A STONE COUNTRY.
IF you were to ask a child in our neighbourhood to imagine a country without stone, you would be expecting too much of him. Born of a race of masons and quarrymen, brought up in a stone house, trotting along the lanes to school between " dry" (i.e., innocent of mortar) stone walls, and with a disused quarry for a playground, such a child would find it next to impossible to picture the flat and monotonous fertility of Holland.
A atone country such as this has a gracious loveliness quite unlike the austere beauty of a granite-ribbed mountain-side. Ours is a softish stone after all, an imperfectly petrified clay called by some "bastard freestone," and our climate is mild enough to favour the natural growth of acacias and sycamores, walnuts, and many another pleasant tree, besides the hardier beech and fir. The dripping mists of our deep valleys help to clothe roofs and walls with orange, white, and grey lichens, and mosses of the pin-cushiony type, golden, green, and brown. Stone-crop in the season paints each wall-top yellow ; the small lilac toad-flax hangs wherever it can find root-hold ; wine-red ivy, five-pointed and veined with vivid green, pushes between the stones and clasps them in the close grip of knotty dust-brown fingers; and tiny blue harebells and gay rock roses deck the coarse tufts of wayside grass below.
The older houses are covered with stone " tiles " (of all roofings the most picturesque in its irregularity and varied weather staining), and almost all have the flat-topped porch formed of a slab of stone with scroll-shaped supports on either side. Rough "rockery-stones," as our people call them, are often piled on the porch-top with a little soil between them, and here house-leeks nestle and " snow in summer " is encouraged to spread its tufted carpet to the sun. A narrow path of broken flagstones, with pipings of bright green moss delicately outlining the seams of its grey patchwork, leads from door to gate.
Red brick when it is old is beautiful, but it takes long to fade to the ideal ruddy hue, and there is a certain vulgarity in new red brick of which the very newest stone cannot be accused. As a background for a cottage garden of mixed flowers brick cannot compare with stone, which even gains forgiveness for certain painful shades of what scedsmen call amaranth, but women who know stigmatise as magenta; and magenta against red brick makes the teeth ache,—the teeth of intelligent women.
There is little to admire in a stone-quarry when it is being worked. Blocks of stone, heaps of earth, cranes, tools, and toiling men are hardly picturesque; but there is beauty in the band of tired quarrymen trooping homeward with the setting sun on their powdery faces and shabby stone-dyed garments, looking as though they were " done in pastel," and with even the familiar handkerchief of gaudy red subdued to a dull rose- madder. And how can one speak adequately of the charm of a long-abandoned quarry ? It is the rock-garden of a god, a rough amphitheatre of shelves and ledges, and pits and crannies, sown by the birds or the winds, watered by the rain, and, let us hope, visited only by people who love it and take light toll of its ferns and flowers. There are tall ash trees and sturdy hollies growing in its clefts, and trails of ivy dangle and sway like long rope-ladders twenty feet and more over its jagged edges. Groups of stout green hart's-tongues star its shadiest slope, and underfoot there is a tangle of wild thyme and mint, ground ivy, speedwell, pansy, yellow toad-flax, wild geranium, and, best and earliest of all, sweet violets, purple and white. But the plant of all others which triumphs in an old quarry is the common clematis,—" traveller's joy," or "old man's beard," as you please. Here no one disturbs it, and it performs prodigies of gymnastics, flinging itself from tree to tree like a long-tailed monkey in the primeval jungle. In early winter the quarry is frothing with its silvery tufts; but it is not only in our quarries. It surges over the tops of stone walls ; it pours its foaming cascades over steep grassy banks ; it drapes sere hedgerows and garlands naked boughs ; it swathes whole families of stunted and shivering trees in a drooping quilt of pale grey swansdown. Lovely is it in the tender green of May ; lovely, too, in the white blossom of July and August ; but lovelier far in the dying year, when every leaf is gone and puffs of feathered smoke poised above its dull brown stalks of tough and twisted cord alone remain.
One learns a new word now and then from the workers in stone. A "cock-up" is one of the stones set up on end to crown a wall, and a " coign " is, of course, a corner-stone. Once in a while a mason possessed of more imagination than his fellows rises to carving vases, sun-dials, or garden-seats. I have seen lions too, strange, smiling beasts with long slender limbs, and tongues and manes painted red, which surprise the passer-by by peeping at him from a shrubbery ; and surmount- ing the porch of the small square-faced house behind them there is a little grey mannikin in a cocked bat, obviously intended for Napoleon. There is a legend that a former owner of that house sent "Napoleon" into the nearest market- town in his donkey-cart the morning after a prolonged carouse. What Napoleon P one asks, and why did lie sit up drinking all night in our village inn ? No satisfactory answer is here forthcoming. These sculptural achievements—the lions and Napoleon—were the creations of a man who with training might have been an artist. His son maintains that he was a genius. "If 'e'd 'a' seen you standee in the road same's you are now, 'e'd 'a' been able to cut you out as natteral as life, an' my son Dick 'e's the same. D'you know what a buss is, Ma'am?" The writer thought for a moment, and was able to say " Yes " just in time to save a small reputation for intelli- gence. " Well, a gen'leman asked Dick t'other day if 'e'd cut him twelve busses fur 'is garden wall,—twelve ancient warriors they was, an' the one Dick 'e tried 'is 'and on 'e was called Augustus. The gen'leman 'e sec to Dick : ' The sperrit
is the thing. You get the sperrit, an' you'll be all right ' 'E were rare pleased wi' Augustus, but Dick, 'e wouldn'
do no mower, 'e weren't satisfied wi' en hisself Teachin'? No—a, I don't believe in teaehin' if you got the gift same's my father 'ad. Dick's got en, but 'e's too modest."
An attempt was made not long ago to establish a school of stone-carving in our . village, but the number of pupils dwindled instead of increasing, and now there is nothing left to commemorate the failure of a praiseworthy effort save a large vase, cleverly carved, but unsold, and apparently un- saleable, which encumbers the hall of the nearest technical school. Granite and Bath-stone are not more unlike than the strenuous North-Countryman and his easygoing brother of the South; but since nothing short of a permanent fall of twenty degrees in the average temperature could avail to toughen the fibre and stimulate the ambition of the Southern, one must needs accept him as he is—and he is a pleasant enough fellow, after all—along with the charm of the country which produces him.
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