COOKHAM DEAN.
Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885


For a long time "the Dean" had had a certain familiarity for us. We
heard it continually spoken of among our artist friends, and had even
come to recognize many of its picturesque features as we came across
them in our usual studio-haunts and in the exhibitions. We seemed to
know those green, billowy swells at sight, as well as the thatched and
tiled roofs and old-fashioned gardens, the swinging barred gates and
stagnant, goose-tormented pools,--even the coarse-limbed rustics in
weather-beaten "store-clothes," picturesque only in mellow fadedness.

We knew all this; yet, when we set eyes and feet upon Cookham Dean for
the first time, behold, the half had not been told us! We had directed
many a letter to Cookham Dean, and knew them to have been duly delivered
by a bucolic postman on a tricycle. But a hundred canvases, and almost
as many tongues, had failed to tell us of the sunny slopes and shadowy
glades, the sylvan lanes and ribbon-like roads, the old stone inn with
open porch and sign swinging from lofty post set across the way, as
Italian campanile stand away from their churches, all coming under the
name of "Cookham Dean," although that "Dean," properly speaking, is only
their geographical and artistic centre.

Long before we reached _Ye Hutte_ from Cookham station--Ye Hutte set
amid bushy and climbing roses upon a prominent knoll of the many-knolled
Dean--we ceased to wonder that our picturesque imaginings of the region
we were passing through had been so various. Artists were before us,
artists behind us, artists on every side of us, two sketching-umbrellas
glinting like great tropical flowers in a corn-field, another like a
huge daisy in the dim vista of a long lane.

"C-- lodges in that red cottage, B-- in the next one, H-- in this
tumble-down farm-house, the L----s in that row of laborers' cottages,
the D----s in the inn," said Mona, tripping lightly over well-known
names, whose most accustomed place is in the exhibition catalogues.

Through the open windows of a hideous brick row, built to hold as many
laborers' families all the year round and as many Bohemian summer
artists as can crowd therein, we caught glimpses of tapestries worth
their weight in gold. One well-known artist has taken possession of the
end of this uncomely row, intended for a supply-shop to the
neighborhood. This shop is his studio, which he has filled with
treasures of Japanese art. As a Cookhamite assured us, "Mr. C-- goes
in for the _Japanesque_;" and he screens the large display-windows
intended for cheese, raisins, and potted meats with smiling mandarins
and narrow-eyed houris under octopus-like trees.

At the rear of the same "Row" we recognized a broad-hatted figure once
familiar to us in the Quartier Latin and the artistic _auberges_ of the
Forest of Fontainebleau. The very personification of _insouciance_ and
_laissez-aller_, he whose tiny bedroom-studio up-stairs ran riot with
color caught among California mountains, in cool gray France and
ochreous England, was bending the whole force of his mind to sketching a
pouter pigeon preening itself upon a barrel.

Still another of the ugly cottages, cursed by artists but inhabited by
them, was hired at ten pounds a year by two young landscapists. A
charwoman came every morning to quell the mad riots in which the
household gods (or demons) diurnally engaged, but at all other times the
landscapists manoeuvred for themselves. That the domestic manoeuvring of
young landscapists is not always _toute rose_ we saw reason later to
believe. For not once, twice, nor yet so seldom as a dozen times, have
we seen these young manoeuvrers begin to dine at four, when shadows
were growing too long upon field, thicket, and stream, only to finish we
knew not when, so late into darkness was that "finish" projected. We
could see one of the diners passing along the road from the public
house, an eighth of a mile away, at four, with the _piece de resistance_
of the meal in an ample dish enveloped in a towel. Ten minutes later the
other rushes by, contrariwise of direction, in pursuit of beer and the
forgotten bread. A little later, and a scudding white dust-cloud in the
road informs us that one of the dining 'scapists flees breathlessly
vinegar- or salt-ward. Still another five minutes, and the other diner
hies him in chase of the white scud, calling vigorously to it that there
is no butter for the rice, no sugar for the fruit.

We saw at once that this Berkshire corner abounds more in dulcet and
sylvan landscape bits than in picturesque motifs for those who paint
_genre_. The peasants have a certain inchoate picturesqueness, as of
beings roughly evolved from the life of this fair material nature, and
sometimes, in silhouette against dun-gray skies and amid rugged fields,
give one vague feeling of Millet's pathos of peasant life and labor. The
yokel himself, however,--and particularly _herself_,--seems determined
to deny all poetic and picturesque relations, by clothing himself--and
herself--in coarse, shop-made rubbish, in battered, _demode_ town-hats
and flounced gowns from Petticoat Lane.

From certain points of the "Dean" the distances are dreamy and wide,
with high horizon-lines touching wooded hills and shutting the Thames
into a middle distance toward which a hundred little hills either
descend abruptly or decline gently upon broad green meadows. Nature here
smiles, not with pure pagan blitheness, but with a tenderer grace, as of
a soul grown human and fraught with countless memories of man's smiles
and tears, his hard, bitter labor, his sins, sorrows, and longings. But
it is very tender, and not even the wildest storm-effects raise the
landscape to any expression of tragic grandeur, but only suede its fair
hues and soft outlines to the wan pathos peculiar to English moorlands.

_Ye Hutte_ is a misnomer for the extraordinary establishment, studio and
domicile combined, at which we dismounted. It is not a _hut_, and
neither in architectural motive nor the artistic proclivities of its
inmates has it aught to do with the centuries when our English tongue
was otherwise written or spoken than it is to-day. Ye Hutte is a vast,
barn-like building, plain and bare save for an inviting vine-grown porch
vaguely Gothic in reminiscence, although nondescript in fact. It was
erected by some dissenting society for public worship: hence its
interior is one immense vaulted room, with cathedral-like windows and
choir-gallery across one end. "The body of the house," to speak
ecclesiastically, is cumbered with easels and the usual chaotic
_impedimenta_ of painters. The choir, ascended by a ladder, holds three
tiny cot-beds, while beneath the choir and concealed by beautiful
draperies are stored the domestic and culinary paraphernalia,--pots,
pans, brushes, dishes, and, above all, the multiplicity of petroleum- and
spirit-stoves in which the Bohemian artistic soul delights. Ye Hutte is
an artist's studio, and its name may be found in all the exhibition
catalogues, for several generations of painters drift through it every
year. As one inmate rushes off to the Continent, the sea-shore, or the
mountains, another takes his place. Yet Ye Hutte holds scant place in
its real owner's esteem compared with that larger studio owned by all
the Dean artists in common, where all their summer's work is done, and
which is parquetted with grain-field gold and meadow emerald, walled
with rainbow horizons, and roofed with azure festooned with spun silk.
Ye Hutte is better appreciated as evening rendezvous for the
palette-bearing hosts, both male and female, who, sunbrowned and tired,
partake there of restful social converse as well as of the hospitable
cup that cheers. Evening after evening, by twos and threes, they sit in
the moonlight under the silver-touched vines and dewy blossoms of the
porch, listening to the far-away cry of night-birds, the murmur of
drowsy bells upon cattle stirring in sleep, or of human voices idealized
by remoteness into faint haunting music, while before them white light
touches the wooded heights of Cliefden,--distant heights full of
picturesque mystery and passionate history,--touches and idealizes into
a semblance of poetic realism the sham ruins of Hedsor, and spreads a
pearly sheen over the unseen Valley of the Shadow of Light through which
winds the quiet Thames.

To the usual artistic circle of Ye Hutte is often added a not
uncongenial element from the outside world, sometimes even from within
the borders of Philistia. Story-tellers, moved by the subtile magnetism
of the artistic creative faculty, whether of brush, chisel, or pen, come
up sometimes from London, bringing with them an atmosphere of
publishers' offices, of romance in high and low life, of professional
gossip and criticism. Often a stalwart bicyclist rolls up from the
capital, bringing with him such a breeze from the world of newspapers,
theatres, and crack restaurants that Ye Hutte straightway determines to
order some weekly journal, waxes ardent for flesh-pots other than of
Cookham, and resolves upon having a Lyceum twice a week when the Dean
shall be swept by the blasts and St. John's Wood studios swallow us up
for the winter.

The Dean is little favored of the ordinary fashionable visitor, for whom
artistic accommodations are quite too scantily luxurious. Now and then,
for the sake of the river, a rustic cot is taken for a few weeks by a
party of boating-people. Then the quaint, old-fashioned gardens blossom
with a sudden luxuriance of striped tents and flaming umbrellas, while
bright women in many-hued boating-costumes flit among cabbages and
onions like curious tropical birds and butterflies. As a rule, however,
the Dean is abandoned to its usual rustic population and to artists,
numbers of the latter remaining all winter in the haunts whence the
majority of their kind have flown.

The social and artistic peculiarities of the Dean are, of course, too
many to be specified. In a collection of various nationalities, many of
whose number have drifted like thistledown hither and yon over the fair
earth, how could it well be otherwise? It may be observed, however, that
here, as everywhere else in this right little tight little isle, where
habit is the very antithesis of the airy license of "Abroad," it is
_not_, as it is in the artistic haunts of the Continent, _en regle_ to
vaunt one's self on the paucity of one's shekels or to acknowledge
acquaintance with the Medici's pills in their modern form of the Three
Golden Balls.

Once upon a time, in a Barbizon _auberge_, a certain famous artist and
incorrigible Bohemian brought down the table by describing an incident
of his releasing a friend's valuables from durance.

"The moment I turned in at the Mont de Piete," he said, "_my_ watch took
fright, and stopped ticking on the spot."

That same Bohemian, after years of the Latin Quarter and Mont de Piete,
found himself one summer on the Dean. One evening at the porch of Ye
Hutte he met a lively group of painters and paintresses, just returned
from corn-field and meadow.

During the short halt the Bohemian's watch was so largely and frequently
_en evidence_ as to attract attention.

"Yes," he said, with colossal, adamantine impudence, "I've just got it
back from a two-years' visit to 'my uncle'."

Only a few evenings later the same party met again in the same spot.

"What time is it, Mr. S----?" asked Sophia Primrose, amiably disposed to
resuscitate a forlorn joke.

A mammoth blush submerged the luckless Bohemian. For Dean propriety was
already becoming engrafted upon Continental habit, and he crimsoned at
having to confess what once he would have proclaimed upon the
house-top,--that his watch was again with his "uncle."

Probably nine-tenths of the Continental artists who are not entirely
beyond the dread of yet eating "mad cow" travel third-class. But Dean
artists, however they may travel when out of England, generally slip
quietly away from the sight of their acquaintances when their tickets
are other than at least second. Our Bohemian was once presented with a
second-class ticket to London. As he scrambled in upon the unwonted
luxury of cushioned seats, he saw familiar faces blushing furiously.

"The first time we ever travelled second-class in our lives," murmured
Materfamilias.

"I too," responded the cheeky Bohemian.

Another difference between Dean Bohemianism and Continental is
characteristic of the whole race whose land this is. Whereas artists in
France, Italy, and Germany are of gregarious habit and gather for their
summers in rural inns, where they form a community by themselves, the
Dean artist sets up his own vine and fig-tree and has a temporary home,
if ever so small and mean. The farm-houses and cottages of the Dean are
filled with lodgers, all dining at separate tables and living as aloof
from each other as the true Briton always lives. There are advantages in
this aloofness, but it certainly lacks the _camaraderie_, the jolly
good-fellowship, of those picturesque _auberges_ and _osterie_ where
twenty or thirty of one calling are gathered together under one roof,
meeting daily at table, where artistic criticism is pungent and free,
artistic assistance ungrudging, tales of artistic experience and
adventure racy, the atmosphere stimulative to the spreading out of every
artistic theory possible to the sane and insane mind.

In one of these Continental _auberges_ rough boards a foot in width ran
in one unbroken line round the four sides of the _salle-a-manger_. These
boards were perhaps hazily intended for seats, but their real office
was to hold all the artistic rubbish--smashed color-tubes, broken
stretchers, ragged canvases, discarded palettes, disreputable paint-rags
and oil-tubes--the _auberge_ possessed. But every sunset, as the stream
of artists set in from forest and field, the boards came into other
service. All the work of the day was ranged upon them along the wall,
and while the painters sat at meat comment and criticism grew rampant,
every canvas coming in for its share. That many good lessons were given
and taken in this wise _va sans dire_. That also artistic progress was
punctuated not unseldom with "_betise_," "_imbecile_," "_nom du chien_,"
"you're a goose," and "you're another," goes equally without saying to
all who know the unrestraint of artistic Bohemia and the usual attitude
of the human mind under criticism.

The walls of this _salle-a-manger_ were--and are--arranged with panels,
in which _messieurs les artistes_ exercised their skill. It is a marked
peculiarity of these artistic communities that no branch of art is so
popular as caricature. Sometimes these caricatures are amiable,
sometimes the reverse. Thus, when a certain blithe widow was represented
colossally upon the wall with a little man in her eye, the likenesses
were so good and the truth of the caricature so palpable that the widow
herself was moved to as quick laughter as the others. But when American
Palmer worked all day upon a panel to create a sunny sea laughing
radiantly back at a sunny sky, while fantastic lateen-sailed craft
floated like bits of jewelled color between, it was mean, to say the
least, of Scotch Willie to take advantage of the American's departure
and paint out those fairy boats, filling their places with horrible
bloated corpses, floating upon the bright water like a nightmare upon
innocent sleep.

It was in this same _auberge_ that our landlady made this piteous
supplication: "Caricature each other on the walls, _messieurs et
mesdames, si vous voulez_; make portrait busts of the bread and
figurines of the potatoes, and decorate the plates in whatever style of
art you please; but don't, _je vous en supplie_, don't blacken the
table-cloths before they are three days old."

Alas! this was eloquence lost; for, at that very dinner, conversation
chancing to turn upon the subtile malignity of Fanny Matilda's smiles,
Fanny Matilda being there present, in less time than it takes to tell it
twenty crayon smiles writhed and wriggled upon the spick-span cloth.

"_Mon Dieu! mon Dieu_!" moaned Madame. "And only yesterday every
handkerchief upon the line came in bearing the noses of _messieurs et
mesdames_!"

Aloofly though the Deanite lives, he is not altogether an unsocial
being. Neither are his domestic habits always as invisible to the finite
eye as he perhaps intends them to be. Tent-life has scant privacy, and
the circumscribed accommodation of the Dean leads to frequent "slopping
over" into cloth annexes.

Opposite our windows a certain painter spent no inconsiderable time in
the peak-roofed tent upon the grass-plot. There the young
foreign-looking wife, in scarlet _birette_ and jaunty petticoats just
touching high boot-tops, with long, flowing hair, as bright and
effective as any pictured _vivandiere_, made tea and coffee over a
petroleum-stove, laid the table, sat at her sewing, posed for her
husband, received her callers, as charming a gypsy picture as ever
brightened canvas.

For the very best of reasons, we were not 'cyclists, although in a
country set with 'cycles as the fields with flowers or the sky with
stars.

For reasons equally good, we were not boatists, although the watery way
from Oxford to the sea flowed so near our door, and our village was one
of the gayest head-quarters not only of the fresh-water navy, whose arms
are flashing oars and whose oaths are of the universities, but equally
that of regiments of painters, whose arms are sketching-umbrellas and
easels and who swear not at all,--or at least not to feminine hearing.

Our lodgings were among the artists in the region farther back from the
river than that monopolized by the boating-people. We were back among
the sunny slopes and smiling meadows, the red-tiled farm-houses and
dusky lanes, of the still primitive natives of the region, while the
navy covered the shining river by day and overran the river-side
hostelries by night.

Our lodgings were not picturesque, if truth must be told, although
surrounded by picturesqueness as by a garment,--a circular cloak of it,
so to say. We had the chief rooms of a staring new and square brick
cottage, glaring with white walls inside, shutterless outside, majestic
with a bow-window too high to look from except upon one's legs, owned by
my Lady H----'s gardener, and elegantly named "Ethel Cottage," as a
stucco plaque in its frieze bore witness. We should have preferred
accommodations in any of the ivy-grown, steep-roofed cots about us, or
in the old stone inn, with its peaked porch, where honest yokels quaffed
nutty ale and a sign-board creaked and groaned from its gibbet across
the road. But we had come too late in the painting-season for any other
than Hobson's choice: the tidbits of grime and squalor were all taken,
and we must e'en content ourselves to be mocked and reviled for the
philistinism of our domestic establishing, or else hie us hence where
artists were not and Ethel Cottages as yet unknown.

But where, tell me where, are not artists in England? And where, tell me
where, do artists gather in squads that Ethel Cottages do not spring up
like the tents of an army with banners? For even painters must eat and
be lodged, the aboriginal habitations are not of elastic capacity, the
inns are of feeble digestion, and the third summer of an artistic
invasion is sure to find "Ethels" and "Mabels" in red brick and stunning
whitewash, and, like our row of laborers' cottages, cursed by artists,
but inhabited by them.

It was a _soulagement_ of our aesthetic discomfort that so long as we
remained hidden within it we never realized our own hideousness. Now and
then we saw the ugly squareness of our afternoon shadow upon our
aristocratically-gravelled front yard, but ordinarily we saw only dreamy
distances melting into piny duskiness against the far-off sky, the
serpent-like windings of the tranquil river, upon which its navy looked
like dust-motes, fair fields of golden grain, and the farm-houses and
cottages which looked upon our blank brickness with admiration and
wondered why we were despised of our less beautifully housed kind, when
our forks were four-pronged and of silvery seeming and our floors
carpeted to our sybaritic feet. It was only when we returned to our
Ethel after long tramps over the country-side, from a four-miles-distant
Norman tower or a ten-miles-away pre-Reformation abbey, now stable or
granary, that we figuratively beat our breasts and tore our hair because
Fate had not made us _real_ tramps, privileged to sleep in
pre-Reformation stables or 'neath pre-Reformation stars, rather than the
imitation tramps we were, wedded to the habits but loathing the aspect
of red-faced, staring Ethels.

What would we not have given for an invitation to pass a time, as Miss
Muloch was, in one of those Thames monsters concerning which she wrote
her fascinating pages, "A Week in a House-Boat"! We could scarce catch a
glimpse of the river upon our tramps--and it was our constant silvery
accompaniment, as the treble to a part-song--without coming across these
ungraceful, unwieldy creatures, seeming like bloated denizens of depths
below come to bask upon the surface. Hundreds of them dot the river
between Teddington and Oxford: once we counted ten between Ethel and the
wooded island whither we rowed every Sunday to dine from ponderous
hampers upon a huge tree-stump. Many of them are owned and occupied by
artists, who have them towed by horses up and down the river every week
or two, or moor them for months in one place while painting
river-scenery. Some are inhabited by maniacal fishermen, who sit day
after day all day long at the end of poles protruding from front or
back doors or bedroom windows. Some are inhabited by Londoners in whom
primeval instincts for air, space, sunshine, and liberty break out every
summer from under the thick crust of modern habits and conventions and
cause them to breathe, as we did, not angelical aspirations, but "I want
to be a gypsy."

Some of these house-boats are miracles of microscopic luxury, doll-like
bedrooms and dining-rooms for pygmies. In some, also, marvels of
culinary skill are evolved in pocket-space by French _chefs_ who spend
their days creating the banquets to which the boaters invite their
_convives_ at evening, when the cold river-mists have driven the navy
into harbor for the night. Others are much simpler in construction and
furnishing, and the inhabitants live largely upon tinned and potted
viands and such light cooking as comes within the possibilities of
oil-stoves and fires of fagots on the banks. Still others--and we often
saw their lordly and corpulent owners reading the "Times" upon the
handkerchief space which serves for porch or piazza before their front
doors--move up and down the river from crack hotel to cracker, taking no
note of picturesque "bits" or of mooring-places where Paradise seems
come down to lodge between Berks and Bucks, caring naught that at this
point four exquisite churches and two interesting manor-houses are
within tramping-distance, at that a feudal castle and the fairest inland
picture that England and nature can offer their lovers, caring only that
at the "King" the trout are the best cooked on the whole river, at the
"Queen" the chops are divine, while at the "Prince" the _perdrix aux
truffes_ are worth mooring there a week for. These house-boaters are
generally accompanied by garish wives and daughters, who spend their
time in the streets of the town where they chance to be moored,--and
they seldom are moored elsewhere than at the larger towns,--exchanging
greetings and chatting with such acquaintances as they there meet, or
idling up and down the river in the luxurious small boats of their
river-made friends. This type of house-boater himself is generally
spoken of in brisk naval asides as a "duffer," the kitchen of his boat
is a wine-closet, and, to look at him poring for hours over his paper,
one may well believe that time is heavy on his hands and that he arrives
during every summer vacation at depths of mortal ennui where "nothing
new is, and nothing true is, and no matter!"

Americans personally unacquainted with England can form little idea of
the extent to which physical culture is carried here, and the universal
summer madness for athletic sports and out-of-door amusements. The
equable climate, never too hot, never too cold, for river-pull or
cricket, is Albion's advantage in this respect over almost all the rest
of the world, and particularly over our fervid and freezing clime. Even
although this is pious England, where the gin-shops cannot open after
the noon of Sunday until the bells ring for the evening service and
"Pub" and church spring open and alight simultaneously, even in pious
England Sunday is the day of all the week on which the river takes on
its merriest aspect, and from the multitudes of familiar faces and
frequency of friendly greetings reminds one of Regent Street and the
Parks. All prosperous and proper London--the amusement is too costly for
'Arry--seems to float itself upon Thames water that day, coming up forty
land-miles from the metropolis to do so. Boats are furiously in demand,
every picnic nook is pre-empted from earliest morning, the river-side
tea-gardens are thronged, the inns are depleted of men and women in
yachting-costumes, and the locks are jammed as full as they can be of
highly-draped boats, gayly-dressed women, and circus-costumed men, the
whole scene gayer, brighter, more fantastic than any Venetian carnival
since the days of the most sumptuous of the Adriatic doges.

One or two real Venetian gondolas are kept at that river-reach where we
spent our summer. The owner of the principal one is an English nobleman
who lived long in Italy and whose twelve daughters were born there. It
is a sight to see those twelve beautiful sisters, from six years of age
to twenty-four, poled down the river to church every Sunday morning by a
swarthy and veritable Venetian gondolier. Whether or not that
hearse-like craft has sacred associations in the minds of the twelve
maidens all in a row, or whether its grimness and want of swiftness seem
out of place amid the carnival brilliancy of Sunday afternoon, it is
certain that it is never used except for church-going, and the maidens
appear later in the day each in her own swift little canoe, or two or
three sisters together in a larger one, darting to and fro, hither and
yon, with almost incredible swiftness, almost more like winged thoughts
than like even swallows on the wing. The gabled and ivy-wreathed
Elizabethan manor-house which is the summer home of the maidens stands
but a few rods from the river's bank. Here, amidst decorous shrubbery,
upon smooth shaven and rolled turf, where marble vases overflow with
gorgeous flowers, sit Pater and Mater among their dozens of guests. Some
of the gentlemen are in correct morning dress, some in boating-costumes,
and some in that last stage of unclothedness or first of clothedness
which is the English bathing-dress. In their striped tights on land
these last look exactly like saw-dust and rope ring clowns, but when
they dive into the water from that well-bred lawn and dart in wild
pursuit of the maidens, who beat them off with oars from climbing into
the canoes, amid shouts of aquatic and terrestrial laughter, one would
almost swear they were neither the clowns they looked a moment ago, nor
yet the English gentlemen they really are, but fantastic mermen bent
upon carrying earth-brides back with them into their cool native depths
beneath the bright water.

That is what it looks like. But a single glimpse into those cool dappled
depths, where the sunny water is shoal enough to show bottom, reveals,
alas! how little mermaiden and romantic those depths are. For London
does not disport itself every Sunday on the Thames without leaving ample
traces of that disporting. We see those traces gleaming and glooming
there,--empty beer- and wine-bottles, devitalized sardine-boxes, osseous
remains of fish, flesh, and fowl, scooped cheese-rinds, egg-shells, the
buttons of defrauded raiment, and the parted rims of much-snatched-at
and vigorously-squabbled-for straw hats.

A favorite boating-trip is from Teddington up to Oxford, or _vice
versa_, spending a week or two on the way, and stopping at river-side
inns at night. In the season these inns are full to overflowing, and the
roughest and smallest of water-side hamlets holds its accommodations at
lofty premiums. A number of public pleasure-steamers and many private
steam-launches ply up and down, making the whole trip in two or three
days, drawing up at night at towns, and by day provoking curses both
loud and deep by the swash of their tidal waves against the liliputian
navy. Many of the merry boating-parties of men and women seek only
sleeping-accommodations at the inns, and do their own cooking upon bosky
islands, on the wooded or sunny banks of the river, by means of
kerosene- or charcoal-stoves and tiny tents. How appetizingly we have
thus smelt the broiling steak and grilled chop done to a turn even in a
camp frying-pan, as we tramped along the river heights and looked down
upon chatting groups below! How like airs of Araby the Blest the odors
of steaming coffee! how more stimulating than breath of fair Spice Isles
the pungent incense of hissing onions!

As a consequence of this return of Nature's children to Nature's breast,
the _genii loci_, the sylvan sprites, are all frightened inland from the
borders of the beautiful river. Except here and there where huge boards
threaten trespassers and announce that landing is forbidden upon this
Private Property, wild flowers will not grow, the grass looks trampled
and dim, the soft summer zephyrs play among empty paper bags and
relics of grocers' parcels, with sound and sentiment vastly unlike their
natural music among green, waving leaves. The river is spoiled for the
poet and the dreamer, and even the artist must choose his bits with
care. Hyde Park and Piccadilly have come up to the Thames; and what does
Hyde Park care for the poetry of dreaming nature, or what the
river-madmen for aught else than glorious expansion of muscle and
strengthening of sinew and the godlike sense of largeness and lightness
which comes with that strengthening and expanding?

Gliding up and down the river, one would suppose all London had taken to
boats. But we as trampists came to other conclusions as we pegged along
the white Berkshire highways, smooth and even as parquetted floors, day
after day. There the bicycle holds its own, and more too, being largely
adopted not only by genuine 'cyclists, but by others as well whose only
interest is to cover the ground as quickly as possible,--amateur
photographers lashed all over with apparatus, artists shapelessly ditto,
and pastoral postmen square-backed with letter-pouches. Women
tricyclists are only less numerous, and the dignity and modesty must be
crude indeed that find objections to this manner of feminine
peregrination. The costume is simple and plain,--close-fitting upper
garments, without fuss of furbelow, and plain close skirts, met at the
ankles by high buttoned boots. A lady's seat upon a tricycle is far less
conspicuous than upon a horse, her bodily motion is less, and the
movement of her feet scarcely more than is necessary to run a
sewing-machine. She sits at her ease in a perfectly lady-like manner,
and flies over the ground like a courser of the desert, if she pleases,
or rolls quietly and smoothly along, chatting easily with the
pedestrians who amble at her side.

Lady tricyclists attract no attention whatever in Oxford Street. Imagine
one flying down Broadway!

As trampists our femininely-encumbered party in those delicious English
days considered fourteen quotidian miles not discreditable to us,
particularly when taking into consideration the bleats and baas and
whimpering laggardness with which we returned from three-mile excursions
during the first few days we were in the tramping-line. By degrees we
thus explored the whole country within a radius of seven miles of Ethel.
With this we were content, yea, even proud; for did not many of our
boating women-neighbors grumble even at their walk to the river and
declare they would rather row five miles than walk one? We were proud,
for we knew every church, every picturesque cottage and ruin, within our
radius, while our aquatic friends knew only those bordering the river.
We were proud--until, ah me! until that desolate day when a merrily,
merrily flying squad swooped down upon us and declared they had 'cycled
every inch of the _twenty-mile_ periphery of which Ethel's neighboring
church tower was the centre!

That cutting down of our pedal pride resulted in our subscribing to a
daily paper. Every morning before stretching out to our regular day's
tramp we had been wont to trot through dewy lanes, over stiles, and
across subtly-colored turnip- and cabbage-fields, to purchase in the town
of M-- a luxury not to be had in our own hamlet,--the "Daily News."
Rain or shine, that trot must be trotted, for there were those among us
who would have tramped sulkily all day and sniffed the sniff of wrath at
ivied church and thatched cottage were the acid of their natures not
made frothy and light by the alkali of their morning paper. It had never
occurred to us, not even when we camped beneath wayside shade around our
sandwiches and ale or in some stiff and dim inn-parlor and listened to
the reading of the "News," that in reality the town of M----, and not
the brickhood of Ethel, was thus the centre of all our ambulatory
circumferences. It had never before dawned upon us that we thus added
three uncounted miles to our fourteen diurnally counted ones. What
astonishment at our own pedometric weakness of calculation! What disgust
to find our periphery thus three whole miles smaller than it need have
been!

The next day we subscribed to the "News," and walked nine miles as the
bee flies from the front door of Ethel even unto the ruins of Medmenham.
And we vowed by all our plaster gods and painted goddesses that another
summer we would tramp no more. We would 'cycle.

A mile away from Ethel is the village proper of Cookham. It is a sleepy
town, save in the boating-season; and whoever enters the post-office in
any season finds it empty and inhospitable. Raps upon a tightly-closed
inner door call a woman attendant from rattling sewing or noisy gossip
of the invisible penetralia; and as soon as the business is done the
inhospitable door swings shut again in the stranger's face.

Cookham houses are quaint, often timbered, frequently ivy-grown from
basement to roof. One imagines them assuming a half-sullen air at this
yearly breaking of their dreamy repose by incursions of parti-colored
hordes for whom life seems to hold but two supreme objects,--boats and
pictures.

The most picturesque feature of the place is the old church, set amid
tombs whose mossy and time-gnawed cherubs have exchanged grins for two
hundred years and more. The old flint tower is grave and grim, but
softened by a wonderful centuries old ivy in a veil of living green. A
pathetic interest to artists hallows the venerable church-yard. Here
sleeps Frederick Walker, a genius cut off before his meridian, and
resting now amid his kindred in a lowly grave, over which the Thames
waters surge every spring, leaving the grave all the rest of the year
the sadder for its cold soddenness and for the humid mildew and decay
eating already into the headstone, as yet but twelve years old. In the
church itself is Thorneycroft's mural tablet to the dead artist, a
portrait head of him who was born almost within the old church's shadow,
and whose pencil dealt always so lovingly with the poetic aspects of his
native region.

MARGARET BERTHA WRIGHT.