t and permanent institutions of the country.
They were otherwise associated in my memory with a long succession of
Christmases, when holly berries enlivened their frames and peeped over
the walls of the pew where my elders drowsed, and my coevals were
sustained during the sermon by visions of the plum pudding and crackers
which would reward them in a near hereafter. I can still remember how,
before these joys began, we would group ourselves in the dining-room
windows, peering at distant woods, in which keepers still set man traps,
or watching the village schoolchildren on their way from church
homeward, making with their crimson cloaks a streak of color as they
followed one another across slopes of snow.

The feelings excited by a landscape such as this bore a subtle
resemblance to those produced in myself by the heraldries which thronged
the church. From the windows, indeed, of all the houses of which I have
just been speaking the prospect was morally, if not visually, the same.
They all looked out, as though it were the unquestioned order of things,
on wooded seclusions pricked by manorial chimneys or on lodges and gray
park walls, while somewhere beyond these last lurked the thatch of
contented cottages, at the doors of which, when a member of "the family"
passed, women and children would curtsy and men touch their forelocks.

Here some persons may be tempted to interpose the remark that the aspect
which things thus wore for ourselves was in one respect quite illusory.
They may say that the idyllic contentment which we thus attributed to
the cottagers was the very reverse of the truth, and that the thatch of
their dwellings, however pleasing to the eye, really shrouded a misery
to which history shows few parallels. Such an objection, even if
correct, would, however, be here irrelevant; for I am dealing now not
with things as they actually were, but merely with the impressions
produced by them on childish minds, and more particularly on my own.
Nevertheless, the objection in itself is of quite sufficient importance
to call, even here, for some incidental attention; and how far, in this
respect, our impressions were true or false will appear in the following
chapter.

CHAPTER II

THE TWO NATIONS

The Rural Poor of Devonshire--The Old Landed Families--An
Ecclesiastical Magnate

Our impressions of the cottagers, to which I have just alluded--and for
us the cottagers represented the people of Engl