Jasper County Democrat, Volume 22, Number 59, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 October 1919 — In the Villey of the Itchen [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

In the Villey of the Itchen

ON THIS morning of spring, when the sun, at last, after many weeks of retirement, has shown his golden face above the eastward downs, any cityeven so fair a city as Winchester—seems for the moment, undesirable. One seeks instinctively a wider skyspace, hills and meadows, and the flow of the new-fallen waters for company. These are in the valley of the Itchen, writes a correspondent of the Christian Science Monitor. Through the cathedral close the way lies, down the avenue, past the western door and out before the spaces of emerald lawn, above which towers this majestic pile, within whose walls, and around them, ffre memorled so much of England’s history, from great Alfred and Chanute, past William of Wykeham and Wolsey, to the modern men of learning and lawn sleeves. Beautifully harmonious are the surroundings, both in line and color —soft grays of full round Norman-arches, vivid greens of cloister-garth, blending with the darker tints of immemorial yews, and the golden sheen of lichens upon gnarled tree-trunks. ' Here are rich reds and browns, upon the tiled copings of mossy walls, on bargeboards of ancient gabled roofs and in the delicate rose-pink network of interlacing twigs, through which the cathedral town Is seen. Thus, among ever-changing charms, you twist and turn, now round a corner, beneath the shadow of an arch, now out again Into the full sunlight, before another bend leads you once more through the pleasant gloom of the eastern gate. Beside Wykeham’s college, modestly fronting the road, is a little humble, buff-colored building, with an prlel window, and a legend reminding us that here Jane Austen lived her later days. Her house, among so many surrounding grandeurs, wears —as I suppose the writer herself wore —an air of shy timidity, not withottt grace in these, sometimes, too blatant days. Here are Wykehamists, fresh-faced, in straw hats, symbolizing a coming summer, and here, past the gray guins of Wolsey castle —where Mary of England, before her marriage, feted her Spanish husband-to-be —are the fresh green water-meadows of the Itchen, and beyond, clear-cut against the skyline, the tree-crested ridge of St. Catherine’s hill, with memories of King Charles H and of the college’s “Dulce Dornum." /

The Waters Splash and Bubble. On either side the meadow path the waters splash and bubble, swish and eddy, with a music most melodious and meaningful, even to those learned In fish lore. Gray gulls hover, mirrored In the shining surface, and Unger over It, so as to set one wondering what lure It was that led them from their open sea into this Inland Hampshire valley. Down below, above a sandy bed, the forest of fernllke water weeds bends to the current, and the minnows—or the minnow-kind —dart and play about Its glades. Right ahead there is age-long majesty again—the gabled roofs and towered church of the Hospital of St. Cross, embowered in ancestral elms. Here I sit, upon a white stile, to enjoy a fleeting glimpse of a thatched roof, and watch, across the sliding water-mir-ror, the fringe of pink feathery grasses nodding and quivering to the breeze. I am tempted almost to go Into the hospital, and demand the “Wayfarer’s Dole” —not that I want the dole — which, moreover, Is meager during these days—but that It is pleasant to partake of a charity practiced for so many centuries by the brethren In red and black. Some say—l hardly know with what truth —that St. Cross.ls the hospital in which Anthony Trollope placed “The Warden” of the novel sc named, and of “Barchester Towers.” Trollope, in his autobiography names Salisbury, not Winton, as the city in which he first co’nceived the story ol that gentle priest-; but, Barsetshire being a county of his own imagining, he may well have conjured d little with English topography. And, think Ing of Trollope—while my eyes lingei upon the crocus-gemmed lawns of St Cross, and the orange-budded chestnul twigs shiny with flowing sap—hov many others, famous in literature have trod these velvet paths, and those of the hills on either hand! A Goodly Five. “Old John of Gaunt, tlme-honoree Lancaster” perhaps, from his place ai

King’s I^ambourn; Alexander Pope, a boy from fair Twyford village, musing already uilon the nature of man; John KebUe of the “Christian Year,” frqm his vicarage at Hursley; John Keats, from over Hazeley Down, with the “Ode to Autumn” fashioning itself in his m|nd: Where are the songs of spring-«ye where are they? Think not of them, thou hast thy mu-' sic, too, While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, 1 And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue— ~ “ and —matching the best of these in genius and In chanfl —the gentle author of “Emma” a%d “Northanger Abbey” from her modest home by the cathedral close. Truly a goodly five! Hereabouts the path mounts awhile from the river bed, beside hedges, tfiat are vocal with the soft flutter of wings, the fluting of hidden birds, and the sudden stir and rustle of small hedgesow life. Drawn by patient brown ponies, slowly mounting the hill, come two gypsy-carts, greenpainted, from whose rickety chimneys long wreaths of blue smpke curl upward and vanish. The weather-tanned nomads, each at a horse’s head, the cheeky, eager-eyed, tangled b?ys behind them, the momentary glimpses of a “home,” caught through half-open doors, leave somehow, a sense of alluring vagabondage. A moment later I am down in the valley meadows again, where going is not easy over those winter sodden ways. But what matter mud and water, when every copse is bursting into leaf, and the young spring carols In your ears? Everwthe pink pigs cease from their nosing on the bank, to gaze and grunt acquiescence. Two gray mares cock their ears, and stare; a speckled trout splashes from under my very feet, ankle-deep in the flood that pours joyously through every watergate. Across bridge . after bridge, wading rather than walking, I reach terra flrma again, and boon am resting beneath the big yew tree that stands beside Twyford church.

St. Cross, Winchester.