Brensham Village by John Moore

hat which was the wonder and the admiration of everybody who gazed upon it, except Mrs Hartley, who was a tidy-minded person, waging ceaseless war against dust and cobwebs with a duster in one hand and a broom in the other: Mrs Hartley was heard to say that she’d like to burn it because it bred germs. It was a deerstalker hat of Victorian pattern, the kind which French cartoonists once supposed English milords to wear. It was atleast fifty years old, and its original colour was no longer evident but it had weathered unevenly, so that parts of it were lichenous-grey and parts of it were mossy-green. Here and there the moth or the mould had got into it, and here and there the Colonel’s sister - he was unmarried - had ventured to make a tentative darn. But the holes didn’t really matter, for they were covered up - thatched would be the better word - with a multitude of fishing-flies. The whole hat bristled with bits of gut, hooks and feathers. There were mayflies of ancient pattern, march browns, duns, sedges, olives, coch-y-bonddhus, alders, and there were salmon-flies as well to add their tinselled brightness, a Jock Scott, a Thunder and Lightning, a Blue Charm azure as the kingfisher. When the Colonel sat down to tea, keeping his hat on because of the sun, we would delightedly watch the effect upon the members of the visiting team, who could scarcely take their eyes off the preposterous thing, except when Mimi’s stagey smile or Sally’s brown eyes momentarily exercised a more powerful attraction.
    These visitors must have carried away the impression that Brensham folk were curiously eccentric in the matter of clothes; for our third spectator, the Mad Lord, generally had the appearance of a scarecrow. Indeed, they always had difficulty in believing that he was a lord: an incredulity which they shared with the numerous creditors, duns, and bum-baillies who now perpetually plagued him. Poor wretches, they could never rid themselves of an uncomfortable suspicion that the tatterdemalion figure was not the lord, but the lord’s cowman. Nor did his manner do much to reassure them, for he always welcomed them kindly and they were unused to friendly welcomes. ‘My dear fellow,’ he would say, ‘I perfectly understand that you will have to stay at my house during the period of the distraint, but the trouble is there’s simply nothing to eat except rabbits -which grow rather freely upon die place as you can see - and I shall be positively ashamed of the wretched hospitality which is all I can offer you.’ In any case there was precious little to distrain upon; for his furniture, it was said, remained only by the grace of a moneylender from London. The house and lands had been mortgaged ago After a brief look-round the duns like disapproved vultures took themselves off; and the bum-baillies soon grew tired of rabbit and reported to their masters that the proceedings were a waste of money. Somehow or other - we never quite knew how - Lord Orris kept out of the County Court and the Bankruptcy Court and, possessing practically nothing nor desiring anything more than he had, continued to live happily amid his ruin and his rabbits, ambitious to receive a few pounds from his quarterly rentals only that he might immediately give them away to the first beggar who came along.
    About the time I am writing of he had just scandalized the village by making over three good pastures to a good-for-nothing fellow who was one of his tenants, In justification of this foolish action he had pleaded that the gift had cost him nothing; since the man had never in seven years paid him a penny of rent. He had also, during a hard winter, granted the right of collecting firewood to the Fitchers and Gormleys, who often camped in their caravans uninvited upon his estate; and those gipsyish families, taking him too literally, had not only cut down most of the coppice which adjoined his garden but had carried away the