock-frocked shoulders, and the tops of bludgeons; while at soonest, Sir George Eastwood's troop could not be expected for an hour or more.
Before me were the downs of Kent, the open face of an English landscape, the orchard-bound homesteads, the verdurous pasture-land. The hedges were bedecked with their late autumn flowers; the teams and smock-frocked men were going home to the gabled houses, and the warm-lit cottages.
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