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of advancement; and secondly, because the English yeoman will be soon as extinct as the bustard.
Tom Pepper was the last of our Monk Soham yeomen—a man, said my father, of the stuff that furnished Cromwell with his Ironsides. He was a strong Dissenter; but they were none the worse friends for that, not even though Tom, holding forth in his Little Bethel, might sometimes denounce the corruptions of the Establishment. "The clargy," he once declared, "they're here, and they ain't here; they're like pigs in the garden, and yeou can't git 'em out." On which an old woman, a member of the flock, sprang up and cried, "That's right, Brother Pepper, kitch 'em by the fifth buttonhole!"[1] Tom went once to hear Gavazzi lecture at Debenham, and next day my father asked him how he liked it. "Well," he said, "I thowt I should ha' beared that chap they call Jerry Baldry, but I din't. Howsomdiver, this one that spǒok fare to läa it into th' owd Pope good tidily." Another time my father said something to him about the Emperor of Russia. "Rooshur," said Tom; "what's that him yeou call Prooshur?" And yet again, when a concrete wall was built on to a neighbouring farm-building, Tom remarked contemptuously that he "din't think much of them consecrated walls." Withal, what an honest, sensible soul it was!
Midway between the rectory and Tom Pepper's is the "Guild-hall," an ancient house, though probably less ancient than its name. It is parish property, and for years has served as an almshouse for ten or a dozen old people. Their average age must have been much over sixty, and some of them were nearly centenarians—James Burrows, for instance, who died in 1853, and to whom my father once said, "You are an old man, Burrows; what's the earliest thing you can remember to have heard of?" "When I was'a big bor," he answered, "I've heard my grandfather saa he could remember the Dutch king comin' over." And by the register's showing, it was really quite possible. Charity Herring was not much younger; she was always setting fire to her bed with a worn-out warming-pan. Then there were Tom and Susan Kemp. He came from somewhere in Norfolk, the scene, I remember, of the 'Babes in the Wood' and he wore the only smock-frock in the parish, where the ruling fashion was "thunder-and-lightning" sleeve-waistcoats. Susan's Sunday dress was a clean lilac print gown, made very short, so as to show white stockings and boots with cloth tops. Over the dress was pinned a little black shawl, and her bonnet was unusually large, of black velvet or silk, with a great white frill inside it. She was troubled at times with a mysterious complaint called "the wind," which she thus described, her finger tracing the course it followed within her: "That fare to go round and round, and then out ta come a-raspin' and a-roarin'" Another of her ailments was swelled ankles. "Oh, Mr Groome!" she would say, "if yeou could but see my poare legs, yeou'd niver forget 'em;" and then, if not stopped, she would proceed to pull up her short gown and show them. If my father
- ↑ I don't think it was Tom who employed that truly Suffolk simile—"I look upon this here chapel as the biler, yeou togither as the dumplins, and I'm the spoon that stars yeou up."