RAMBLES IN SUSSEX.

I.

I LIKE to go to church without going into church. A patch of white clover in West Tarring churchyard is my pew-cushion this golden Sunday morning. The luscious scent of a field of red clover comes in wafts upon the lazily wandering breeze. Birds are chirping. Parish notices rustle on a board within the porch, and the board taps like a drowsy woodpecker upon the wall. Psalm and prayer, priest's solo and people's rustic responses, the peal of the organ and the heavy uprising and downsitting of the ponderously-booted worshippers, find their way, pleasantly softened, from the cool shady inside of the church to the sunny air without.

"Coom on," shouts an old man in a white smock frock to some cows that are very leisurely plodding in straggling file to the grey farm buildings just outside the churchyard-once appurtenances of the Archbishop of Canterbury's manor-house, when Archbishops of Canterbury came down to this quiet place to rest or hide. Other farming-men in shirt-sleeves are basking on corn-ricks. A lass and two swains have shirked church and are flirting in the green treeshaded paddock that adjoins the churchyard, gravely watched, as if in reproach, by a gingerbread-and-white cow. A brown hen is clucking complacently as she follows her speckled brood of cheeping chicks dodging in and out between the graves. A woman in black comes out of the church and makes her way to a tombstone, the inscription on which she reads-stopping now and then to spell. Then the parish-clerk, in black broadcloth and white choker, comes out to get a breath of outside air. When he sees a profane watering-placer in tweed suit, straw hat, and canvas shoes, instead of decorous "Sunday best," lying on the grass taking notes, the old man's cheerful face turns to stone. He fixes me with his eye as if he meant to mesmerise me, stares at me for five minutes without a word, and then stalks into the church again. I have an uneasy feeling that he is going to tell the vicar or the churchwardens of me, and I shift my place from the porch to the other side of the church, passing on my way a stoneless grave completely covered with plucked, withered, wild convolvuluses and red poppies. I cannot hear the vicar now, but I have a book of his in my pocket-"Parochial Fragments," by John Wood Warter, B.D. -discursive, erudite, orthodox, Southey-worshipping, as might be expected from the son-in-law of Southey-benevolent and urbane, too, save for now and then an outpouring of a little vial of not very vitriolic wrath on the heads of the enemies of the Church—“immarcessible as amaranth," in Mr. Warter's eyes and phrase. In this rural

parish the " Doctor" was edited. A memorial window of Southey was placed in the tower of the church by his daughter, Mrs. Warter, now herself deceased. It is a fine old tower of flint and stone, with a spire of wooden shingles, grey and glistening like granite, rising pleasantly, though a little awry, above rich foliage. The weather-cock at the top is a cock-a gilt one, flashing in the sunlight, and straining as if he wanted to perch on the point of the rusty lightning-conductor at his side. The tower and chancel were built in the time of Edward IV. The nave and aisles are still older. The first Edward was king when they stood fresh from the builder's hands. I am going to be as learnedly ecclesiastico-antiquarian as I please. Haven't I given 4s. 6d. for Mr Warter's half-guinea book, and pray mayn't I crib from it? The church is dedicated to St. Andrew, and has stalls and carved misereres. If you don't know what a miserere is, listen to this from Du Cange. (I never saw the book in my life, but then, you see, I am going to take my full four-and-sixpenn'orth out of Mr. Warter's book.) "Misericordia, Sellulæ, erectis formarum subselliis appositæ, quibus stantibus senibus vel infirmis per misericordiam insidere conceditur, dum alii stant. Nostris misericordes vel Patiences." The church is called a Twelve-Apostle-arch church-five on each side, one for the tower, and another for the chancel. A good many of the tombstones are orange-brown and hoary with age and lichens-their inscriptions quite blotted out, or scaled away; amongst them this, which used to be read on a stone hard by the Lych-gate :

"Here lieth the Bodie of John Parson: the only Sonne of William Parson of Salvington who was buried the fowerth Day of March, 1633.

"Youthe was his age:
Virginitie his state :
Learning his love :
Consumption his fate."

West Tarring, one of the many Ings or pastures the Saxons colonized, was once, comparatively, an important place. A letter for Worthing, for instance, would have borne the supplementary address,

66

near West Tarring;" and now Worthing, within living memory a sparsely peopled fishing and smuggling hamlet, is a thronged watering-place, whilst West Tarring is about the most slumberous little village to be found within the four seas.

If its street were only straight a cannon-ball might be fired down it many a time throughout the day without the slightest injury to human life. On its busiest working-day it is still so quiet that little children from London speak in a whisper as they glance at its old beam-and-plaster and shore-pebble cottages, and say, "It seems like Sunday."

Athelstan gave the manor of Tarring to the Church of Christ in Canterbury; and in Domesday Book the Archbishop of that ilk is entered as its owner. At that time it had two churches, but one has vanished, even utterly from the memory of local tradition.

If we cross the road we shall see an old ecclesiastical looking building roofed with brown and grey Horsham stone-both roof and walls dotted with nipplewort-the old Rectory House, or Thomas à Becket's Palace, as it is called. Here, according to tradition, Thomas à Becket lived, and kept wild beasts, and planted fig-trees. In the glossy-leaved shady avenues of the fig gardens adjoining, their successors flourish. In Lancing, too, and indeed the whole of this mild part of West Sussex, in which the fuchsia runs up into a tree and forms a bushy hedge in almost every garden, however humble, fig-trees are common. Brown Turkey, black Ischian, the Marseilles or Madagascar, the large green, and the smooth green, are the chief kinds in cultivation. When the fruit is ripe the Italian fig-eater comes over and levies tithe upon it. Near the Rectory Croft there used to stand -perhaps still stands, but if so, it must have been modernised-the Archbishop's Brasinium, Brasin-huse, Brazen-nose, or Brew-house. Beer six hundred years ago used to be valued in Tarring at 1d. the four gallons, a carcase of beef at 1s. 4d., of mutton 4d., a hog 8d., a hen a halfpenny, a goose ditto, a hundred eggs 1d., a quarter of wheat 1s. 6d., of oats 8d. Henry VI. granted a charter for holding a market at Tarring for this reason, that, whilst Tarring buyers and sellers were at Broadwater market-only a mile off" they that were abyding and beleyving in the said towne stille in the mene while by the said enemys, the Kynges enemys of Ffrance, Breteyne, Spayne, and other partys, had dyvers times been taken prisoners and byn slayn as well the men as the women, childer, maidenes, wives, and doters therin beying and beleyving."

Before leaving West Tarring I will quote Mr. Warter's description of a predecessor of the old gentleman who looked me so severely and silently in the face outside the porch :

"He is one of a race almost extinct-an honest man with infirmities-old James Long, the parish clerk. Seventy and five years, man and boy, he has heard these church bells call to prayer; forty and five years he has officiated as clerk and sexton. When his turn to depart comes, I question if his place will be better filled. Obstinate at times as a quadruped I need not name, he is shrewd and intelligent, plain-spoken and trustworthy. A chronicler of bygone days, he is familiar with every one's history, and his local knowledge is extensive. He takes heed to no changes, and is one of the most independent of the creation; respectful withal, and devotedly attached to his successive masters, as he familiarly calls the clergy. He is a keen observer, and has great knowledge of character. Otherwhiles,—to use a Sussex phrase,-his occupation is that of a gardener, and he has kept a diary for forty years and more. when his day's work is over, is to jot down more particularly as regards the weather. offered a considerable sum of money for declined to take it; and he was right. It is his familiar!

The first thing he does, his casual observations, Some time ago he was this document, but he

To him, perhaps, I may have done a good turn in my ministerial capacity.

Perhaps the old man cannot say

'In my youth I never did apply

Hot and rebellious liquors to my blood,'

but, nevertheless, his age is as a lusty winter, frosty, but kindly.'" And now on a Monday morning as golden as the day before, with a balmy west wind blowing, across the great field hard by West Tarring church. A brown-faced farmer is jogging over it on horseback, speaking cheerily to the old men who are turning over the almost black heaps of cut peas with ash sticks. His white setter, putting up his tail like a palm branch, gallops hither and thither snuffing. Golden corn, uncut and in stooks and stacks, succeeds to the peas, and to that red clover. Over a stile made of a cart-axle into oats and a potatoe-field planted with young trees. More corn falling before the sickle, with huge dandelions waving here and there, and out into a lane where lilac scabious, corn-cockle, mallow, thyme, thistles with white butterflies on them, hemlock and white and pink yarrow, and white and pink convolvuluses and pink and purple heather grow profusely on both hedgebanks, with honeysuckle and wild clematis drooping over them. A white pony stands at a smithy door. A new-fangled agricultural implement is waiting outside to be mended, but the forge roars, and the hammers clink, and the waiting rustics gossip with the blacksmiths as they have done for hundreds of years-most probably on the self-same spot. The church and the smithy seem to me the historic centres of country life-linking on generation to generation-more than any other buildings preserving the identity of the village or hamlet. But Durrington has no church Ruined ivy-plumed side-walls, in a grassy enclosure, in which blue-eyed, brown-skinned, white-haired toddlers are playing, are all that remains of its old chapel. There are no graves, named or nameless, in the green old chapel-yard. The dead of Durrington are buried in West Tarring churchyard, but according to tradition they used to be carried across the Downs to Steyning. On again past flower-full hedges, hedgebanks and ditches, over which black-spotted brown butterflies, and tiny blue butterflies, and now and then a Red Admiral are fluttering, into the richly wooded Arundel road. Swallows are zigzagging overhead, the stonechat is making its stonechatter in the gorse, there goes a blackbird-yonder spreads and then falls into closer order a flock of fieldfares-partridges rise plump and brown from the ripe corn. A glass of Sussex ale at a roadside house, in which, although noon is still two hours off, some unseen politician in a drowsy but still beerily-dogmatic tone is discussing the probable supply of corn for the coming year. "Don't you believe it," he says to his unseen companion, who only answers with admiring grunts. "Don't you believe it, mas'r. Tain't the drain that doos it. I tell ye that at this present time there's enough laid up in the isle o

now.

Malter to last Great Britain seven 'ear-Great Britain and all her terri-tories."

Under the park-trees that overhang the road grow great yellow funguses big enough to serve as music-stools for the Miss Tomthumbs. Blackberries in big bunches are fast reddening in the hedges. Ivy runs over the grey walls in mantle-like patches. Ivyclad tree-trunks stand ankle-deep in fern. "To Clapham and Patching" says the finger-post that points up a lane bordered on each side with a grassy terrace planted with firs, in whose tops the wind is sighing like the sea. Cottages of brick with iron casements—not much bigger than dolls'-houses-thatched cottages of plaster, pargeted plaster, and brick and beams, slate-roofed cottages of brick and shorepebbles turn up here and there. The sulphur and claret-coloured hollyhocks almost overtop some of them. The thatch-eaves of the backs of others slope down into onion beds, and are buried in currant and gooseberry bushes. Fruit may be a failure elsewhere, but here rosy-cheeked apples hang in cottage gardens, and green pears are turning golden on cottage-walls. Just outside the door of every cottage is a well. Sheep bells are tinkling, lazy cocks crowing as if they were yawning; geese are gabbling in home-closes, and ducks are dabbling in olive-brown ponds as thick as duck-gravy. Where the road forks I take the wrong turning, and trudge into the pretty little village of Clapham, from which a glimpse of Chichester Cathedral can be got. “Am I right for Patching?" I ask of an upright, ruddy old shepherd who comes over a gate with an orthodox crook in his hand, and followed by a sheep-dog that looks like a bundle of tarry oakum. Subridet, as he toucheth his hat and answers, "No, sir, you be gooin' right away from Patchin'. There be the church on the brow yonder." That anyone cannot find his way to Patching, with the church before his very eyes, is a rich joke to the old shepherd. It is the event of his not very eventful day, and no doubt will be the leading topic in his conversation for half a week. There is nothing particularly picturesque in Patching Church, except its position. Islanded in the quietness of its green graveyard it stands just on the edge-slope of the treeless, breezy downs.

Through woods in which truffles and orchises grow, and again through flowery lanes, with butterflies and golden-banded humble-bees embossed on teazle-heads, to Angmering. What a thoroughly old Saxon sound the name has! At the entrance to the village a young donkey is rolling under a great walnut tree. An aged bitch is sunning herself at the door of the old inn. As soon as the newcomer orders lunch, the dog follows him to his seat. In vain the pretty barmaid calls Fan, Fan!" Fan has made up her mind not to budge whilst bread-and-cheese is going.

Such a funny old luncheon-room! The boards clean scrubbed, but greyish-brown with age, and on to them is nailed a broken-backed bagatelle-board, one flap of which is covered with chapped oil-cloth