in such a village; perhaps lately built by the Puseyite incumbent:[74]
and beyond the church, close to the sea, are two fragments of a border
war-tower, standing on their circular mound, worn on its brow deep into
edges and furrows by the feet of the village children. On the bank of
moor, which forms the foreground, are a few cows, the carter's dog
barking at a vixenish one: the milkmaid is feeding another, a gentle
white one, which turns its head to her, expectant of a handful of fresh
hay, which she has brought for it in her blue apron, fastened up round
her waist; she stands with her pail on her head, evidently the village
coquette, for she has a neat bodice, and pretty striped petticoat under
the blue apron, and red stockings. Nearer us, the cowherd, bare-footed,
stands on a piece of the limestone rock (for the ground is thistly and
not pleasurable to bare feet);--whether boy or girl we are not sure: it
may be a boy, with a girl's worn-out bonnet on, or a girl with a pair of
ragged trousers on; probably the first, as the old bonnet is evidently
useful to keep the sun out of our eyes when we are looking for strayed
cows among the moorland hollows, and helps us at present to watch
(holding the bonnet's edge down) the quarrel of the vixenish cow with
the dog, which, leaning on our long stick, we allow to proceed without
any interference. A little to the right the hay is being got in, of
which the milkmaid has just taken her apronful to the white cow; but the
hay is very thin, and cannot well be raked up because of the rocks; we
must glean it like corn, hence the smallness of our stack behind the
willows; and a woman is pressing a bundle of it hard together, kneeling
against the rock's edge, to carry it safely to the hay-cart without
dropping any. Beyond the village is a rocky hill, deep set with
brushwood, a square crag or two of limestone emerging here and there,
with pleasant turf on their brows, heaved in russet and mossy mounds
against the sky, which, clear and calm, and as golden as the moss,
stretches down behind it towards the sea. A single cottage just shows
its roof over the edge of the hill, looking seawards: perhaps one of the
village shepherds is a sea captain now, and may have built it there,
that his mother may first see the sails of his ship whenever it runs
into the bay. Then under the hill, and beyond the border tower, is the
blue sea itself, the waves flowing in over the sand in long curved lines
slow