In a modern
country sketch or picture you would _not_ find them, they would be
smoothed away--drawing-room faces, made transparent, in attitudes like
easy-limbed girls delicately proportioned These are not country people.
Country people are the same now in appearance as when the old artists
honestly drew them; sturdy and square, bulky and slow, no attitudes, no
drawing-room grace, no Christmas card glossiness; somewhat stiff of limb,
with a distinct flavour of hay and straw about them, and no enamel. In
the villages cottagers have no ideas of tastefully disposing their
mantles about their shoulders, or of dressing for the occasion. I do not
know how to describe the form of a middle-aged cottage woman on a stormy
day with a large, greenish umbrella, a round bonnet, huge and enclosing
all the head, back, and sides, like the vast helm of the knights, a sort
of circular cloak, stout ankles well visible, and sometimes pattens; the
wearer inside all this decidedly bulky, and the whole apparatus coming
along through mud and rain with great deliberation. Inside the round
bonnet a ruddy, apple-checked face, just such a one as used to go to mass
in Sir John the priest's time, before the images were knocked out of the
rood-loft at the church there. The boys and girls play in the ditches
till they go to school, and they play in the hedges and ditches every
hour they can get out of school, and the moment their time is up they go
to work among the hedges and ditches, and though they may have had to
read standard authors at school, no sooner do they get among the furrows
than they talk hedge and ditch language.
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