the brook, Mickleham the great home, and
Effingham is probably Upping home; but
what is Darkham?"

"The dark home," said Jack, as if the
question were settled.

"No, that's not it, though I think you
may be right about the name. Darag or
Darach is the old Celtic for oak, and Darkham
is the home among the oak-trees."

"You've got it now," said Jack. " That's
it for sartain."

I have had many talks with Jack, and
have taken considerable interest in his
humble fortunes. As soon as the leaves fall
from the trees and the nights begin to grow
cold and frosty, Jack retires from the busy
world into his winter palace. That palace is
the workhouse, or rather the workhouse infirmary;
for Jack cannot work if he would,
and his rheumatism or poor man's gout—
he does not exactly know to which of the
two names his inveterate malady is properly
entitled—requires the treatment that none
but the parish doctor and the parish funds
will supply. But as soon as the cuckoo is
heard in the woods, Jack, after a hybernation
which he has shared with the flies, the
bees, the dormice, and other of God's
creatures, which are mercifully permitted
to sleep all through the season when no
food is to be found for them, emerges once
again into the light of day to ply his vocation.
He looks so very miserable, and so
picturesque, that many kind-hearted people
stop him on the road, and give him either
of their own poverty or of their riches the
wherewithal to make himself a little more
comfortable. But he never asks for charity.
For this reason he denies being a beggar—
a figment, a white lie, a suppressio veri,
whatever it may be called, which does no
harm to anybody, while it administers very
sensibly to the little pride that the world
and old age and hard struggles have left in
him. It is his wish to earn an honest subsistence,
and he does his best in that direction,
and with a very patient, humble, and
uncomplaining spirit. The first objects of
his solicitude as soon as he is emancipated
from his winter thraldom are the primrose
roots and flowers, with which he drives his
small bargains in the towns and villages
with people who want to ornament their
little front gardens or their cottage windows,
and which he sells for what he can get—for a
penny or a halfpenny a root, or for a piece
of bread, or, better still, for a pair of old
boots or shoes, or any cast-off garment that
may be too ragged for the poorest of the
poor, but which is not utterly valueless to
such as he. He also collects herbs, or, as
he calls them, " yarbs," either for the garden
or for the use of the poor people and the
notable housewives among them, who have
faith in simples for his treatment and cure
of burns and scalds or other simple maladies.
Though, unlike Milton's herbalist, he cannot
Ope his leathern scrip,
And show us simples of a thousand names,
he can display some dozens of varieties in
his basket, and can tell what they were supposed
to be good for. One day he got an
order from a village apothecary for cartloads
of groundsel, if he could collect as
much, and was busy on the job for a whole
fortnight. It was wanted for a military
hospital for the purpose of making poultices.
But he never received so extensive an order
again. Ferns and orchids were other sources
of income, and last, but by no means the
least, were watercresses and mushrooms.
Jack has no faith in the new-fangled ideas
about mushrooms, and does not believe that
there is more than one kind in England that
is edible. "Mushrooms," said he, with a conservatism
strongly opposed to the radicalism
of the present day, that will not allow us
our ancient faith even in fungi, " have been
growing in the English meadows for a
thousand years, and if there were more
than one sort good for eating, do you think
our grandfathers and their grandfathers
would not have found it out? No, no!"
he added, with strong emphasis, " there is
only one mushroom: all the others are
toadstools: and I won't believe otherwise if
all the doctors in England says the contrary."

There is a suspicion afloat, that in his
early manhood, and when he first took to
the road, Jack got into trouble, and was
had before a justice of the peace for poaching.
But the suspicion is too vague and
shadowy to merit much notice. I have
tried more than once to get him on the
subject of the Game Laws, as affecting
people in his circumstances and the rural
population generally; but he has always
evaded it, and expressed no opinion, or even
made a remark, except " that he did not understand
about that." Jack can read, and
has a small, dog's-eared, and very shabby-
looking and well-thumbed Bible, which he
carries in his basket, and reads every Sunday
in the fields, out of the public path somewhere,
when the weather is fine, and he
has enough bread-and- cheese or scraps of
victuals in his pocket to serve for his dinner.
He never goes to church in the summer
when he is a free man, having been, he