Publisher's Synopsis
Among the few features of agricultural England which retain an appearance but little modified bythe lapse of centuries, may be reckoned the high, grassy and furzy downs, coombs, or ewe-leases, asthey are indifferently called, that fill a large area of certain counties in the south and south-west. Ifany mark of human occupation is met with hereon, it usually takes the form of the solitary cottageof some shepherd.Fifty years ago such a lonely cottage stood on such a down, and may possibly be standing there now.In spite of its loneliness, however, the spot, by actual measurement, was not more than five milesfrom a county-town. Yet that affected it little. Five miles of irregular upland, during the long inimicalseasons, with their sleets, snows, rains, and mists, afford withdrawing space enough to isolate aTimon or a Nebuchadnezzar; much less, in fair weather, to please that less repellent tribe, the poets, philosophers, artists, and others who 'conceive and meditate of pleasant things.'Some old earthen camp or barrow, some clump of trees, at least some starved fragment of ancienthedge is usually taken advantage of in the erection of these forlorn dwellings. But, in the presentcase, such a kind of shelter had been disregarded. Higher Crowstairs, as the house was called, stoodquite detached and undefended. The only reason for its precise situation seemed to be the crossingof two footpaths at right angles hard by, which may have crossed there and thus for a good fivehundred years. Hence the house was exposed to the elements on all sides. But, though the wind uphere blew unmistakably when it did blow, and the rain hit hard whenever it fell, the various weathersof the winter season were not quite so formidable on the coomb as they were imagined to be bydwellers on low ground. The raw rimes were not so pernicious as in the hollows, and the frosts werescarcely so severe. When the shepherd and his family who tenanted the house were pitied for theirsufferings from the exposure, they said that upon the whole they were less inconvenienced by'wuzzes and flames' (hoarses and phlegms) than when they had lived by the stream of a snugneighbouring valley.The night of March 28, 182-, was precisely one of the nights that were wont to call forth theseexpressions of commiseration. The level rainstorm smote walls, slopes, and hedges like the clothyardshafts of Senlac and Crecy. Such sheep and outdoor animals as had no shelter stood with theirbuttocks to the winds; while the tails of little birds trying to roost on some scraggy thorn were blowninside-out like umbrellas. The gable-end of the cottage was stained with wet, and the eavesdroppingsflapped against the wall. Yet never was commiseration for the shepherd more misplaced. For thatcheerful rustic was entertaining a large party in glorification of the christening of his second girl
