The incident greatly amused us, but I am not sure
that the Reverend Gilbert White would have regarded it in the same
humorous light.
Occasionally one even finds a village where strangers are not often
seen, which has yet outlived the curtsey. Such a place, I take it, is
Alvediston, the small downland village on the upper waters of the
Ebble, in southern Wiltshire. One day last summer I was loitering near
the churchyard, when a little girl, aged about eight, came from an
adjoining copse with some wild flowers in her hand. She was singing as
she walked and looked admiringly at the flowers she carried; but she
could see me watching her out of the corners of her eyes.
"Good morning," said I. "It is nice to be out gathering flowers on such
a day, but why are you not in school?"
"Why am I not in school?" in a tone of surprise. "Because the holidays
are not over. On Monday we open."
"How delighted you will be."
"Oh no, I don't think I shall be delighted," she returned. Then
I asked her for a flower, and apparently much amused she presented me
with a water forget-me-not, then she sauntered on to a small cottage
close by. Arrived there, she turned round and faced me, her hand on the
gate, and after gazing steadily for some moments exclaimed, "Delighted
at going back to school - who ever heard such a thing?" and, bursting
into a peal of musical child-laughter, she went into the cottage.
One would look for curtseys in the Flower Walk in Kensington Gardens as
soon as in the hamlet of this remarkably self-possessed little maid.
Her manner was exceptional; but, if we must lose the curtsey, and the
rural little ones cease to mimic that pretty drooping motion of the
nightingale, the kitty wren, and wheatear, cannot our village pastors
and masters teach them some less startling and offensive form of
salutation than the loud "Hullo!" with which they are accustomed to
greet the stranger within their gates?
I shall finish with another story which might be entitled "The Democrat
against Curtseying." The scene was a rustic village, a good many miles
from any railroad station, in the south of England. Here I made the
acquaintance and was much in the society of a man who was not a native
of the place, but had lived several years in it. Although only a
working man, he had, by sheer force of character, made himself a power
in the village. A total abstainer and non-smoker, a Dissenter in
religion and lay-preacher where Dissent had never found a foothold
until his coming, and an extreme Radical in politics, he was naturally
something of a thorn in the side of the vicar and of the neighbouring
gentry.
