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Updated: June 3, 2025
There was one row of pollards where they always began laying first. With a big stick in his beak the rook is blown aside like a loose feather in the wind; he knows his building-time from the fathers of his house hereditary knowledge handed down in settled course: but the stray things of the hedge, how do they know?
After half an hour's trundling along the unfenced roads of this fine old estate, crossing ancient stone bridges, rolling through leafy groves, startling fat cattle from their browsing, getting a hat-touch from a shepherd who is leading his flocks across the fields in true pastoral style, we reach the manor-house, standing stately amid dells and dingles, pollards of fantastic growth and patches of fern and gorse.
A little in front of me, the road, rising quickly, took a sharp turn to pass along an old stone bridge that spanned the water with a single fine arch, somewhat pointed; and through the arch I could see the river stretching away up through the meadows, its banks bordered with pollards. Now, pollards always made me miserable.
Only the walnuts and the great oaks, some of them pollards of a thousand years of age, remained stark and stern in their winter dress. Alan was in a reflective mood and involuntarily began to wonder how many of his forefathers had stood in that same spot upon such April mornings and looked out upon those identical trees wakening in the breath of spring.
I had seen the whole house lighted up from attic to kitchen, and some of the lights were still glistening between the pollards in the spinny; while the stables themselves seemed alive with coachmen, carriages, and motor-cars.
From this, towards the left, extended alleys, some recently planted, intended to afford, in summer, cool and shady places for the favourite game of bowls; while scattered clumps, chiefly of old pollards, to the right broke the space agreeably enough into detached portions, each of which afforded its separate pastime or diversion.
Choosing, though without consciously intending to do so, the dreariest path to be found, I wandered up the side of the slow black river, with the sentinel pollards looking at themselves in its gloomy mirror, just as I was looking at myself in the mirror of my circumstances. They leaned in all directions, irregular as the headstones in an ancient churchyard.
Besides the hawthorn and briar there were several species of willow the snake-skin willow, so called because it sheds its bark; the 'snap-willow, which is so brittle that every gale breaks off its feeble twigs, and pollards. One of these, hollow and old, had upon its top a crowd of parasites.
But I reached the last turn of the path without meeting any one, and I was congratulating myself upon the prospect of having an hour of perfect freedom, when I detected, leaning on the gate before me, the firm, well-knit figure of a man. As the two Pollards were more or less alike in form, I could not distinguish at first glance which of the brothers it was.
Not a day, not an hour, not a minute, when I am with other people, passes that I do not see myself in their estimation playing that role as plainly as if I saw myself in a looking-glass. It is a moral lesson which I presume I need. I have just returned from my visit at the Pollards' country-house in Lancaster, where I most assuredly did not have it. I do not think I deceive myself.
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