Dan’l Burdon, the treasure-seeker—The shepherd’s feeling for the Bible—Effect of the pastoral life—The shepherd’s story of Isaac’s boyhood—The village on the Wylye
One of the shepherd’s early memories was of Dan’l Burdon, a labourer on the farm where Isaac Bawcombe was head-shepherd. He retained a vivid recollection of this person, who had a profound gravity and was the most silent man in the parish. He was always thinking about hidden treasure, and all his spare time was spent in seeking for it. On a Sunday morning, or in the evening after working hours, he would take a spade or pick and go away over the hills on his endless search after “something he could not find.” He opened some of the largest barrows, making trenches six to ten feet deep through them, but found nothing to reward him. One day he took Caleb with him, and they went to a part of the down where there were certain depressions in the turf of a circular form and six to seven feet in circumference. Burdon had observed these basin-like depressions and had thought it possible they marked the place where things of value had been buried in long-past ages. To begin he cut the turf all round and carefully removed it, then dug and found a thick layer of flints. These removed, he came upon a deposit of ashes and charred wood. And that was all. Burdon without a word set to work to put it all back in its place again—ashes and wood, and earth and flints—and having trod it firmly down he carefully replaced the turf, then leaning on his spade gazed silently at the spot for a space of several minutes. At last he spoke. “Maybe, Caleb, you’ve beared tell about what the Bible says of burnt sacrifice. Well now, I be of opinion that it were here. They people the Bible says about, they come up here to sacrifice on White Bustard Down, and these be the places where they made their fires.”
Then he shouldered his spade and started home, the boy following. Caleb’s comment was: “I didn’t say nothing to un because I were only a leetel boy and he were a old man; but I knowed better than that all the time, because them people in the Bible they was never in England at all, so how could they sacrifice on White Bustard Down in Wiltsheer?”
It was no idle boast on his part. Caleb and his brothers had been taught their letters when small, and the Bible was their one book, which they read not only in the evenings at home but out on the downs during the day when they were with the flock. His extreme familiarity with the whole Scripture narrative was a marvel to me; it was also strange, considering how intelligent a man he was, that his lifelong reading of that one book had made no change in his rude “Wiltsheer” speech.
Apart from the feeling which old, religious country people, who know nothing about the Higher Criticism, have for the Bible, taken literally as the Word of God, there is that in the old Scriptures which appeals in a special way to the solitary man who feeds his flock on the downs. I remember well in the days of my boyhood and youth, when living in a purely pastoral country among a semi-civilized and very simple people, how understandable and eloquent many of the ancient stories were to me. The life, the outlook, the rude customs, and the vivid faith in the Unseen, were much the same in that different race in a far-distant age, in a remote region of the earth, and in the people I mixed with in my own home. That country has been changed now; it has been improved and civilized and brought up to the European standard; I remember it when it was as it had existed for upwards of two centuries before it had caught the contagion. The people I knew were the descendants of the Spanish colonists of the seventeenth century, who had taken kindly to the life of the plains, and had easily shed the traditions and ways of thought of Europe and of towns. Their philosophy of life, their ideals, their morality, were the result of the conditions they existed in, and wholly unlike ours; and the conditions were like those of the ancient people of which the Bible tells us. Their very phraseology was strongly reminiscent of that of the sacred writings, and their character in the best specimens was like that of the men of the far past who lived nearer to God, as we say, and certainly nearer to nature than it is possible for us in this artificial state. Among these sometimes grand old men who were large landowners, rich in flocks and herds, these fine old, dignified “natives,” the substantial and leading men of the district who could not spell their own names, there were those who reminded you of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Esau and Joseph and his brethren, and even of David the passionate psalmist, with perhaps a guitar for a harp.
No doubt the Scripture lessons read in the thousand churches on every Sunday of the year are practically meaningless to the hearers. These old men, with their sheep and goats and wives, and their talk about God, are altogether out of our ways of thought, in fact as far from us—as incredible or unimaginable, we may say—as the neolithic men or the inhabitants of another planet. They are of the order of mythical heroes and the giants of antiquity. To read about them is an ancient custom, but we do not listen.
Even to myself the memories of my young days came to be regarded as very little more than mere imaginations, and I almost ceased to believe in them until, after years of mixing with modern men, mostly in towns, I fell in with the downland shepherds, and discovered that even here, in densely populated and ultra-civilized England, something of the ancient spirit had survived. In Caleb, and a dozen old men more or less like him, I seemed to find myself among the people of the past, and sometimes they were so much like some of the remembered, old, sober, and slow-minded herders of the plains that I could not help saying to myself, Why, how this man reminds me of Tio Isidoro, or of Don Pascual of the “Three Poplar Trees,” or of Marcos who would always have three black sheep in a flock. And just as they reminded me of these men I had actually known, so did they bring back the older men of the Bible history—Abraham and Jacob and the rest.
The point here is that these old Bible stories have a reality and significance for the shepherd of the down country which they have lost for modern minds; that they recognize their own spiritual lineaments in these antique portraits, and that all these strange events might have happened a few years ago and not far away.
One day I said to Caleb Bawcombe that his knowledge of the Bible, especially of the old part, was greater than that of the other shepherds I knew on the downs, and I would like to hear why it was so. This led to the telling of a fresh story about his father’s boyhood, which he had heard in later years from his mother. Isaac was an only child and not the son of a shepherd; his father was a rather worthless if not a wholly bad man; he was idle and dissolute, and being remarkably dexterous with his fists he was persuaded by certain sporting persons to make a business of fighting—quite a common thing in those days. He wanted nothing better, and spent the greater part of the time in wandering about the country; the money he made was spent away from home, mostly in drink, while his wife was left to keep herself and child in the best way she could at home or in the fields. By and by a poor stranger came to the village in search of work and was engaged for very little pay by a small farmer, for the stranger confessed that he was without experience of farm work of any description. The cheapest lodging he could find was in the poor woman’s cottage, and then Isaac’s mother, who pitied him because he was so poor and a stranger alone in the world, a very silent, melancholy man, formed the opinion that he had belonged to another rank in life. His speech and hands and personal habits betrayed it. Undoubtedly he was a gentleman; and then from something in his manner, his voice, and his words whenever he addressed her, and his attention to religion, she further concluded that he had been in the Church; that, owing to some trouble or disaster, he had abandoned his place in the world to live away from all who had known him, as a labourer.
One day he spoke to her about Isaac; he said he had been observing him and thought it a great pity that such a fine, intelligent boy should be allowed to grow up without learning his letters. She agreed that it was, but what could she do? The village school was kept by an old woman, and though she taught the children very little it had to be paid for, and she could not afford it. He then offered to teach Isaac himself and she gladly consented, and from that day he taught Isaac for a couple of hours every evening until the boy was able to read very well, after which they read the Bible through together, the poor man explaining everything, especially the historical parts, so clearly and beautifully, with such an intimate knowledge of the countries and peoples and customs of the remote East, that it was all more interesting than a fairy tale. Finally he gave his copy of the Bible to Isaac, and told him to carry it in his pocket every day when he went out on the downs, and when he sat down to take it out and read in it. For by this time Isaac, who was now ten years old, had been engaged as a shepherd-boy to his great happiness, for to be a shepherd was his ambition.
Then one day the stranger rolled up his few belongings in a bundle and put them on a stick which he placed on his shoulder, said good-bye, and went away, never to return, taking his sad secret with him.
Isaac followed the stranger’s counsel, and when he had sons of his own made them do as he had done from early boyhood. Caleb had never gone with his flock on the down without the book, and had never passed a day without reading a portion.
The incidents and observations gathered in many talks with the old shepherd, which I have woven into the foregoing chapters, relate mainly to the earlier part of his life, up to the time when, a married man and father of three small children, he migrated to Warminster. There he was in, to him, a strange land, far away from friends and home and the old familiar surroundings, amid new scenes and new people, But the few years he spent at that place had furnished him with many interesting memories, some of which will be narrated in the following chapters.
I have told in the account of Winterbourne Bishop how I first went to that village just to see his native place, and later I visited Doveton for no other reason than that he had lived there, to find it one of the most charming of the numerous pretty villages in the vale. I looked for the cottage in which he had lived and thought it as perfect a home as a quiet, contemplative man who loved nature could have had: a small, thatched cottage, very old looking, perhaps inconvenient to live in, but situated in the prettiest spot, away from other houses, near and within sight of the old church with old elms and beech-trees growing close to it, and the land about it green meadow. The clear river, fringed with a luxuriant growth of sedges, flag, and reeds, was less than a stone’s-throw away.
So much did I like the vale of the Wylye when I grew to know it well that I wish to describe it fully in the chapter that follows.
