coming home from church, of the glossy-haired
servant-girls who carry their prayer-books folded
up square in their clean white pocket-handkerchiefs,
as religiously as if that mode of preserving
the book and dirtying the handkerchief had been
commanded by statute, has been about the club
dance, the club holiday, the club colours, the club
booth, the prospect of good weather for the
club. For, Whitsuntide is the time when lovers
meet, when brothers from distant farms see each
other, when old father is sent for, when mother
has a new shawl, when sister comes from her
place, when uncle comes down from London,
when children get new clothes. It is the courting
time, the time for making friends, the time
for love, peace, and general good will.

A holiday to be really enjoyed must be well-earned.
The Italians enjoy their carnival the
more because they are a priest-ridden people;
the Londoner enjoys the Derby-day because all
the other three hundred and sixty-four days of
the year he works with his nose at the desk, and
in a bad atmosphere. So, the Downshire shepherds
work hard and live hard all the year, and
enjoy the club week all the better for it. To
many of them, the club dinner is the only dinner
at which in the whole year they have their real
satisfaction of good butcher's meat, well cooked.
To most, it is the only week in the year of real
freedom, contentment, society, and happiness.
The love of society, independence, and good and
plentiful food, is by no means confined to rich
people. The love may be stunted in the poor
man's mind, as the fish in dark cavern rivers
become blind from, not using their eyes; but the
love is still in the poor man, as the eye is still
in the fish.

The week before Whitsuntide, the symptoms
begin to increase. On every white Downshire
road you meet bands of wives and mothers and
children, going to Swallowtown, shopping—to
buy large-patterned gowns and flowered waistcoats,
and those traditional white thin shawls
with Indian patterns, peculiar to labourers'
wives, and seldom seen in towns. Now, the
older people on these expeditions carry large
wicker baskets, through the looped handles of
which their arms run; and they bear, whatever
the weather, globular gig-umbrellas, with much
shining brass-work about the black hooked
handles; and the children run on before and
chase birds, and fall into ditches, and linger at
dangerous ponds, and give their mothers mingled
horror and pleasure in large alternate doses.
The children are clear-eyed and bright-eyed
as angels, and nothing can match the purity of
their complexions but the pearly-pink leaves of
the wild dog-roses; and the daughters are trim
and neat-waisted, and walk with a pretty innocent
self-consciousness. The shopping is a painfully
pleasant business. There is a sense of pride
and importance about it, tempered with anxiety
about the bargain. The shopman with rustic
flattery pours out his variegated stores before
the cheery country people, and extracts from
them, not merely their coin but also their lavish
admiration.

Another symptom of the coming rejoicing,
also perceptible about this time, is of a more
painful nature. It consists in dreadful shrieks,
and whistles, and sounds like the beating in of
an old hat; this, I am told, is the club band
practising. Those sounds of ill omen are heard
nightly above the church bells, and they lead
the listener's mind to longings for "a lodge" in
some vast wilderness. The sounds die away at
nightfall, and the brown owl then hoots in triumph
through the welcome silence. The night is spent
in dream dinners, in dream speeches, and dream
dances. But the longest nights must have an
end, and daybreak at last comes and turns dreams
into reality. The blue coat of singular and expensive
cut, with buttons bright as gold, the
flowered waistcoats, the new "cords," and, above
all, the red and blue ribands are put on, and, as
the bells begin to "ching-chang," the members
of "The Good Samaritan Mutual Benefit Society"
meet at Colonel Hanger's park gate.

Just under that great arch of rustic work,
with the giant's head on the keystone, which
Pitt, and Lord Nelson, and many wise, and brave,
and beautiful have passed under, is the rendezvous
place of the Downshire self-helping Samaritans.
Those busy men with blue wands, who
act as sheep dogs, drive on the loiterers, and
keep the whole band together, are the stewards
—officers elected by turns, and liable to be fined
if they refuse to serve. The members of this
club are all men, but there are female clubs in
Downshire; for there was one at Dufferton
where I once lived, and it gave a handsome
reward to every housemaid who had kept in
good health for twenty years, and it refused to
admit my cook because she had once had the
ague. That good-natured moon-faced fellow is the
treasurer, and the parish clerk to boot; he is the
leader and fugleman of the whole. That handsome
old man, his father, with the colours at his
button-hole, who, nearly bent double, paces along
so sturdily, and with his stick in one hand
walks along with pride in the van of all the
"Royal Samaritans," has walked with that club
thirty years, and as no one else present has been
at so many anniversaries, he is proud of that
simple distinction.

The band of six performers wear blue caps
with white lace round them, and blue trousers
with white stripes down the sides, and, though
a little heavy-footed and dragging in their walk,
have a quasi-military air, as they drum and
toot and blow and blast, with great vigour and
much spirited independence of one another.
And now, as the church bell calls more querulously,
the procession, which began by marching
dead away from the village (steered by the
men with the blue wands), suddenly makes a
masterly loop turn, and, recoiling on itself,
sweeps round the road towards the church,
heralded by the band exultingly strident and
triumphant, with an irrelevant tune—Paddy
will you now? or The girl I left behind me—
and so paganly bursting out its content, the
Royal Samaritans file into the churchyard, driven
in, as it were, by the sight of the rector, who,