Chapter I

There's nothing I know of to make you spend A day of your life at Cragwell End. It's a village quiet and grey and old, A little village tucked into a fold (A sort of valley, not over wide) Of the hills that flank it on either side. There's a large grey church with a square stone tower, And a clock to mark you the passing hour In a chime that shivers the village calm With a few odd bits of the 100th psalm. A red-brick Vicarage stands thereby, Breathing comfort and lapped in ease, With a row of elms thick-trunked and high, And a bevy of rooks to caw in these.

'Tis there that the Revd. Salvyn Bent
(No tie could be neater or whiter than _his_ tie)
Maintains the struggle against dissent,
An Oxford scholar _ex Aede Christi_;
And there in his twenty-minute sermons
He makes mince-meat of the modern Germans,
Defying their _apparatus criticus_
Like a brave old Vicar,
A famous sticker
To Genesis, Exodus and Leviticus.
He enjoys himself like a hearty boy
Who finds his life for his needs the aptest;
But the poisoned drop in his cup of joy
Is the Revd. Joshua Fall, the Baptist,
An earnest man with a tongue that stings--
The Vicar calls him a child of schism--
Who has dared to utter some dreadful things
On the vices of sacerdotalism,
And the ruination
Of education
By the Church of England Catechism.

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!"