The chief hotel at Sherton-Abbas was an old stone-fronted inn with a
yawning arch, under which vehicles were driven by stooping coachmen to
back premises of wonderful commodiousness. The windows to the street
were mullioned into narrow lights, and only commanded a view of the
opposite houses; hence, perhaps, it arose that the best and most
luxurious private sitting-room that the inn could afford over-looked
the nether parts of the establishment, where beyond the yard were to be
seen gardens and orchards, now bossed, nay incrusted, with scarlet and
gold fruit, stretching to infinite distance under a luminous lavender
mist. The time was early autumn, "When the fair apples, red as evening sky,
Do bend the tree unto the fruitful ground,
When juicy pears, and berries of black dye,
Do dance in air, and call the eyes around."
The landscape confronting the window might, indeed, have been part of
the identical stretch of country which the youthful Chatterton had in
his mind.
In this room sat she who had been the maiden Grace Melbury till the
finger of fate touched her and turned her to a wife. It was two months
after the wedding, and she was alone. Fitzpiers had walked out to see
the abbey by the light of sunset, but she had been too fatigued to
accompany him. They had reached the last stage of a long eight-weeks'
tour, and were going on to Hintock that night.
In the yard, between Grace and the orchards, there progressed a scene
natural to the locality at this time of the year. An apple-mill and
press had been erected on the spot, to which some men were bringing
fruit from divers points in mawn-baskets, while others were grinding
them, and others wringing down the pomace, whose sweet juice gushed
forth into tubs and pails. The superintendent of these proceedings, to
whom the others spoke as master, was a young yeoman of prepossessing
manner and aspect, whose form she recognized in a moment. He had hung
his coat to a nail of the out-house wall, and wore his shirt-sleeves
rolled up beyond his elbows, to keep them unstained while he rammed the
pomace into the bags of horse-hair. Fragments of apple-rind had
alighted upon the brim of his hat--probably from the bursting of a
bag--while brown pips of the same fruit were sticking among the down
upon his fine, round arms.
She realized in a moment how he had come there. Down in the heart of
the apple country nearly every farmer kept up a cider-making apparatus
and wring-house for his own use, building up the pomace in great straw
"cheeses," as they were called; but here, on the margin of Pomona's
plain, was a debatable land neither orchard nor sylvan exclusively,
where the apple produce was hardly sufficient to warrant each
proprietor in keeping a mill of his own. This was the field of the
travelling cider-maker. His press and mill were fixed to wheels
instead of being set up in a cider-house; and with a couple of horses,
buckets, tubs, strainers, and an assistant or two, he wandered from
place to place, deriving very satisfactory returns for his trouble in
such a prolific season as the present.