And still smiling with perfect complacency, he watched the Maypole being carried carefully along the space of grass left open between the fruit trees on either side of the orchard, and followed its bright patch of colour and the children's faces and forms around it, till it entirely disappeared among the thicker green of a clump of elms that bordered the 'big meadow,' which Walden generally kept clear of both crops and cattle for the benefit of the village sports and pastimes.
He was indeed the only land-owner in the district who gave any consideration of this kind to the needs of the people. St. Rest was surrounded on all sides by several large private properties, richly wooded, and possessing many acres of ploughed and pasture land, but there was no public right-of-way across any single one of them, and every field, every woodland path, every tempting dell was rigidly fenced and guarded from 'vulgar' intrusion. None of the proprietors of these estates, however, appeared to take the least personal joy or pride in their possessions. They were for the most part away in London for 'the season' or abroad 'out' of the season,--and their extensive woods appeared to exist chiefly for the preservation of game, reared solely to be shot by a few idle louts of fashion during September and October, and also for the convenience and support of a certain land agent, one Oliver Leach, who cut down fine old timber whenever he needed money, and thought it advisable to pocket the proceeds of such devastation.
Scarcely in one instance out of a hundred did the actual owners of property miss the trees sufficiently to ask what had become of them. So long as the game was all right, they paid little heed to the rest. The partridges and the pheasants thrived, and so did Mr. Oliver Leach. He enjoyed, however, the greatest unpopularity of any man in the neighbourhood, which was some small comfort to those who believed in the laws of compensation and justice. Bainton was his particular enemy for one, and Bainton's master, John Walden, for another. His long-practised 'knavish tricks' and the malicious delight he took in trying to destroy or disfigure the sylvan beauty of the landscape by his brutish ignorance of the art of forestry, combined with his own personal greed, were beginning to be well- known in St. Rest, and it is very certain that on May-morning when the youngsters of the village were abroad and, to a great extent, had it all their own way, (aided and abetted in that way by the recognised authority of the place, the minister himself,) he would never have dared to show his hard face and stiffly upright figure anywhere, lest he should be unmercifully 'guyed' without a chance of rescue or appeal.