a few have seventeenth-century dates cut on stone tablets on their
fronts, but the undated ones look equally old; some thatched,
others tiled, but none particularly attractive. Certainly they are
without the added charm of a green drapery--creeper or ivy rose,
clematis, and honeysuckle; and they are also mostly without the
cottage-garden flowers, unprofitably gay like the blossoming furze,
but dear to the soul: the flowers we find in so many of the villages
along the rivers, especially in those of the Wylye valley to be
described in a later chapter.

The trees, I have said, are few, though the churchyard is shady, where
you can refresh yourself beneath its ancient beeches and its one
wide-branching yew, or sit on a tomb in the sun when you wish for warmth
and brightness. The trees growing by or near the street are mostly ash
or beech, with a pine or two, old but not large; and there are small or
dwarf yew-, holly-, and thorn-trees. Very little fruit is grown; two or
three to half a dozen apple- and damson-trees are called an orchard, and
one is sorry for the children. But in late summer and autumn they get
their fruit from the hedges. These run up towards the downs on either
side of the village, at right angles with its street; long, unkept
hedges, beautiful with scarlet haws and traveller's-joy, rich in bramble
and elder berries and purple sloes and nuts--a thousand times more nuts
than the little dormice require for their own modest wants.

Finally, to go back to its disadvantages, the village is waterless; at
all events in summer, when water is most wanted. Water is such a
blessing and joy in a village--a joy for ever when it flows throughout
the year, as at Nether Stowey and Winsford and Bourton-on-the-Water, to
mention but three of all those happy villages in the land which are
known to most of us! What man on coming to such places and watching the