Set in a circle of oak and beech,
North of the village lies Cragwell Hall;
And stretching far as the eye can reach,
Over the slopes and beyond the fall
Of the hills so keeping their guard about it
That the north wind never may chill or flout it,
Through forests as dense as that of Arden,
With orchard and park and trim-kept garden,
And farms for pasture and farms for tillage,
The Hall maintains its rule of the village.
And in the Hall
Lived the lord of all,
Girt round with all that our hearts desire
Of leisure and wealth, the ancient Squire.
He was the purplest-faced old man
Since ever the Darville race began,
Pompous and purple-faced and proud;
With a portly girth and a voice so loud
You might have heard it a mile away
When he cheered the hounds on a hunting day.
He was hard on dissenters and such encroachers,
He was hard on sinners and hard on poachers;
He talked of his rights as one who knew
That the pick of the earth to him was due:
The right to this and the right to that,
To the humble look and the lifted hat;
The right to scold or evict a peasant,
The right to partridge and hare and pheasant;
The right to encourage discontent
By raising a hard-worked farmer's rent;
The manifest right to ride to hounds
Through his own or anyone else's grounds;
The right to eat of the best by day
And to snore the whole of the night away;
For his motto, as often he explained,
Was "A Darville holds what a Darville gained."
He tried to be just, but that may be
Small merit in one who has most things free;
And his neighbours averred,
When they heard the word,
"Old Darville's a just man, is he? Bust his
Gills, we could do without his justice!"
II
The village itself runs, more or less,
On the sinuous line of a letter S,
Twining its little houses through
The twists of the street, as our hamlets do,
For no good reason, so far as I know,
Save that chance has arranged it so.
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