in every cottage, what logs of wood, and what store of coals. He would moreover busy himself with the meanest circumstances of the meanest mortality; for example, in such mishaps as the death of a cow, a horse, nay, even pigs, when the property of a labouring villager. He would thereupon resolve himself into a jury of inquiry; and satisfied with the evidence, would replace the cow, give another horse, send a pig or two from his own store. Moreover, this lord in the deep vaults of his Hall had captives buried from the light for ten and twenty years: and these at Christmas and at holiday times he would set free for the especial merriment of the folk of Marigolds. Jogtrot Hall was partly surrounded by an advance guard of magnificent elms: huge, sturdy timber, with the wrinkles of some two hundred years in their bark; but green and flourishing, and alive and noisy with a colony of rooks, the descendants of a long[Pg 51] flight of undisturbed ancestry. Between the elms, and lifted on a gentle rise of ground, Jogtrot Hall looked down with smiling, hospitable face. There was no rampant lion over the gates; no eagle, ready to swoop upon the new-comer. You approached the door through a double hedge of holly, winding up the slope; a double line of green-liveried guards bristling and berried. Two peacocks cut in yew—the bird crest of former occupants—were perched at the upper end on either side. Their condition, in the midst of flourishing beauty, gave warning of its fleetness. They were fast withering. One bird was dying from the head; the other from the tail; they looked forlorn and blighted; an eyesore amidst health and freshness. Nevertheless, Carraways would not suffer them to be cut down. “In the first place,” he would say, “it would be a mean act towards those who had lived there before him: to the original owners of the peacocks. And secondly, in the sunniest seasons the dying birds preached a sermon, nothing the less solemn because to a rustling, fine-dressed congregation of leaves and flowers.” [Pg 51] Now, whatever discourse the peacocks may have held to the master of the domain, we have no belief that the dying preachers will obtain a moment’s attention from the crowd of visitors now on their way from London, to eat and drink, and dance and sing, and to act love and to make enmity, to embrace one another, and to pick one another to pieces, for half-a-day’s happiness at Jogtrot Hall. Family parties, gatherings of friends and acquaintances came with every week to the house; but this was a day special—a day set apart for the reception of a multitude. Never, since Carraways had come down to the village, had Marigolds been so roused. The
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