THE MYSTERIOUS PETTICOAT

The sad thoughts with which this incident naturally left me were at length and suddenly dispersed, as sad thoughts not infrequently are, by a petticoat.When I say petticoat, I use the word in its literal sense, not colloquially as a metaphor for its usual wearer, meaning thereby a dainty feminine undergarment seen only by men on rainy days, and one might add washing-days.

It was indeed to the fortunate accident of its being washing-day at the pretty cottage near which in the course of my morning wanderings I had set me down to rest, that I owed the sight of the petticoat in question.

But first allow me to describe a little more fully my surroundings at the moment.Not indeed that I can hope to put into words the charm of those embowered cottages, like nests in the armpits of great trees, tucked snugly in the hollows of those narrow, winding, almost subterranean lanes which burrow their way beneath the warm-hearted Surrey woodlands.

Nothing can be straighter and smoother than a Surrey road--when it is on the king's business; then it is a high-road and behaves accordingly: but a Surrey bye-road is the most whimsical companion in the world.It is like a sheep-dog, always running backwards and forwards, poking into the most out-of-the-way corners, now climbing at a run some steep hummock of the down, and now leisurely going miles about to escape an ant-hill; and all the time (here, by the way, ends the sheep-dog) it is stopping to gossip with rillets vagabond as itself, or loitering to bedeck itself with flowers.It seems as innocent of a destination as a boy on an errand; but, after taking at least six times as long as any other road in the kingdom for its amount of work, you usually find it dip down of a sudden into some lovely natural cul-de-sac, a meadow-bottom surrounded by trees, with a stream spreading itself in fantastic silver shallows through its midst, and a cottage half hidden at the end.Had the lane been going to some great house, it would have made more haste, we may be sure.

The lane I had been following had finally dropped me down at something of a run upon just such a scene.The cottage, built substantially of grey stone, stood upon the side of the slope, and a broad strip of garden, half cultivated and half wild, began near the house with cabbages, and ended in a jungle of giant bulrushes as it touched the stream.Golden patches of ragwort blazed here and there among a tangled mass of no doubt worthier herbage,--such even in nature is the power of gold,--and there were the usual birds.

However, my business is with the week's washing, which in various shades of white, with occasional patches of scarlet, fluttered fantastically across a space of the garden, thereby giving unmistakable witness to human inhabitants, male and female.