WOODBURN GRANGE.

WOODBURN GRANGE.

A Story of English Country Life.

BY

WILLIAM HOWITT.
IN THREE VOLUMES.
VOL. I.
LONDON:
CHARLES W. WOOD, 13, TAVISTOCK ST., STRAND.
1867.
[Right of Translation reserved.]

LONDON:
BRADBURY, EVANS, AND CO., PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.

CONTENTS.

WOODBURN GRANGE.

CHAPTER I.

THE LAST OF A LONG LINE.

Sir Roger Rockville, of Rockville, was the last of a very long line. It extended from the Norman Conquest to the present century. His first known ancestor came over with William, and must have been a man of some mark, either of bone and sinew, or of brain, for he obtained what the Americans would call a prime location. As his name does not occur in the roll of Battle Abbey, he was, of course, not of a high Norman extraction; but he had done enough, it seems, in the way of knocking down Saxons, to place himself on a considerable eminence in this kingdom. The centre of his domains was conspicuous far over the country, through a high range of rock overhanging one of the sweetest rivers in the kingdom. On one hand lay a vast tract of rich marsh land, capable, as society advanced, of being converted into meadows; and on the other, as extensive moorlands, finely undulating, and abounding with woods and deer.

Here the original Sir Roger built his castle on the summit of the range of rock, with huts for his followers; and became known directly all over the country as Sir Roger de Rockville, or Sir Roger of the hamlet on the Rock. Sir Roger, no doubt, was a mighty hunter before the lord of the feudal district; it is certain that his descendants were. For generations they led a jolly life at Rockville, and were always ready to exchange the excitement of the chase for a bit of civil war. Without that the country would have grown dull, and ale and venison lost their flavour. There was no gay London in those days, and a good brisk skirmish with their neighbours in helm and hauberk was the way of spending their season. It was their parliamentary debate, and was necessary to thin their woods. Protection and free trade were as much the great topics of interest as they are now, only they did not trouble themselves so much about corn bills. Their bills were of good steel, and their protective measures were arrows a cloth-yard long. Protection meant a good suit of mail, and a castle with its duly prescribed moats, bastions, portcullises, and donjon keep. Free trade was a lively inroad into the neighbouring baron’s lands, and the importation thence of goodly herds and flocks. Foreign cattle for home consumption was as striking an article in their market as ours, only the blows were expended on one another’s heads, instead of the heads of foreign bullocks—that is, bullocks from over the Welsh or Scotch marches, or from beyond the next brook.

Thus lived the Rockvilles for ages. In all the iron combats of those iron times they took care to have their quota. Whether it was Stephen against Matilda, or Richard against his father, or John against the barons; whether it were York or Lancaster, Tudor or Stuart, the Rockvilles were to be found in the mêlée, and winning power and lands. So long as it required only stalwart frames and stout blows, no family cut a more conspicuous figure. The Rockvilles were at Bosworth Field. The Rockvilles fought in Ireland under Elizabeth. The Rockvilles were staunch defenders of the crown in the wars of Charles I. with his parliament. The Rockvilles even fought for James II. at the Boyne, when three-fourths of the most loyal of the English nobility and gentry had deserted him in disgust and indignation. But from that hour they had been less conspicuous.

The opposition to the successful party, that of William of Orange, of course brought them into disgrace; and though they were never molested on that account, they retired to their estate, and found it convenient to be as unobtrusive as possible. Thenceforward you heard no more of the Rockvilles in the national annals. They became only of consequence in their own district. They acted as magistrates; they served as high-sheriffs; they were a substantial county family, and nothing more. Education and civilisation advanced; a wider and very different field of action and ambition opened upon the aristocracy of England. Our fleets and armies abroad; our legislature at home; law and the church, presented brilliant paths to the ambition of those thirsting for distinction, and the good things that follow it. But somehow the Rockvilles did not expand with this expansion. So long as it required only a figure of six feet high, broad shoulders and a strong arm, they were a great and conspicuous race; but when the head became the member most in request, they ceased to go a-head. Younger sons, it is true, served in army and navy, and filled the family pulpit, but they produced no generals, no admirals, no archbishops. The Rockvilles of Rockville were very conservative, very exclusive, and very stereotype. Other families grew poor, and enriched themselves again by marrying plebeian heiresses. New families grew up out of plebeian blood into greatness, and intermingled the vigour of their first earth with the attenuated aristocratic soil. Men of family became great lawyers, great statesmen, great prelates, and even great poets and philosophers. The Rockvilles remained high, proud, bigoted, and bornés.

The Rockvilles married Rockvilles, or their first cousins the Cliffvilles, simply to prevent property going out of the family. They kept the property together; they did not lose an acre; and they were a fine, tall, solemn race,—and nothing more. What ailed them?

If you saw Sir Roger Rockville—for there was an eternal Sir Roger filling his office of high-sheriff, he had a very fine carriage, and a very fine retinue in the most approved and splendid of costumes;—if you saw him sitting on the bench at quarter-sessions, he was a tall, stately, and solemn man. If you saw Lady Rockville shopping in her handsome carriage, with very handsomely attired servants, saw her at the county ball, or on the race-stand, she was a tall, aristocratic, and stately lady. That was in the last generation—the present could boast no Lady Rockville.

Great outward respect was shown to the Rockvilles on account of the length of their descent, and the breadth of their acres. They were always, when any stranger asked about them, declared, with a serious and important air, to be a very ancient, honourable, and substantial family. “Oh! a great family are the Rockvilles—a very great family.”

But if you came to close quarters with the members of this great and highly distinguished family, you soon found yourself fundamentally astonished. You had a sensation come over you, as if you were trying, like Moses, to draw water from a rock, without his delegated power. There was a goodly outside of things before you, but nothing came of it. You talked, hoping to get talking in return; but you got little more than “noes,” and “yeses,” and “oh, indeeds!” and “reallys,” and sometimes not even that, but a certain look of dignity, or dignification, that was meant to serve for all purposes. There was a sort of resting on aristocratic oars or “sculls,” that were not to be too vulgarly handled. There was a feeling impressed on you, that eight hundred years of descent and ten thousand a year in landed income, did not trouble themselves with the trifling things that gave distinction to lesser people—such as literature, fine arts, politics, and general knowledge. These were very well for those who had nothing else to pride themselves on, but for the Rockvilles—oh, certainly they were by no means requisite!

In fact, you found yourselves, with a little variation, in the predicament of Cowper’s people—

“who spent their lives
In dropping buckets into empty wells,
And growing tired of drawing nothing up.”

Who has not often come across these dry wells of society?—solemn gulfs out of which you can pump nothing up? You know them—they are at your elbow every day in large and brilliant companies, and defy the best sucking-buckets ever invented to extract anything from them. But the Rockvilles were each and all of this actual description. It was a family feature, and they seemed, if either, rather proud of it. They must be so; for proud they were, amazingly proud, and they had nothing else to be proud of, except their acres and their ancestors.

But the fact was, they could not help it, it was become organic. They had acted the justice of peace, and maintained the constitution against upstarts and manufacturers, signed warrants, supported the Church, and the house of correction, committed poachers, and then rested on the dignity of their ancestors for so many generations, that their sculls, brains, constitutions, and nervous systems were all so completely moulded into that shape, and baked in that mould, that a Rockville would be a Rockville to the end of time, if God and Nature would have allowed it. But such things wear out. The American Indians and the Australian natives wear out. They are not progressive: and as Nature abhors a vacuum, she does not forget the vacuum, wherever it may be, whether in a hot desert or in a cold and stately Rockville,—a very ancient, honourable, and substantial family that lies fallow till the thinking faculty literally dies out.

For several generations there had been symptoms of decay about the Rockville family. Not in its property; that was as large as ever. Not in their personal stature and physical aspect. The Rockvilles continued, as they always had been, a tall and not bad-looking family. But they grew gradually less prolific. For a hundred and fifty years past, there had seldom been more than two, or at most, three children. There had generally been an heir to the estate, and another to the family pulpit, and sometimes a daughter, married to some neighbouring squire. But Sir Roger’s father had been an only child, and Sir Roger himself was an only child. The danger of extinction to the family, apparent as it was, had never induced Sir Roger to marry. At the time that we are turning our attention upon him, he had reached the mature age of sixty. Nobody believed that Sir Roger now would marry; he was the last, and likely to be, of his line.

It is worth while here to take a glance at Sir Roger and his estate. They exhibited a strange contrast. The one bore all the signs of progress, the other of a stereotyped feudality. The estate, which in the days of the first Sir Roger de Rockville had been half morass and three-quarters wilderness, was now cultivated to the pitch of British agricultural science. The marsh lands beyond the river were one splendid expanse of richest meadows, yielding a rental of four solid pounds per acre. Over hill and dale on this side for miles, where formerly ran wild deer, and grew wild woodlands or furze-bushes, now lay excellent farms and hamlets, and along the ridge of the ancient cliffs rose the most magnificent woods. Woods, too, clothed the steep hill-sides, and swept down to the noble river, their very boughs hanging far out over its clear and rapid waters. In the midst of these fine woods stood Rockville Hall, the family seat of the Rockvilles. It reared its old brick walls over the towering mass of elms, and travellers at a distance recognised it for what it was—the mansion of an ancient and wealthy family.

The progress of England in arts, science, commerce, and manufactures, had carried Sir Roger’s estate along with it. It was full of active and moneyed farmers, and flourished under modern influences. How lucky it would have been for the Rockville family had it done the same!

But amid this estate, there was Sir Roger, solitary, and the last of the line. He had grown well enough—there was nothing stunted about him, as far as you could see on the surface. In stature he exceeded six feet. His colossal elms could not boast of a more proper relative growth. He was as large a landlord and as tall a justice of the peace as you could desire; but, unfortunately, after all, he was only the shell of a man. Like many of his veteran elms, there was a very fine stem, only it was hollow. There was a man just with the rather awkward deficiency of a soul.

And it was no difficult task to explain, either, how this had come about. The Rockvilles saw plainly enough the necessity of manuring their lands, but they scorned the very idea of manuring their family. What! that most ancient, honourable, and substantial family suffer any of the common earth of humanity to gather about its roots! The Rockvilles were so careful of their good blood that they never allied it to any but blood as pure and inane as their own. Their elms flourished in the rotten earth of plebeian accumulations, and their acres produced large crops of corn from the sewage of towns and fat sinks, but the Rockvilles themselves took especial care that no vulgar vigour from the real heap of ordinary human nature should infuse a new force of intellect into their race. The Rockvilles needed nothing: they had all that an ancient, honourable, and substantial family could need. The Rockvilles had no necessity to study at school—why should they? They did not want to get on. The Rockvilles did not aspire to distinction for talent in the world—why should they? They had a large estate, and a large estate implies large honour and respect, though the owners of it be simply cyphers. So the Rockville soul—unused from generation to generation—grew

“Fine by degrees and beautifully less,”

till it tapered off into nothing.

Look at the last of a long line in the midst of his fine estate. Tall he was, with a stoop in his shoulders, and a bowing of his head on one side, as if he had been accustomed to stand under the low boughs of his woods, and peer after intruders. And that was precisely the fact. His features were thin and sharp; his nose prominent and keen in its character; his eyes small, black, and peering like a mole’s, or a hungry swine’s. Sir Roger was still oracular on the bench, after consulting his clerk, who was a good lawyer, and looked up to by the neighbouring squires in election matters, for he was an unswerving tory. You never heard of a rational thing that he had said in the whole course of his life; but that mattered little—he was a gentleman of solemn aspect, of stately gait, and of very ancient family.

With ten thousand a year, and his rental rising, he was still, however, a man of overwhelming cares. What mattered a fine estate if all the world was against him? And Sir Roger firmly believed that he stood in that predicament. He had grown up to regard the world as full of little beside upstarts, radicals, manufacturers, and poachers. All were banded, in his belief, against the landed interest. It demanded all the energy of his very small faculties to defend himself and the landed aristocracy against them.

Unfortunately for his peace, a large manufacturing town had sprung up within a couple of miles of him. He could see its red-brick walls, and its red-tiled roofs, and its tall, smoke-vomiting chimneys, growing and extending over the slopes beyond the river. It was to him the most irritating sight in the world; for what were all those swarming weavers and spinners but arrant radicals, upstarts, sworn foes of the ancient institutions and the landed interests of England? Sir Roger had passed through many a desperate conflict with them for the return of members to parliament. They brought forward men that were utter wormwood to all his feelings, and they paid no more respect to him and his friends on such occasions than they did to the meanest creature living. Reverence for ancient blood did not exist in that plebeian and rapidly multiplying tribe. There were master manufacturers there actually that looked and talked as big as himself, and, entre nous, talked a vast deal more cleverly. The people talked of rights and franchises, and freedom of speech and of conscience, in a way that was really frightful.

Then they were given most inveterately to running out in whole and everlasting crowds on Sundays and holidays into the fields and woods; and as there was no part of the neighbourhood half so pleasant as the groves and river-banks of Rockville, they came swarming up there in crowds that were enough to drive any man of acres frantic.

Unluckily there were roads all about Rockville; foot roads, and high roads, and bridle roads. There was a road up the river-side, all the way to Rockville woods; and when it reached them, it divided like a fork, and one foot-path led straight up a magnificent grove of a mile long, ending close to the hall: and another ran all along the river-side, under the hills and branches of the wood.

Oh, delicious were those woods! In the river there were islands, which were covered in summer with the greenest grass, and the freshest of willows, and the clearest of waters rushed around them in the most inviting manner imaginable. And there were numbers of people extremely ready to accept this delectable invitation of these waters. There they came in fine weather, and as these islands were only separated from the mainland by a little and very shallow stream, it was delightful for lovers to get across, with laughter, and treading on stepping-stones, and slipping off the stepping-stones up to the ankles into the cool brook, with pretty screams and fresh laughter, and then landing on those sunny, and to them, really enchanted islands.

And then came fishermen: solitary fishermen, and fishermen in rows; fishermen lying in the flowery grass, with fragrant meadow-sweet and honey-breathing clover all about their ears; and fishermen standing in file, as if they were determined to clear all the river of fish in a day. And there were other lovers, and troops of loiterers, and shouting roysterers, going along under the boughs of the wood, and following the turns of that most companionable of rivers. And there were boats going up and down; boats full of young people, all holiday finery and mirth, and boats with duck-hunters, and others, in Sir Roger’s eyes, detestable marauders, with guns and dogs and great bottles of beer. In the fine grove, on summer-days, there might be found hundreds of people. There were pic-nic parties, fathers and mothers, with whole families of children, and a grand promenade of the delighted artizans and their wives or sweethearts.

In the times prior to the growth, rapid yet steady, of the neighbouring town, Great Castleborough, and to the simultaneous development of the love-of-nature principle in the Castleburghians, nothing had been thought of all these roads. The roads were well enough till they led to these inroads. Then Sir Roger aroused himself. This must be changed. The roads must be stopped. Nothing was easier to his fancy. His fellow justices, Sir Benjamin Bullockshed and Squire Sheepshank, had asked his aid to stop the like nuisances, and it had been done at once. So Sir Roger put up notices all about, that the roads were to be stopped by an Order of Session, and these notices were signed, as required by law, by their worships of Bullockshed and Sheepshank. But Sir Roger soon found that it was one thing to stop a road leading from One-man-town to Lonely Lodge, and another to attempt to stop those leading from Great Castleborough to Rockville.

On the very first Sunday after the exhibition of those notice-boards, there was a ferment in the Grove of Rockville, as if all the bees in the county were swarming there, and all the wasps and hornets to boot. Great crowds were collected before each of these obnoxious placards, and the amount of curses vomited forth against them was really shocking for any day, but more especially for a Sunday. Presently there was a rush at them; they were torn down, and simultaneously pitched into the river. There were great crowds swarming all about Rockville all that day, and the next, being St. Monday, with looks so defiant, that Sir Roger more than once contemplated sending off for the Yeomanry Cavalry to defend his house, which he seriously thought in danger.

But so far from being intimidated from proceeding, this demonstration only made Sir Roger the more determined. To have so desperate and irreverent a population coming about his house and woods, now presented itself in a much more formidable aspect than ever. So, next day, not only were the placards once more hoisted, but rewards offered for the discovery of the offenders, attended with all the maledictions of the insulted majesty of the law. No notice was taken of this; but the whole of Great Castleborough was in a buzz and an agitation. There were posters plastered all over the walls of the town, four times as large as Sir Roger’s notices, in this style:—

“Englishmen! Your dearest rights are menaced! The woods of Rockville, your ancient, rightful, and enchanting resort, are to be closed to you. Castleburghians, the eyes of the world are upon you. ‘Awake! arise! or be for ever fallen!’ England expects every man to do his duty! And your duty is to resist and defy the grasping soil-lords, to seize on your ancient patrimony!”

“Patrimony! Ancient and rightful resort of Rockville!” Sir Roger was astounded at the audacity of this upstart plebeian race. What! they actually claimed Rockville, the heritage of a hundred successive Rockvilles, as their own. Sir Roger determined to carry it to the Sessions; and at the Sessions was a magnificent muster of all his friends. There was Sir Roger himself in the chair; and on either hand a prodigious row of country squirearchy. There was Sir Benjamin Bullockshed, and Sir Thomas Tenterhook, and all the squires—Sheepshank, Ramsbottom, Turnbull, Otterbrook, and Swagsides. The clerk of the Sessions read the notice for the closing of all the foot-paths through the woods of Rockville, and declared that this notice had been duly, and for the required period, publicly posted. The Castleburghians protested by their able lawyer, Dare Deville, against any order for the closing of these ancient woods—the inestimable property of the public.

“Property of the public!” exclaimed Sir Roger. “Property of the public!” echoed the multitudinous voices of indignant Bullocksheds, Tenterhooks, and Ramsbottoms. “Why, sir, do you dispute the right of Sir Roger Rockville to his own estate?”

“By no means,” replied the undaunted Dare Deville; “the estate of Rockville is unquestionably the property of the honourable baronet, Sir Roger Rockville; but the roads through it are as unquestionably the property of the public.”

The whole bench looked at itself; that is, at each other, in wrathful astonishment. The swelling in the diaphragms of the squires of Otterbrook, Turnbull, and Swagsides, and all the rest of the worshipful row, was too big for utterance. Only Sir Roger himself burst forth with an abrupt—“Impudent fellow! But I’ll see him —— first!”

“Grant the order!” said Sir Benjamin Bullockshed; and the whole bench nodded assent. The able lawyer Dare Deville retired with a pleasant smile. He saw an agreeable prospect of plenty of grist to his mill. Sir Roger was rich, and so was Great Castleborough. He rubbed his hands not in the least like a man defeated, and thought to himself—“Let them go at it—all right.”

The next day the placards on the Rockville estate were changed for others, bearing, “Stopped by order of Sessions!” and alongside of them were huge carefully painted boards, denouncing on all trespassers prosecutions according to law. The same evening came a prodigious invasion of Castleburghians, who tore down all the boards and placards, and carried them on their shoulders to Great Castleborough, singing as they went, “See the Conquering Heroes come!” They set them up in the centre of the Castleborough market-place, and burnt them along with an effigy of Roger Rockville.

This was grist at once to the mill of the able lawyer Dare Deville. He looked on and rubbed his hands. Warrants were speedily issued by the baronets of Bullockshed and Tenterhook, for the apprehension of the individuals who had been seen carrying off the notice-boards, for larceny; and against a number of others for trespass, and for aiding and abetting. There was plenty of work for Dare Deville and his brethren of the robe; but it all ended, after the flying about of sundry mandamuses and assize trials, in Sir Roger finding that though Rockville was his, the roads through it were the public’s.

As Sir Roger drove homewards from the assize, which finally settled the question of those foot-paths, he heard the bells in all the steeples of Great Castleborough burst forth with a grand peal of triumph. He closed the windows of his fine old carriage, and sunk into a corner: but he could not drown the intolerable sound. “But,” said he, “I’ll stop their pic-nicing. I’ll stop their fishing. I’ll have hold of them for trespassing and poaching!” There was war henceforth between Rockville and Great Castleborough.

On the next Sunday there came literally thousands of the jubilant Castleburghians to Rockville. They had brought baskets and wine for dining and drinking success to all foot-paths. But in the great grove there were keepers and watchers, who warned them to keep the path, that narrow, well-worn line up the middle of the grove. “What! were they not to sit on the grass?” “No.” “What! were they not to pic-nic?” “No; not there!”

The Castleburghians felt a sudden damp on their spirits. But the river-bank! The cry was “to the river-bank! There they would pic-nic!” The crowd rushed away down the wood; but there they found a whole regiment of watchers, who pointed again to the narrow line of foot-path, and told them not to trespass beyond it. But the islands! They went over to the islands. There, too, were Sir Roger’s forces, who warned them back. There was no road there—all found there would be trespassers, and be duly punished.

The Castleburghians discovered that their triumph was not quite so complete as they had flattered themselves. The foot-paths were theirs, but that was all. Their ancient licence was at an end. If they came there, there was no more fishing; if they came in crowds, there was no more pic-nicing; if they walked through the woods in numbers, they must keep to Indian file, or they were summoned before the county magistrates for trespass and were soundly fined; and not even the able Dare Deville would undertake to defend them.

The Castleburghians were chop-fallen, but they were angry and dogged; and they thronged up to the village, and the front of the hall. They filled the little inn in the hamlet—they went by scores, and roving all over the churchyard, read epitaphs—

“That teach the rustic moralists to die,”

but don’t teach them to give up their old indulgences very good-humouredly. They went and sat in a row on the old churchyard-wall, opposite to the very windows of the irate Sir Roger. They felt themselves beaten, and Sir Roger felt himself beaten. True, he could coerce them to the foot-path—but, then, they had the foot-paths: yet, on the other hand, the pic-nicing, and the fishing, and the islands! The Castleburghians were full of sullen wrath, and Sir Roger was—oh, most expressive old Saxon phrase—Hairsore! Yes, he was one universal wound of vexation and jealousy of his rights. Every hair in his body was like a pin sticking in him. Come within a dozen yards of him; nay, at the most, blow on him, and he was excruciated—you rubbed his sensitive hairs at a furlong’s distance.

The next Sunday the people found the churchyard locked up, except during service, when beadles walked there, and desired them not to loiter and disturb the congregation, closing the gates and showing them out like a flock of sheep the moment the service was over. This was fuel to the already boiling blood of Castleborough. The week following, what was their astonishment to find the much frequented, the charming little rustic inn gone. It was actually gone! not a trace of it; but the spot where it had stood for ages, turfed, planted with young spruce trees, and fenced off with post and rail. The exasperated people now launched forth an immensity of fulminations against the churl, Sir Roger; and a certain number of them resolved to come and seat themselves in the street of the hamlet and there dine; but a terrific thunderstorm, which seemed in league with Sir Roger, soon routed them, drenched them through, and on attempting to seek shelter in the cottages, the poor people said they were very sorry, but it was as much as their holdings were worth, and they dare not admit them.

Sir Roger had triumphed! It was all over with the old delightful days at Rockville. There was an end of pic-nicing, of fishing, of roving in the islands. One sturdy disciple of Izaak Walton, indeed, dared to fling a line from the banks of Rockville Grove, but Sir Roger himself came upon him, and endeavoured to seize him. The man coolly walked into the middle of the river, and without a word continued his fishing.

“Get out there!” exclaimed Sir Roger, “that is still on my property.” The man waded through the river to the other bank, where he knew that the land was rented by a farmer. “Give over!” shouted Sir Roger. “I tell you the water is mine!”

“Then,” said the fellow, “bottle it up, and be-hanged to you! Don’t you see it is all running away to Castleborough?”

The story was carried by the man to the town, and occasioned a good laugh, and many a time when Sir Roger appeared in the place, he was greeted with—“Why don’t you bottle up the Trent?” But the joke did not compensate for a tittle of what was lost: there was bad blood between Rockville and Castleborough as a settled condition. Castleborough was incensed, and Sir Roger was hairsore.

A new nuisance sprang up. The people of Castleborough looked on the cottagers of Rockville as sunk in the deepest darkness under Sir Roger, and his cousin the vicar, who had seconded, and it was believed had instigated the baronet to a great portion of these proceedings. They could not pic-nic, but they thought they could hold a camp-meeting. They could not fish for roach, but they thought they might for souls. Accordingly, there assembled crowds of Castleburghians on the green of Rockville, with a chair and a table, and a preacher with his head bound in a red handkerchief; and soon there was a sound of hymns, and a zealous call to come out of the darkness of Babylon. But this was more than Sir Roger could bear; he rushed forth with all his servants, keepers, and cottagers, overthrew the table, and routing the assembly, chased them to the boundary of his estate.

The discomfited Castleburghians now fulminated awful judgments on the unhappy Sir Roger, as a persecutor and malignant. They dared not enter again on his park, but they came to the very verge of it, and held weekly meetings on the highway, in which they sang and declaimed as loudly as possible, that the winds might bear their voices to Sir Roger’s ears.

To such a condition was now reduced the last of the long line of Rockville. The spirit of a policeman had taken possession of him; he had keepers and watchers out on all sides, but that did not satisfy him. He was perpetually haunted with the idea that poachers were after his game; that trespassers were in his woods. His whole life was now spent in strolling to and fro in his fields and plantations, and in prowling along his river-side. He looked under hedges, and watched for long hours under forest trees. If any one had a curiosity to see Sir Roger, they had only to enter his fields by the wood side, and wander a few yards from the path, and he was almost sure to spring out over the hedge, and in hurried and angry, almost stammering tones, demand their name and address. The descendant of the chivalrous and steel-clad De Rockvilles was sunk into a restless spy on his own ample property. There was but one idea in his mind—encroachment. It was destitute of all other furniture but the musty technicalities of warrants and commitments. There was a stealthy and skulking manner in everything he did. He went to church on Sunday, but it was no longer by the grand iron-gate opposite to his house,—that stood generally with a large spider’s web woven over the lock, and several others in the corners of the fine iron tracery, bearing evidence of the long period since it had been opened. How different to the time when Sir Roger and Lady Rockville had had these gates thrown wide on Sunday morning, and with all their train of household servants at their back, with true antique dignity, marched, with much proud humility, into the house of God. Now, Sir Roger—the solitary, suspicious, undignified Sir Roger, the keeper and policeman of his own property—stole in at a little side-gate from his paddock, and back the same way, wondering all the time whether there was not somebody in his pheasant preserves, or Sunday trespassers in his grove.

If you entered his house, it gave you as cheerless a feeling as its owner. There was a conservatory, so splendid with rich plants and flowers in his mother’s time, now a dusty receptacle of hampers, broken hand-glasses and garden tools. These tools could never be used, for the gardens had grown wild. Tall grass grew in the walks, and the huge unpruned shrubs disputed the passage with you. In the wood above the gardens, reached by several flights of fine, but now moss-grown steps, there stood a pavilion, which had once clearly been very beautiful. It was now damp and ruinous—its walls covered with greenness and crawling insects. It was a great lurking place of Sir Roger, when on the watch for poachers.

The line of the Rockvilles was evidently running fast out. It had reached the extremity of imbecility and contempt—it must soon reach its close.

Sir Roger used to make his regular annual visit to town; but of late, when there he had wandered restlessly about the streets peeping into the shop-windows: and if it rained, he would stand under an entry for hours, waiting till it was gone over, rather than take a cab or omnibus. The habit of lurking and peering about was become fixed, and his feet bore him instinctively into those narrow and crowded alleys where swarm the poachers of the city—the trespassers and anglers in the game preserves and streams of humanity. He had lost all pleasure in his club; the most exciting themes of political life retained no piquancy for him. His old friends ceased to find any pleasure in him. He was become the driest of all dry wells. Poachers, and anglers, and Methodists, haunted the wretched purlieus of his fast fading-out mind, and he resolved to go to town no more. His whole nature was centred in his woods. He was for ever on the watch; and when at Rockville again, if he heard a door clap when in bed, he thought it a gun in his woods; and was up and out with his keepers.

Of what value was that magnificent estate to him? those superb woods; those finely-hanging cliffs; that clear and riante river, careering, travelling on, and taking a noble sweep below his window; that glorious expanse of most verdant meadows, stretching almost to Castleborough, and enlivened by numerous herds of the most beautiful cattle; those old farms and shady lanes overhung with hazel and wild rose; the glittering brook, and the songs of woodland birds—what were they to that worn-out old man, that victim to the delusive doctrine of blood, that man-trap, of an hereditary name?

There the poet could come and feel the presence of divinity in that noble scene, and hear sublime whispers in the trees, and create new heavens and new earths from the glorious charms of nature around him, and in one short hour live an empyrean of celestial life and love. There could come the very humblest children of the plebeian town, and feel a thrill of exquisite delight pervade their bosoms at the sight of the very flowers on the sod, and see heaven in the infinite blue above them. And poor Sir Roger, the holder, but not the possessor of all, walked only in a region of sterility, with no sublimer ideas than poachers and trespassers—no more rational enjoyment than the brute indulgence of hunting like a ferret, and seizing his fellow-men like a bulldog. He was a specimen of human nature degenerated; retrograded from the divine to the bestial, through the long-operating influences of false notions, and institutions continued beyond their time. He had only the soul of a keeper. Had he been only a keeper he had been a much happier man.

CHAPTER II.

THE FIRST OF A NEW LINE.

In Great Castleborough there lived a race of paupers. From the year of the 42nd of Elizabeth, or 1601, down to the present generation, this race maintained an uninterrupted descent. Like that of many a more worldly-favoured race, theirs was a descent; it had nothing of an ascent in it. But that is the fate of ancestry. A man on some particular occasion ascends; makes himself a mark in his time; perhaps a name in the world’s annals, and from him his family descends.

The expression is perfectly correct; as the heralds truly have it; it descends, fades out, and is gone. It has lived? no, continued, a thousand years perhaps; it has descended, and prided itself on descending. That was the case of the Rockvilles; and when we hear of families and persons illustriously or honourably descended, we hear an internal echo which says, “Yes—descended.” The truly great man ascends from his ancestors.

There was a steady and unbroken line of paupers in Great Castleborough, as the parish books testify. No families had a more unquestionable pedigree. There was no flaw, no dubious spot in it. The parish books were the red-books of this race. No genealogy could bear a more rigid scrutiny than theirs. From generation to generation their demands on the parish funds stand recorded. There were no lacunæ in their career; there was no occasion for the herald to skip skilfully from cousin to doubtful cousin, nor great lawyers to cast a costly glamour over some delicate question of legitimacy. There never failed a rightful heir to their families. Fed on the bread of idleness and legal provision, these people flourished, increased, and multiplied. Sometimes required to work for the weekly stipend which they received, they never acquired a taste for labour, or lost the taste for the bread for which they did not labour. These paupers regarded their maintenance by no means as a disgrace. They claimed it as a right—as their patrimony. They contended that one-third of the property of the Church had been given by benevolent individuals for the support of the poor, and that what the Reformation wrongfully deprived them of, the great enactment of Elizabeth rightfully—and only rightfully—restored.

Those who imagine that all paupers merely claim parish relief because the law has ordained it, commit a great error. There were numbers then who were hereditary paupers, on a higher principle even than hereditary peers, and that on a tradition carefully handed down, that they were only manfully claiming their own. They traced their claims from the most ancient feudal times. They were none of your modern manufactures, the offspring of wretched political necessities. They came down from times when the lord was as much bound to maintain his villein in gross, as the villein was to work for the lord. These paupers were in fact, or claimed to be, the original adscripti glebæ, and to have as sound a claim to parish support as the landed proprietor had to his land. For this reason, in the old Catholic times, after they had escaped from villenage by running away from their hundred, and remaining absent for a year and a day, dwelling for that period in a walled town, these people were amongst the most diligent attendants at the abbey doors, and, when the abbeys were dissolved, were, no doubt, amongst the most daring of those thieves, vagabonds, and sturdy rogues who, after the Robin Hood fashion, beset the highways and solitary farms of England, and claimed their black-mail in a very unceremonious style. It was out of this class that Henry VIII. hanged his seventy-two thousand during his reign, and, as it is said, without appearing materially to diminish their number.

That they continued to “increase, multiply, and replenish the earth,” overflowing all bounds, overpowering by mere populousness all the severe laws against them, of whipping, burning in the hand, in the forehead, or the breast, and hanging, and filling the whole country with alarm, is evidenced by the very Act of Elizabeth itself.

Amongst these hereditary paupers who, as we have said, were found in Castleborough, there was a family of the name of Deg. This family had never failed to demand and enjoy what it held to be its share of its ancient inheritance. It appeared from the parish records, that they practised, in different periods, the crafts of shoemaking, tailoring, and chimney-sweeping; but since the invention of the stocking-frame they had, one and all of them, followed the profession of stocking-weavers; or, as they were there called, stockingers. This was a trade which required no extreme exertion of the physical or intellectual powers. To sit in a frame, and throw the arms to and fro, was a thing that might be carried to a degree of extreme diligence, or be let down into a mere apology for idleness. An “idle stockinger” was then no very uncommon phrase, and the Degs were always classed under that head. Nothing could be more admirably adapted than this trade for building a plan of parish relief upon. The Degs did not pretend to be absolutely without work, or the parish authorities would soon have set them to some real labour—a thing that they particularly recoiled from, having a very old adage in the family, that “hard work was enough to kill a man.”

There was, indeed, an anecdote of three of the Degs which was continually quoted as exemplifying the three degrees of extreme indolence. According to this, three Degs were lying one fine autumn day under a neighbour’s pear-tree. One of them, in a languid tone, said, “There! a pear has dropped.” The second observed, still more languidly, “I wish I had it.” The third was too lazy even to open his mouth to express such a wish, much less to move and get it.

The Degs, then, were seldom out of work; but they did not get enough, or do enough, to meet and tie. They had but little work if times were bad, and if times were good, they complained of large families and sickly wives and children. Be times what they would, therefore, the Degs were due and successful attendants at the parish pay-table. Nay, so much was this a matter of course, that they came at length not even to trouble themselves to receive their pay, but sent their young children for it; and it was duly paid. Did any parish officer, indeed, turn restive, and decline to pay a Deg, he soon found himself summoned before a magistrate, and such pleas of sickness, want of work, and poor earnings brought forward, that he most likely got a sharp rebuke from the benevolent but uninquiring magistrate, and acquired a character of hard-heartedness that stuck to him.

So parish overseers learnt to let the Degs alone; and their children, thus regularly brought up to receive the parish money for their parents, were impatient, as they grew up, to receive it for themselves. Marriages in the Deg family were, consequently, very early, and there were plenty of instances of married Degs claiming parish relief under the age of twenty, on the plea of being the parents of two children. One such precocious individual being asked by a rather verdant officer why he was married before he was able to maintain a family, replied, in much astonishment, that he had married in order to maintain himself by parish assistance. That he had never been able to maintain himself by his labour, nor ever expected to do it: his only hope, therefore, lay in marrying, and becoming the father of two children, to which patriarchal rank he had now attained, and demanded his “pay.”

Thus had lived and flourished the Degs on their ancient patrimony, the parish, for upwards of two hundred years. Nay, we have no doubt whatever that, if it could have been traced, they had enjoyed an ancestry of paupers as long as the pedigree of Sir Roger Rockville himself. In the days of the most perfect villenage they had, doubtless, eaten the bread of idleness, and claimed it as a right. They were numerous, improvident, ragged in dress, and fond of an alehouse and gossip. Like the blood of Sir Roger, their blood had become peculiar through a long persistence of the same circumstances. It was become pure pauper blood.

The Degs married, if not entirely amongst Degs, yet amongst the same class. None but a pauper would dream of marrying a Deg, even were she handsome as Helen of Troy. The Degs, therefore, were in constitution, in mind, in habit, and in inclination, paupers. But a pure and unmixed class of this kind does not die out like an aristocratic stereotype. It increases and multiplies. The lower the grade, the more prolific, as is sometimes seen on a large and even national scale. The Degs threatened, therefore, to become a most formidable clan in the lower purlieus of Castleborough; but, luckily, there is so much virtue even in evils, that one not rarely cures another. War, the great evil, cleared the town of Degs.

Fond of idleness, of indulgence, of money easily got and as easily spent, the Degs were rapidly drained off by recruiting parties during the great French war. The young men enlisted, and were marched away; the young women married soldiers that were quartered in the town from time to time, and marched away with them. There were eventually none of the once numerous Degs left, except a few old people, whom death was sure to draft off at no distant period into his regiment of the line which has no end. Parish overseers, magistrates, and master manufacturers felicitated themselves on this unhoped-for deliverance from the ancient family of the Degs.

But one cold, clear winter evening, the east wind piping his sharp, sibilant ditty in the hawthorn hedges, and poking his sharp fingers into the sides of well broad-clothed men by way of passing joke, Mr. Spires, a great manufacturer of Castleborough, driving in his gig some seven miles from the town, passed a poor woman with a stout child on her back. The large ruddy-looking man in the prime of life, and in the greatcoat and thick worsted gloves of a wealthy traveller, cast a glance at the wretched creature trudging heavily on, expecting a pitiful appeal to his sensibilities, and thinking it a bore to have to pull off a glove, and dive into his pocket for a copper; but to his surprise, there was no demand, only a low curtsey, and the glimpse of a face of singular honesty of expression, and of excessive weariness.

Spires was a man of warm feelings; he looked earnestly at the woman, and thought he had never seen such a picture of fatigue in his life. He pulled up and said,

“You seem very tired, my good woman.”

“Awfully tired, sir.”

“And are you going far to-night?”

“To Great Castleborough, sir, if God give me strength.”

“To Castleborough!” exclaimed Mr. Spires, “why you seem ready to drop; you’ll never reach it. You’d better stop at the next village.”

“Ay, sir, it is easy stopping for those who have money.”

“And you’ve none, eh?”

“As God lives, sir, I’ve a sixpence, and that’s all.”

Mr. Spires put his hand in his pocket and held out to her the next instant half-a-crown.

“There, stop, poor thing—make yourself comfortable—it’s quite out of the question to reach Castleborough. But stay, are your friends living in Castleborough? What are you?”

“A poor soldier’s widow, sir: and may God Almighty bless you,” said the poor woman, taking the money, the tears standing in her large brown eyes as she curtseyed very low.

“A soldier’s widow,” said Mr. Spires. She had touched the softest place in the manufacturer’s heart, for he was a very loyal man, and vehement champion of his country’s honour in the war. “So young,” said he,—“how did you lose your husband?”

“He fell, sir,” said the poor woman,—but she could get no further; she suddenly caught up the corner of her grey cloak, covered her face with it, and burst into an excess of grief.

The manufacturer felt as if he had hit the woman a blow by his careless question. He sat watching her for a moment in silence, and then said—“Come, get into the gig, my poor woman; come, I must see you to Castleborough.”

The poor woman dried her tears, and heavily climbed into the gig, expressing her gratitude in a very touching and modest manner. Spires buttoned the apron over her, and taking a look at the child, said in a cheerful tone to comfort her, “Bless me, but that is a fine, thumping fellow, though. I don’t wonder you are tired, carrying such a load.”

The poor woman pressed the stout child, apparently two years old, to her heart, as if she felt it a great blessing, and no load. The gig drove rapidly on.

Presently, Mr. Spires resumed his conversation.

“So you are from Castleborough?”

“No, sir, my husband was.”

“So: what was his name?”

“John Deg, sir.”

“Deg?” said Mr. Spires; “Deg, did you say?”

“Yes, sir.”

The manufacturer seemed to hitch himself off towards his own side of the gig, gave another look at her, and was silent. The poor woman seemed somewhat astonished at his look and movement, and was silent too.

After awhile Mr. Spires said again, “And do you hope to find friends in Castleborough? Had you none where you came from?”

“None, sir; none in the world!” said the poor woman, and again her feelings seemed too strong for her. At length she added, “I was in service, sir, at Poole, in Dorsetshire, when I married; my mother only was living, and while I was away with my husband, she died. When—when the news came from abroad, that—when I was a widow, sir, I went back to my native place, and the parish-officers said I must go to my husband’s parish lest I and my child should become troublesome.”

“You asked relief of them?”

“Never! oh, God knows, no, never! My family have never asked a penny of a parish,—they would die first, and so would I, sir; but they said I might do it, and I had better go to my husband’s parish at once and they offered me money to go.”

“And you took it, of course.”

“No, sir; I had a little money, which I had earned by washing and laundering; and I sold most of my things, as I could not carry them, and came off. I felt hurt, sir; my heart rose against the treatment of the parish, and I thought I should be better amongst my husband’s friends,—and my child would, if anything happened to me. I had no friends of my own.”

Mr. Spires looked at the woman in silence.

“Did your husband tell you anything of his friends? What sort of a man was he?”

“Oh, he was a gay young fellow, rather, sir; but not bad to me. He always said his friends were well off in Castleborough.”

“He did!” said the manufacturer, with a great stare, and as if bolting the words from his heart in a large gust of wonder.

The poor woman again looked at him with a strange look. The manufacturer whistled to himself, and giving his horse a smart cut with the whip, drove on faster than ever. The night was fast settling down; it was numbing cold; a grey fog rose from the river as they thundered over the old bridge; and tall engine chimneys, and black smoky houses loomed through the dusk before them. They were at Castleborough.

As they slackened their pace up a hill at the entrance of the town, Mr. Spires again opened his mouth.

“I should be very sorry to hurt your feelings, Mrs. Deg,” he said, “but I have my fears that you are coming to this place with false expectations. I fear your husband did not give you the truest possible account of his family here.”

“Oh, sir! What—what is it?” exclaimed the poor woman; “in God’s name, tell me!”

“Why, nothing more than this,” said the manufacturer; “there are few of the Degs left here. They are old, and on the parish, and can do nothing for you.”

The poor woman gave a deep sigh, and was silent.

“But don’t be cast down,” said Mr. Spires. He would not tell her what a pauper family it really was; for he saw that she was a very feeling woman, and he thought that she would learn that soon enough. He felt that her husband had from vanity given her a false account of his connections; and he was really sorry for her.

“Don’t be cast down!” he went on; “you can wash and iron, you say; you are young and strong; those are your friends. Depend on them, and they will be better to you than any other.”

The poor woman was silent, leaning her head down on her slumbering child, and crying to herself; and thus they drove on through many long and narrow streets, with lights glaring from the shops, but with few people in the streets, and those hurrying shivering along the pavement, so intense was the cold. Anon, they stopped at a large pair of gates; and the manufacturer rang a bell, which he could reach from his gig; and the gates were presently flung open, and they drove into a spacious yard, with a large handsome house, having a bright lamp burning before it, on one side of the yard, and tall warehouses on the other.

“Show this poor woman and her child to Mrs. Craddock’s, James,” said Mr. Spires, “and tell Mrs. Craddock to make them very comfortable; and if you will come to my warehouse to-morrow,” added he, addressing the poor woman, “perhaps I can be of some use to you.”

The poor woman poured out her heartfelt thanks, and following the old man-servant, soon disappeared, hobbling over the pebbly pavement with her living load, her limbs stiffened almost to stone by her fatigue and cold ride.

We must not pursue too minutely our narrative. Mrs. Deg was engaged to do the washing and getting up of Mr. Spires’s linen, and the manner in which she executed her task, insured her recommendations to all their friends. Mrs. Deg was at once in full employ. She occupied a neat house in a yard near the meadows below the town, and in these meadows she might be seen spreading out her clothes to whiten on the grass attended by her stout little boy. In the same yard lived a shoemaker, who had two or three children of almost the same age as Mrs. Deg’s child. The children, as time went on, became playfellows. Little Simon might be said to have the free run of the shoemaker’s house, and he was the more attracted thither by the shoemaker’s birds, and his flute, on which he often played when his work was done.

Mrs. Deg took a great liking to the shoemaker: and he and his wife, a quiet, kind-hearted woman, were almost all the acquaintances that she cultivated. She had found out her husband’s parents; but they were not of a description that at all pleased her. They were old and infirm, but they were of the true pauper breed, a sort of persons whom Mrs. Deg had been taught to avoid and to despise. They looked on her as a sort of second parish, and insisted that she should come and live with them, and help to maintain them out of her earnings. But Mrs. Deg would rather that her little boy had died than have been familiarised with the spirit of these old people. Despise them she struggled hard not to do, and she agreed to allow them sufficient to maintain them, on condition that they desisted from any further application to the parish. It would be a long and disgusting tale to recount all the troubles, annoyances, and querulous complaints and even bitter accusations that she received from her connections, whom she could never satisfy; but she considered it one of her crosses in life, and patiently bore it, seeing that they suffered no real want, so long as they lived, which was for years; but she would never allow her little Simon to be with them alone.

The shoemaker neighbour was a stout protector to her against the greedy demands of the old people, and of others of the old Degs, and also against another class of inconvenient visitors, namely suitors, who saw in Mrs. Deg a neat and comely young woman, with a flourishing business, and a neat and well-furnished house, a very desirable acquisition. But Mrs. Deg had resolved never again to marry, but to live for the boy, and she kept her resolve with firmness and gentleness.

The shoemaker often took walks in the extensive town-meadows, to gather groundsel and plantain for his canaries and gorse-linnets, and little Simon Deg delighted to accompany him with his own children. There William Watson, the shoemaker, used to point out to the children the beauty of the flowers, the insects, and other objects of nature; and while he sat on a stile and read in a little old book of poetry, as he often used to do, the children sate on the summer grass, and enjoyed themselves in a variety of plays.

The effect of these walks, and the shoemaker’s conversation on little Simon Deg, was such as never wore out of him through his whole life, and soon led him to astonish the shoemaker by his extraordinary conduct. He manifested the greatest uneasiness at their treading on the flowers in the grass; he would burst into tears if they persisted in it; and when asked why, he said they were so beautiful, and that they must enjoy the sunshine, and be very unhappy to die. The shoemaker was amazed, but indulged the lad’s fancy. One day he thought to give him a great treat, and when they were out in the meadows, he drew from under his coat a bow and arrow, and shot the arrow high up into the air. He expected to see him in an ecstasy of delight; his own children clapped their hands in transport, but Simon stood silent, and as if awestruck. “Shall I send up another?” asked the shoemaker.

“No, no!” exclaimed the child, imploringly. “You say God lives up there, and He mayn’t like it.”

The shoemaker laughed, but presently he said, as if to himself, “There is too much imagination there. There will be a poet there if we don’t take care.”

The shoemaker offered to teach Simon to read, and to solidify his mind, as he termed it, by arithmetic, and then to teach him to work at his trade. His mother was very glad; and thought shoemaking would be a good trade for the boy; and that with Mr. Watson she should have him always near her. He was growing now a great lad, and was especially strong, and of a frank and daring habit. He was greatly indignant at any act of oppression of the weak by the strong, and not seldom got into trouble by his championship of the injured in such cases amongst the boys in the neighbourhood.

He was now about twelve years of age; when going one day with a basket of clothes on his head to Mr. Spires’ for his mother, he was noticed by Mr. Spires himself from his counting-house window. The great war was raging; there was much distress amongst the manufacturers; the people were suffering, and exasperated against their masters. Mr. Spires, as a staunch tory, and supporter of the war, Was particularly obnoxious to the workpeople, who uttered violent threats against him. For this reason his premises were strictly guarded, and at the entrance of his yard, just within the gates, was chained a large and fierce mastiff, his chain allowing him to approach near enough to intimidate any stranger, though not to reach him. The dog knew the people who came regularly about, and seemed not to notice them; but on the entrance of a stranger, he rose up, barked, and came to the length of his chain. This always drew the attention of the porter, if he was away from his box, and few persons dared to pass till he came.

Simon Deg was advancing with the basket of clean linen on his head, when the dog rushed out, and barking loudly, came exactly opposite to him, within a few feet. The boy, a good deal startled at first, drew himself back against the wall, but at a glance perceiving that the dog was at the length of his tether, he seemed to enjoy his situation, and stood smiling at the furious animal, and lifting his basket with both hands above his head, nodded to him, as if to say—“Well, old boy, you’d like to eat me, wouldn’t you?”

Mr. Spires, who sat near his counting-house window at his books, was struck with the bold and handsome bearing of the boy, and said to a clerk, “What boy is that?”

“It is Jenny Deg’s,” was the answer.

“Ha! that boy! Zounds! how boys do grow! Why, that’s the child that Jenny Deg was carrying when she came to Castleborough, and what a strong, handsome, bright-looking fellow he is now.”

As the boy was returning, Mr. Spires called him to the counting-house door, and put some questions to him as to what he was doing and learning, and so on. Simon, taking off his cap with much respect, answered in such a clear and modest way, with a voice which had so much feeling and natural music in it, that the worthy manufacturer was greatly taken with him.

“That’s no Deg!” said he, when he again entered the counting-house, “not a bit of it. He’s all Goodrich, or whatever his mother’s name was, every inch of him.”

The consequence of that interview was, that Simon Deg was very soon after perched on a stool in Mr. Spires’ counting-house, where he continued till he was twenty-two. Mr. Spires had no son, only a single daughter; and such were Simon Deg’s talents, attention to business, and genial disposition, that at that age Mr. Spires gave him a share in the concern. He was himself now getting less fond of exertion than he had been, and placed the most implicit reliance on Simon’s judgment and general management. Yet, no two men could be more unlike in their opinions beyond the circle of trade. Mr. Spires was a staunch tory of the staunch old school. He was for church and king, and for things remaining for ever as they had been. Simon, on the other hand, had liberal and reforming notions. He was for the improvement of the people, and their admission to many privileges. Mr. Spires, therefore, was liked by the leading men of the place, and disliked by the people. Simon’s estimation was precisely in the opposite direction. But this did not disturb their friendship; it required another disturbing cause, and that came.

Simon Deg and the daughter of Mr. Spires grew attached to each other; and as the father had thought Simon worthy of becoming a partner in the business, neither of the young people deemed that he could object to a partnership of a more domestic description. But here they made a tremendous mistake. No sooner was such a proposal hinted at, than Mr. Spires burst forth with the fury of all the winds from the bag of Ulysses.

“What! a Deg aspire to the hand of the sole heiress of the enormously opulent Spires?”

The very thought almost cut the proud manufacturer off with apoplexy. The ghosts of a thousand paupers rose up before him, and he was black in the face. It was only by a prompt and bold application of leeches and lancet, that the life of the great man was saved. But there was an end of all further friendship between himself and the expectant Simon. He insisted that he should withdraw from the concern, and it was done. Simon, who felt his own dignity deeply wounded too, for dignity he had, though the last of a long line of paupers—his own dignity, not his ancestors’—took silently, yet not unrespectfully, his share—a good round sum, and entered another house of business.

For several years there appeared to be a feud, and a bitterness between the former friends; yet, it showed itself in no other manner, than by a careful avoidance of each other. The continental war came to an end; the manufacturing distress increased exceedingly. Then came troublous times, and a fierce warfare of politics. Great Castleborough was torn asunder by rival parties. On one side stood pre-eminent, Mr. Spires; on the other towered conspicuously, Simon Deg. Simon was growing rich, and was extremely popular. He was on all occasions the advocate of the people. He said that he had sprung from, and was one of them. He had bought a large tract of land on one side of the town; and intensely fond of the country and flowers himself, he had divided this into gardens, built little summer-houses in them, and let them to the artizans. In his factory, he had introduced order, cleanliness, and ventilation. He had set up a school for the children, besides an evening and Sunday school for such as had begun to work in the factory or the loom, with a reading-room and conversation-room for the workpeople, and encouraged them to bring their families there, and enjoy music, books, and lectures. Accordingly, he was the idol of the people, and the horror of the old school of the manufacturers.

“A pretty upstart and demagogue I’ve nurtured,” said Mr. Spires often to his wife and daughter, who only sighed and were silent.

Then came a furious election. The town for a fortnight, more resembled the worst corner of Tartarus, than a Christian borough. Drunkenness, riot, pumping on one another, spencering one another, that is, tearing each other’s coat-tails off, all sorts of violence and abuse ruled and raged, till the blood of all Castleborough was at boiling heat. In the midst of the tempest were everywhere seen, ranged on the opposite sides, Mr. Spires, now old and immensely corpulent, and Simon Deg, active, buoyant, zealous, and popular beyond measure. But popular though he still was, the other and old tory side triumphed. The people were exasperated to madness; and when the chairing of the successful candidate commenced, there was a terrific attack made on the procession by the defeated party. Down went the chair, and the new member, glad to escape into an inn, saw his friends mercilessly assailed by the populace. There was a tremendous tempest of sticks, brickbats, paving-stones and rotten eggs. In the midst of this, Simon Deg, and a number of his friends, standing at the upper window of an hotel, saw Mr. Spires knocked down, and trampled on by the crowd. In an instant, and before his friends had missed him from amongst them, Simon Deg was seen darting through the raging mass, cleaving his way with a surprising vigour, and gesticulating, and, no doubt, shouting vehemently to the rioters, though his voice was lost in the din. In the next moment his hat was knocked off, and himself appeared in imminent danger; but another moment, and there was a pause, and a group of people were bearing somebody from the frantic mob into a neighbouring shop. It was Simon Deg assisting in the rescue of his old friend and benefactor, Mr. Spires.

Mr. Spires was a good deal bruised, and wonderfully confounded and bewildered by his fall. His clothes were one mass of mud, and his face was bleeding copiously; but when he had had a good draught of water, and his face washed, and had time to recover himself, it was found that he had received no serious injury.

“They had like to have done for me, though,” said he.

“Yes; and who saved you?” asked a gentleman.

“Ay, who was it? who was it?” asked the really warm-hearted manufacturer. “Let me know; I owe him my life.”

“There he is!” said several gentlemen at the same instant, pushing forward Simon Deg.

“What, Simon!” said Mr. Spires, starting to his feet. “Was it thee, my boy?” He did more—he stretched out his hand. The young man clasped it eagerly; and the two stood silent, and with a heartfelt emotion, which blended all the past into forgetfulness, and the future into a union more sacred than esteem.

A week hence, and Simon Deg was the son-in-law of Mr. Spires. Though Mr. Spires had misunderstood Simon, and Simon had borne the aspect of opposition to his old friend, in defence of conscientious principles, the wife and daughter of the manufacturer had always understood him, and secretly looked forward to some day of recognition and re-union.

Simon Deg was now one of the richest men in Castleborough. His mother was still living to enjoy his elevation. She had been his excellent and wise housekeeper, and she continued to occupy that post still.

CHAPTER III.

THINGS AS THEY USED TO BE.

One of the first things which Simon Deg did after Mr. Spires had so indignantly refused him his daughter on account of his origin, was to conceive and to carry out a resolve that, however the brand of pauperism might attach to his ancestors, none of its obligations should lie on him. “Let past generations settle their own accounts,” he said; “but so far as this generation goes, there is not a man of it shall say that I owe the country, or rather this town, a farthing for life and growth. If my father ever received a bodle of parish-pay, which I know not, or his father or father’s father for him, it shall be repaid.” He went, therefore, successively to the committee of the poor in each parish, of which the town contained three, and desired permission to search the pay-books of each of these parishes for the last eighty years. “Beyond that period,” he said, “there can be no man living who ever paid a farthing to the poor-rates.” He did not conceal the object of his research. It was to ascertain, to a fraction, what amount had been paid during that period to any individual of the name of Deg. His position in the town readily secured him this opportunity, and he immediately employed an able accountant in each parish to trace down, through the books, items of these payments. He promised, moreover, to the stipendiary, or sub-overseers of the poor, a handsome honorarium, to assist the accountant in seeing that his work was done completely, and in aiding him in any difficulty. He himself frequently attended, and made tests, by going over certain extents of these accounts, of the accuracy with which they were done. It was a great labour, and was not completed much under a year. But it was accomplished at last, and the result was a statement of several thousand pounds as having been paid to persons of the name of Deg. This amount Simon Deg paid over with great satisfaction to the respective committees, and took receipts for it. The parish officers represented to him that there was no reason whatever that he should make so extraordinary a refundment to the parish, from which neither he himself nor his father in his own person could be shown to have derived a penny. Still more, they represented that Mr. Deg could not be descended from all the Degs; he could only have descended in one line, and from that specific line did he only incur even the shadow of an obligation to the parishes.

Simon Deg replied, that that was true; but, on the other hand, there was a female side to the line, the fathers and mothers of women who married Degs, and daughters of Degs who married and passed under other names, had swelled the account. He therefore requested to be allowed to pay the whole account, as it appeared under the name of Deg; and this was done. He observed, that he did not wish to dictate in any way the manner in which these sums should be expended, but he thought that the whole of them might with advantage be employed in extending and rendering more comfortable those parts of the workhouses where the aged paupers or the sick were accommodated; and this suggestion was fully and freely complied with.

This act of Simon Deg’s, demonstrating a feeling of such a profound sense of honour and integrity, made a grand impression on his townspeople, and raised him still higher in public estimation. In the course of his inquiry he made the discovery that the family name was in reality Degge, and had been thus spelled from the earliest period till within the last half of the last century. He therefore resumed the dropped letters, as giving a greater finish of the name to the eye; and saying pleasantly that, as he had now discharged the debts of his progenitors, at least to this generation, he thought he might be allowed to take the two last letters out of pawn. Henceforth, therefore, he and every one else wrote him Simon “Degge.”

Not long after his marriage, he bought a farm at Hillmartin, a village not far from Rockville. He was naturally of an active temperament, was fond of riding, and took a great fancy to farming and shooting. These divertisements were all afforded him by this little estate. After close confinement in his counting-house, he liked to get on his horse, and ride briskly out of town, over the old Trent Bridge, and up the winding way to his farm. Hillmartin was about three miles out, and stood on a fine, airy elevation, overlooking the country round, and from this side of it giving a full view of Castleborough. Simon’s farm lay a little over the hill beyond Hillmartin, and stretched in one direction towards Gotham, and in another towards the estate of Sir Benjamin Bullockshed.

Simon Degge’s purchase of this farm was a subject of great annoyance to Sir Benjamin, who was very anxious to have it, as it lay alongside of his woods and game preserves. The fact of seeing his pheasants, which had found a favourite, because a plentiful feeding-place, on this farm, shot down by Mr. Degge and his numerous friends from Castleborough, was, in truth, as great a misfortune as Sir Benjamin well could imagine to himself. For a quarter of a mile these woods of his ran along the corn-lands of this farm. The previous farmer had complained in vain of the depredations of the game—hares, rabbits and pheasants—which issued out of the preserves in legions. He was told that he must fence them out, but the fence was Sir Benjamin’s; and the farmer dared no more to put a stick into it to stop their runs, than he dared have taken a stick to Sir Benjamin himself. His growing corn was trodden down by the hares and rabbits; the hares, according to their habit, cut paths through it, and made playgrounds in it; the rabbits cropped it as fast as it grew for fifty yards, all along the woodsides. What escaped and went into ear was regularly eaten up by the pheasants. They sat on the hedges along the woodside as tame as barn-door fowls, knowing well that they were under powerful protection, and during harvest, if a daring waggoner snapped his whip at them, they disdained to move. On a fine afternoon, so long as there was anything to pick on the stubble, you might see them feeding in flocks of a hundred together, as quietly as fowls in a barn-yard.

The nuisance of this great game-manufactory, ruinous to the farmer, had compelled one tenant after another to throw the farm up. In fact, no one knowing the farm would take it; they were only men from a distance who did so, and were in terrible but vain trepidation when they discovered the real nature of the game-preserving incubus that lay upon the land. In itself the land was excellent, and, therefore, a stranger examining it, who had not already lived in a game-preserving country, was readily taken in by it. If the farmer, on discovering the alarming evil, complained, the answer from Sir Benjamin’s steward was, as I have said, “You can stop the runs in the hedges but if the farmer did stop them, he found the stoppage very soon removed by the keepers in their nocturnal rounds. One bold farmer had kept terriers to scour the woodsides; but he soon found his dogs, when they followed the game into the wood, shot, or trapped in the iron traps so freely used by our English gamekeepers, who are the greatest and most extensive animal torturers that the world ever knew.

The farm, belonging to a gentleman of Lincolnshire, he had, by the frequent change of tenants, grown out of love with it, and had offered it to Sir Benjamin at a moderate price; but Sir Benjamin, who did not believe any one thereabout would dare to come between him and the vendor, was standing out in the secure expectation of getting it at a very low figure, when Simon Degge, who was inquiring for such a farm, not far from town, heard of it from a lawyer in Castleborough who had carried on the negotiations with Sir Benjamin for the owner. This gentleman was much disgusted with the gross selfishness, the many delays, and haughty conduct of Sir Benjamin, and was delighted at the opportunity of putting the property at once and for ever out of his power. Mr. Degge closed with the conditions of sale at once, and as the whole of the purchase-money was ready, in a month the farm was fully conveyed to him, and put into his possession.

The consternation and indignation of Sir Benjamin on receiving this intelligence may be imagined. He saw at once that the tables were now most completely turned against him. He had no longer a half-informed and comparatively poor farmer to contend with, but a young man of great acknowledged ability and wealth, as well as activity of character. Instead of telling Mr. Degge to put sticks and bushes into the runs of the hares, rabbits, and pheasants, which his keepers could pull out again, he himself ordered the fences all along Mr. Degge’s farm to be made game-tight. A fence, inside the hawthorn-fence, of stakes about two feet long, which were driven down nearly in contact, side by side, was made to prevent egress from the preserves to the farm. But all this did not avail. The pheasants, as the corn ripened, flew over the fences, and fed freely on Mr. Degge’s corn. The hares travelled round and squatted themselves down thickly in the green crops of corn, grass, and clover; and the rabbits burrowed under, requiring continually the stopping of their holes: for although the rabbits were less cared for by Sir Benjamin, they were more cared for by his keepers, who made a profitable perquisite out of them.

On his part, Mr. Degge did not trouble himself at all about a certain amount of damage done by this game to his crops along the woodside; for the money value did not distress him, and he looked on that part of the farm as a nursery for the game which he meant to invite his Castleborough friends in the autumn to shoot.

But the annoyance to Sir Benjamin and his friends did not end here. Scattered about on that side of the country lay the estates of a number of squires—the Tenterhooks, Sheepshanks, Otterbrooks, Swagsides, &c.—who were of a thoroughly countryfied school. They were men not destitute of a certain amount of education, but who had no tastes beyond those of living on their property, and being the lords paramount as far as it extended. To be the great men of their little ancestral spots of earth; to rule over the farmers; to rear and destroy game; to officiate as magistrates, and convict poachers and petty culprits—that was the extent of their ambition. They seldom frequented the metropolis, or mixed in the society of the more elevated and refined aristocracy. They formed a circle of society of their own, looking proudly down on the moneyed men of the market town, on the farmers and villagers around them—at once ignorant of all superior knowledge, proud, and arbitrary.

That a man of the manufacturing town should have dared to step in, and catch away a valuable farm from before Sir Benjamin Bullockshed’s very nose, and, as they said, in actually gasping astonishment, whilst he was in negotiation for it, was a piece of audacity which really took away their breath. It was ominous of fresh attempts of the kind. The sanctity of the country and of game was no longer secure from the unhallowed inroads of plebeian audacity. Sir Roger Rockville, whose property also at one point came up to Mr. Degge’s farm, was in a state of most imbecile exasperation at this event. The dreaded manufacturing town was thus already marching into the very heart of the country; and of the manufacturing town, the very worst in his eyes of its odious population. For who was this Degge? he asked. A pauper, and the last of a long line of paupers. It mattered not that Mr. Degge had most fully discharged the pauper debt so far as this generation was concerned. To Sir Roger it was only another proof of the upstart pride and abundance of money of this dangerous class.

The sensation which this shocking event, as it was called, created in the whole circle of this squirearchy was visible at the meetings of these men of the earth, earthy, at their dinner-parties at each other’s houses, and at their meetings at the justice-rooms, and their morning rides to one another’s houses. A feeling of strange inveteracy was entertained against Simon Degge. If any of them met him on the highway as they rode to or from Castleborough, they scowled at him as though he had been a most suspicious character. More than once, when two of them were together, he had heard them remark to one another—for it was done loud enough for him to hear it—“That is that upstart pauper, Degge.” If any labourer of his could be caught on any pretence, and brought before them, as magistrates, he was sure to be handled with the utmost severity and the least possible modicum of justice; and when Mr. Degge went forward to speak a word in his defence, he was sure to be treated with a marked contempt, and even incivility.

This proceeding did not tend on Mr. Degge’s part to excite any pleasant feelings in his bosom towards these lords of the soil; but he maintained a demeanour of true gentlemanliness and self-respect. At the same time that he certainly felt a great satisfaction in the idea of the sweeping devastation of the game which he and his friends would make in the autumn, and which he was sure no precautions could prevent making its way to his fields so long as there was a better pasture there, or whilst he scattered a quantity of barley on his stubbles, after the corn naturally shed on them had been gathered off by the pheasants.

Such was the state of feelings all round Simon Degge’s new farm. So far as he himself was concerned, it seemed only to amuse him and his town friends, but to the whole squiral group, including Sir Roger Rockville, it was an acute, and promised to become a chronic condition of gall and wormwood. Mr. Degge brought his mother to live at the house belonging to the farm, for she delighted in the country;—not at the farm-house, for there he had a bailiff, but in a large old house at the village of Hillmartin itself, with a fine old-fashioned garden; and there himself and Mrs. Degge spent a great deal of the fine summer weather.

Simon Degge had also removed William Watson from his cottage by the farm meadow, and from his trade, and he was now acting as a sort of orderly at Mr. Degge’s chief manufactory. He occupied the lodge, and walked about, and saw that all was safe, and moving as it should do.

There were several wealthy and intelligent families in the neighbourhood of Mr. Degge’s farm, who, however, at once acknowledged the distinguished merit and virtues of this young man, and who did not hesitate to call on him and Mrs. Degge, much to the disgust of the class of country gentlemen of whom I have spoken. These, it must be admitted, had indeed little in common with men of game and warrants, and did not stand very highly in their favour before. Let us see whether they may not present a more agreeable aspect to us.

CHAPTER IV.

THE WOODBURNS AND THEIR NEIGHBOURS.

Amongst the families which called on the Degges was that of Mr. Leonard Woodburn, of Woodburn Grange. The Woodburns did not belong to the so-called great families of the county, but to those of smaller but independent estate, whose heads were formerly classed under the name of yeomen. Mr. Woodburn was the possessor of about four hundred acres of freehold land, beautifully situated about a mile beyond Rockville, in the vicinity of the Trent, and beautifully cultivated. The house was one of those old Elizabethan ones with a variety of projections, pointed gables, and mullioned windows. The chimneys were of the cross-banded and ornamented kind which are now regarded as extremely beautiful, and, indeed, they had been thought so a good while ago, for the father of Sir Thomas Tenterhook, when rebuilding Tenterhook Hall, had asked the father of the present Mr. Woodburn if he had any objection to sell them. A proposal, which Mr. Woodburn had with true yeoman feeling of independence, regarded as so great an insult, that he turned his back on the baronet as he sat at his gate on horseback, and in presence of his groom, and closing the gate pretty sharply, walked into the house without deigning a reply.

The present Mr. Woodburn, who had been the only son, was a man of a liberal education, fond of classical literature, and more deeply learned in all the history, both general and family, of the county, than any other man in it. Nay, there was scarcely a family of any note in England of which he did not possess a knowledge which continually surprised you. He had a real love for topography and family history, which had led him, as it would seem, insensibly to acquire not only this knowledge of domestic annals, but of the titles of almost all the estates in the county, many copies of which, curious and important in their way, he possessed; and this knowledge made him a great authority in cases of disputed title, and had led him to decide the issue of several most noted trials. He had a habit also of noting down all sorts of curious facts which came to his knowledge either in the course of his reading of books, or of the newspapers, or which he heard verbally. These curiosa had accumulated into several volumes, which he kept locked up in his desk, and which he would bring out occasionally as something of public interest was occurring, or as something in conversation had suggested the reference. A somewhat odd medley a stranger would have regarded the contents of these volumes, for amongst public and important facts, would be found jotted down birth-days, dates of weddings, and funerals of his family or neighbours; and even remarkable cases of prolificness of fowls, cattle, and fruit-trees on his farm. There was an entry of the turkey, or the hen that had laid away in the copse or the thicket, and came forth unexpectedly with some fifteen or twenty pouts, or chickens. The tame hawk, which was reared by George, his son, and suddenly flying away, became not only wild, but the scourge of his poultry-yard, by making continual visits to it, till at length shot, stands in immediate succession to the history of the lawyer of the neighbouring town, who, reared at the cost of the clergyman of Cotmanhaye, whose shoeblack and errand boy he had originally been, had grown rich by harassing the poor people of the country round by all sorts of vexatious suits.

Mr. Woodburn was a quiet gentleman, of somewhat above the middle stature, now approaching fifty. He would not at that time of day have been addressed by letter as esquire, though every man who is not exactly a sweep or a costermonger is so now. He would be written down, however, Leonard Woodburn of Woodburn, gent., in any public document, or county summons on judicial service. Mr. Woodburn might be seen daily riding on a good sturdy horse about his farm, and in harvest time he did not hesitate to take a hand at raking or forking in the hay-field, or binding after his reapers in the corn-field; and on such occasions his children would turn out for a frolic, rather than for serious work. His harvest done, Leonard Woodburn shot over his own land, accompanied by his son George, now just come of age, and who was treading in his father’s steps, being fond of both agricultural pursuits and of the gun.

Mrs. Woodburn was a fine, large, comely woman, who, though as well educated as the ladies generally of her day, and fond of hearing books read in winters’ evenings rather than reading them herself, had her heart and pride in her house and her dairy. Churning, cheese-making, looking after her fowls, her eggs, her calves, and pigs, and pigeons, her ducks, geese, turkeys, guinea-fowls, her fruit both of garden and orchard, storing it up, or preserving it; these were the great business of her daily life, and afforded her a perpetual satisfaction. It was a real delight to see Mrs. Woodburn amid her daily duties of this kind, with her handsome, sunny, smiling face, and tall and ample but active figure, directing her maids, or helping even in an emergency, or, to instruct a novice, kneeling on a soft bass, leaning over the side of the large brass pan, with her fair, full, and finely rounded arms bared to near the shoulder, crushing down the curd in the whey, or crumbling it and pressing it into the vat. Or you might see her surrounded by a large flock of glossy pigeons in the farm-yard, who had descended from their tower surmounting one of the buildings to receive her daily bounty. Not that Mrs. Woodburn deemed it her express duty to feed any of the farm-yard creatures; that belonged to the men-folk, who not only foddered horses and cows, but fed pigs and poultry, and the pigeons came down quickly and put in for their share with the numerous and scuffling family of ducks, geese, turkeys, and all the rest of them.

It was the custom of farm-houses, and the custom reigned at Woodburn Grange, for the mistress of the house to receive the profits on pigs, calves and poultry, with all their eggs, feathers, or other appurtenances. These were her perquisites, with the butter, in most cases, to furnish her wardrobe and for spending money. It was, therefore, natural that the farmer’s wife should keep a patronising eye on the creatures within her province, and Mrs. Woodburn thus frequently made her visit to the farm-yard; saw whether the pigs were well fed and bedded, and that all the feathered flocks in the yard, or in the paddock, or on the pond were prosperous. The dairymaid fed the calves till they were ready for the butcher, or to be turned out into the orchard, where they at first galloped with cocked tails, to and fro, with a frantic velocity that made it marvellous that they did not crack their silly, but joyful skulls against the trees. For some time after their liberation from the calf-house to daylight and freedom, they were the dairymaid’s care, and Mrs. Woodburn taking her rambles through the ample kitchen-garden, could stand and survey the infant herd with professional and a sort of motherly satisfaction.

Besides their son George, the Woodburns had two daughters, the elder one, who was really the oldest of the three children, was the sedate, but kindly Ann. Ann at this epoch was four or five-and-twenty: of middle stature, an extremely neat figure; of a very sweet, serious countenance. Quiet, thoughtful, very prudent in her disposition, but with warm and deep, but not demonstrative feelings. Ann loved music, and played well on the piano, on which she was frequently called to charm away the evening hours when the family was assembled. She was fond of reading, but not of a very wide range of literature. She had her favourite books of poetry and piety in her own room, and had the strongest attachment to certain authors. They were those who touched her heart rather than excited her imagination, and their thoughts and sentiments were familiar to her mind as her own thoughts. In the light literature of the day she took comparatively little interest, though she was ever ready to read to her mother what she liked. Ann devoted herself to the cares of the house, but not of the farm. She saw that the meals were all duly prepared and served: saw that all the rooms were kept in nicest order; helped often to make a pudding or a pie, and took care, if guests were expected, that all was in order to receive and entertain them. Besides these duties, Ann loved the garden, rejoiced in tending the flowers, and looking after the bees, which had a large shed, and occupied several shelves in it with their hives towards the lower and sunniest corner of the garden. Such was Ann, quiet, cheerful, loving, and busy, but never bustling. Every one relied much on her clear, good sense and loving interest in them: every one consulted her in their difficulties, and received from her almost invariably, the very wisest counsels. Mr. Woodburn said Ann was like many other still waters, she was deep, and his familiar name for her was, “Old Sobersides.”

The last of the flock was the lively, laughing Letitia, seldom called anything but Letty. Sweet Letty was about seventeen; with all the vivacity, and eager frank life of a schoolgirl. In fact, she was that till the other day. Now, she was the sunshine, the flying, quivering sunshine called Jack-a-dandy, sent by reflection from a basin of water over walls and ceilings in blithest dance. Letty, like the Jack-a-dandy, was here and there, in the house, in the garden, full of joy and love of all things around her; with a face more charming than beautiful, all smiles and frolic, Letty was ready to lend a helping hand to her mother or sister; full of talk and question, making every one glad with her own gladness, and ready to take a stroll or a ride with her father or George, and to astonish them with the frank, open, genuine expressions of her young and innocent heart. Everything they told her of the people or the things amid which they lived interested her, and any relation of cruel or unkind treatment of any one, fetched up the colour of a most lovely roseate indignation to her young, pure cheek, and the warmest expressions of it to her tongue. Such was blithe Letty—simple, yet shrewd, loving and light-hearted, the happy embodiment of ardent and out-blossoming womanhood.

But Woodburn Grange was a spot made for a happy home, for substantial ease and abundance, not for grandeur. There was everything there which enabled its possessors to enjoy the country. A handsome income; all the rural luxuries of life; horses, an open, but not a close carriage, a boat on the charming river below, hearts ready to love good and intelligent neighbours, and such neighbours to love.

The old house stood in its ample gardens. A low brick wall, surmounted by a hedge of roses fenced it in from the road, which ran by from the village to Cotmanhaye, and further up the valley. A straight walk led up to the handsome, ample porch—you could not enter the garden in a carriage, but must walk up it,—in summer, amid a glow and perfume of flowers and a murmur of bees, and a flickering dance of butterflies, that was delicious. Around and beyond the house extended the flower-garden with evergreens, and here and there a fruit-tree. Then down the slope stretched the kitchen-garden, with its tall south fruit wall, with its trellises of roses and jasmines bordering beds of raspberries and gooseberries. Its abundant growth of peas, beans, and all vegetables, its asparagus beds, strawberry beds, beds of salsify and scorzonera; its quince and medlar and filbert trees. Then, below still, stretched an old orchard, with seats here and there under its trees, some of the old trees stooping one way, some another; and at the bottom ran the Trent, in phrase of Christopher North, “one of the sincerest streams in England.”

Tolerably elevated stood the house, overlooking undulating fields, studded with cattle and sheep, or waving with corn, the patrimonial estate, and beyond them the woods of Cotmanhaye, and across the river an expanse of level meadows of some miles in width, with the ruddy walls of the village of Breton bounding them. On the other hand, southward, rose a range of sand cliffs, at the foot of which ran the highway from Rockville to Cotmanhaye, and still beyond the cliffs, and the patches of trees on their brow, rose the country to the large farming village of Hillmartin.

Leonard Woodburn, of Woodburn Grange, though styled but yeoman, had a homestead which a king might envy, and when Simon and Mrs. Degge returned the Woodburns’ call, they could not sufficiently express their delight at it, and went over the house and the cheese-chamber, with its growing display of goodly cheeses, over the farm-yard, and through garden and orchard. They were charmed with the view from the windows, which were different from their own, and no less with the kindly intelligence of the Woodburns themselves, free, simple, and at ease; and inly promised themselves much pleasure in their friendship, which they resolved to cultivate.

Before rambling farther in our discoveries in this neighbourhood, we have still a friend of ours to introduce at the Grange, and then a promenade to make through the village—at least to make a passing note of it, and say, “Here lives so-and-so, and there lives somebody else.” Our acquaintance at the Grange is only a servant, however. It is Betty Trapps, a sort of miscellany of housemaid and cook, in past days adding something of the nurse to the rest of her duties. Betty has lived with the Woodburns since she was five-and-twenty, and she is now—let me see—what? Five-and thirty? Yes—she has lived at least fifteen years at the Grange, and that makes her—upon my word!—forty! And yet Betty does not look more than five-and-thirty. She is middle-sized, middle-bulkish in body, but lithe and active. Never idle, never weary, never ill, never grumbling, but with a wit and a will of her own, and always ready to give, as she says, as good as she gets. In fact, they must be awake that venture on a jest or trick with Betty. She is the freest of free-spoken women: Mr. Woodburn, who likes a good-natured nickname, calls her “Meg Merrymouth.” She says often what she thinks—almost unmercifully; and yet Betty is full of kindness, and is knowing and shrewd. There is nobody thereabout that can see half so thoroughly through those she comes into contact with. But we shall see Betty Trapps again, for she says she means to stay at the Grange as long as there is a tile on the house, unless Master should discharge her for chaffing a little, and she does not think he will. And she has given a good many proofs that she means to keep her word, for Betty is a Methodist, and is a woman of consequence at chapel and at the class, and has had a good many offers of marriage from the brethren, some very well to do; and Betty has so far always said, “No, thank you.” Civilly, be it understood, and as secretly as possible, for she does not really, smart as she is sometimes, like to hurt any one’s feelings. But Betty is shrewdly supposed to have saved a pretty little stock of money, having lived so long in a good place, and never indulged in finery, and the brethren may not be always so easily rebuffed, for this is one of those charms which continue growing even when others fade. However, the tiles on Woodburn Grange are extremely good yet, so we shall see.

A little above Woodburn Grange, and nearer to Rockville, lies the village of Woodburn. It is not very large, and chiefly built round a spacious green, on which the young men in summer evenings enjoy their games of cricket, ninepins, bowls, and quoits. At the corner where the road enters the green from Rockville, and, of course, from Castleborough, stands the blacksmith’s shop, where frequently two or three farm-horses stand waiting to be shod; and a number of ploughs and harrows lie expecting repairs. There the sturdy smith, Job Latter, is generally found working and perspiring, and conversing with a number of village-lads and young men hanging about, whom he contrives to disperse when they incommode him, by rubbing his hot iron in his heap of sand, and thus sending a storm of burning stars in every direction, that makes a sudden scamper. Not far thence, a congregation of dilapidated carts, waggons, and disabled wheels, mark the shop of Will Spokeshave, the wainwright. In the centre of the south side of the green, rises a somewhat large old house with porch and tall gabled roof, which is the village school, frequented, more particularly in winter, by the farmers’ and labourers’ sons of the neighbourhood. This school has now for master a worthy half-Welshman, named Howell Crusoe (after his mother and father), a man noted far around as “a great scollard”—a very great, long-headed “scollard.” He has written a book to teach boys good manners, and a genuine curiosity it is in its way; and his profound acquaintance with the customs of polite society may be at once discerned by the following rules in this his “Book of Etiquette for Boys”—a work now become very rare, yet of which an odd, and it must be admitted, a very odd copy, may now and then be met with on the shelves of the bookworms of Castleborough:—“When a gentleman or lady speaks to you”—thus teaches Howell Crusoe boy-etiquette—“immediately touch your forehead with the back of your right hand; then place three fingers of the same hand between the buttons of the centre of your waistcoat, and expect the observations of your superior in an attitude of easy but respectful attention. At any remark of the respected lady or gentleman, incline your head with a graceful dignity, and scrape backward with your left foot. Whenever you are asked to sit down in company, place one leg over the other; rest your elbow on the elevated knee, repose your chin on the hand of the same arm, with two fingers extended upright between your cheek and your ear. In an attitude at once so easy and so graceful, await the wisdom which is sure to fall from beauty, learning, and experience, and hoard up the precious results for the future occasions of life, as the busy bee hoards up the honey of spring for the winter of age.”

A company of boys educated by Crusoe, or on Crusoe’s plan, seated round a room in his most approved attitude, must have been a pleasing sight!

Crusoe is the oracle of the “Grey Goose,” the public-house opposite; for he has a number of theories which he there defends against all comers, and very few comers, it may be supposed, ever go away having won any sort of advantage over the erudite Howell Crusoe.

Howell has distinguished himself in his determined onslaughts on bull-baiting, dog-fighting, badger-baiting, cock-fighting, and the like; and has been supported in these eventually successful achievements by Jasper Heritage, David Qualm, and Sylvanus Crook, persons as yet unknown to the reader, but to whom I most probably shall, by permission, very soon introduce them. Howell does not find, however, that he can altogether dispense with boy-baiting, or beating with his cane. He manages to frighten the young ones, nevertheless, by threatening to “look over their heads to the wall,” which has something awful in it to their imaginations; and he thinks, in time, cudgels may be used to drive beasts with, and boys be ruled by appealing to what Sylvanus Crook calls their “inner man.” Howell Crusoe is also secretary of both men and women’s clubs, and is much disgusted with the drunkenness displayed by these members at Whitsuntide; finds, indeed, he has a rude and uncouth generation to deal with, and makes but little progress in refining them. In a word, Howell Crusoe is an out-and-out social reformer.

Not far from the village on the Rockville-road, you see a large pair of gates, a capacious lodge with flowering plants in the windows, and under one of them a little wooden trough, very much resembling a pig-trough. It is, in fact, a trough which Sylvanus Crook, the good Quaker, who lives at this gentleman’s lodge, has set there for the refreshment of dogs, having often seen them passing with lolling tongues, and eyes anxiously cast about for water. Sylvanus soon had his first trough stolen, but this he has secured by stout iron fastenings to the wall, and he trusts that he relieves much canine discomfort. He says, indeed, that he has never had the pleasure of seeing a dog drink at it; neither has Dorothy, his wife; but he hopes they do. At least they have the opportunity.

But this lodge is but the entrance to the extensive grounds and house of Jasper Heritage, the wealthy Quaker banker of Castleborough. Enter; advance up the well-kept carriage-drive, and very soon you will see standing on an open, level, extensive lawn, a very large square brick house. It is one of the country houses so frequently seen, which are built at no expense of architecture whatever. It is as simple and as exactly square as any box or square block of stone that you can see anywhere. Take a good, big deal box, chalk on it a door in the centre, and two or three rows of windows, and a parapet-wall at the top, showing no roof, and then you have the exact representation of some hundreds, or, indeed, thousands of houses which raise themselves as proudly on the soil of England, as if they boasted all the architectural graces ever displayed. And truly they are houses capable of lodging and entertaining a great number of people in the perfection of comfort. They are ample, convenient, and opulent abodes of opulent families, though they look so cubical and featureless outside. This house of Mr. Jasper Heritage, is, moreover, made somewhat attractive by such ornaments as the very simple taste of its owner could, or perhaps would, give it. It has an ample portico on plain Tuscan pillars; a broad flight of easy stone steps up to it; a very highly-burnished brass-knocker and bell-handle; and in a row under the windows, a range of splendid orange-trees in large square tubs, and a fountain in the centre of the lawn, which plays on particular occasions. Right and left you see broad, exquisitely rolled gravel walks going off into very tempting-looking shrubberies and gardens. Ah! it will be a great treat to penetrate in there, and see all the lawns and alleys, and gardens, ponds, and conservatories, and snug summer-houses in corners, which give you from a second storey a prospect over the country round. But we must come again some day for that. We shall get an invitation. Now it is enough to say, that in that house is not Jasper Heritage; he is just now at his bank in Castleborough, whither his coachman, Sylvanus Crook, also a Friend, and dressed in the plainest drab, with the most approved cocked-hat and knee-breeches of that society, and that day, has driven him, and will fetch him back, at four o’clock, in the handsome, roomy dark-green family carriage, without, I may add, the slightest vanity of coat-of-arms, crest, or any such badge of a worldly pride. At home, are—but not to be intruded upon by us at this moment, for they are busy cutting out a very multitude of clothes for the Dorcas Society—yes, there are Rebecca Heritage, the wealthy banker’s wife, and Millicent Heritage, the fair and only child of this wealthy banker—only think of that! What! you say, is the young lady handsome? Oh, don’t be so curious! Wait a bit. I will tell you about the mother first. Mrs. Rebecca Heritage is a lady of apparently forty-five. She is not very tall, she is not very short, she is not very thin, nor very stout; but she is fair, very fair, yet with dark hair neatly laid back from the centre of the forehead under a very white and very plain Quaker cap. A silk gown she wears—pale very dovelike silk; a white muslin handkerchief covers her shoulders and bosom, and she has extremely well-cut features. Her nose is perfect. Her eyes blue-grey, large, and thoughtful. Her forehead is broad and ample, and, in a word, she looks like a grave and comely duchess dressed up for a female Friend in a domestic theatrical. In that noble face—in that smooth, soft, yet healthy face—where no approach to a wrinkle, one thinks, would ever dare to come—there is a thought, a spirit, a fire—yes, a fire—even in the calm that rules all in that tranquil aspect. Depend upon it, Rebecca Heritage is no common woman. She is like one of those women Friends, who used to enter Whitehall, and tell the king-destroyer Cromwell or the laughing, reckless Charles II., in tones that made them still as children, of the oppression of the saints which they were perpetrating; of the foul and hideous dungeons in which they were holding those whose only crime was a religion of peace. There! if you want the picture of a mother in Israel—of a brave, self-possessed, yet loving and large-hearted woman—send for a painter, and let him pourtray Rebecca Heritage.

But I see you glancing aside from this figure of heroic piety and peace to that gentle creature at her side. Lovely, modest, retiring Millicent. So rich, and yet nature has heaped all those other riches upon her. Look at that very fair face, at those clear blue eyes, and yet shaded by such long dark eye-lashes, such finely-arched jetty eye-brows and hair. Why it is not an English, but a genuine Eastern beauty. That form and face were evidently made for an Asiatic palace, and they are here, in a Quaker house, and busy in cutting out jackets and petticoats for the squalid brats of the next town. Come away! It is too dangerous here. I must show you Still Lodge, it is just outside the grounds here. There! You see it—a genuine little wrens nest: and in it dwells David Qualm, the brother-in-law of Jasper Heritage, and Dorothy Qualm, his wife. Oh, most peaceable and peace-loving people! You will come again,—don’t linger. Remember when you inquire for the house of Jasper Heritage, it is called Fair-Manor.

One more introduction, and then enough for the present. We must now turn back, pass through the villages of Rockville and Woodburn, give a nod to pleasant Woodburn Grange as we pass, and so on a mile farther, skirting the feet of the sand-cliffs, till we stand on a fine mount with a modern-looking mansion, also of brick; they all are so round about here. This mansion is the seat of Sir Emanuel Clavering, a baronet of an old family. Finely stands the house with its large bay windows looking out on its velvet lawn, from the soft, smooth turf of which spring stately elms and ashes, with that luxury of neatness which only aristocratic trees can wear. Finely sweep the swelling slopes of the hill down to the river, which there takes a superb bend, and across it the eye runs on to distant towers, and masses of woods, and clumps of pine-clad hills high and dark. Near the house stands the picturesque parsonage, half covered with ivy, and here and there a cottage, and that is Cotmanhaye—there is no village. Opposite to the house southward, or south-west, rises a still higher range of hills, and on climbing that, you behold another landscape, vast and varied, villages, farms, and woods.

Sir Emanuel Clavering is a tall gentlemanly man of sixty. All who know him declare him a man of very pleasant manners, extremely well read; fond of poetry, but of the Pope school, which he declares to be the only polished and correct one; and given to astronomical, and it is said abstruse studies. There is a small tower at some distance on the ridge of the hill, which he uses as an observatory. In his youth he was away, no one knows where, for a space of seven years. Those who have seen him often and inspected him closely, assert that the gristle of his nose is bored, as savages bore theirs to insert a feather or a flower. Hence, there is a popular story—an imagination, for Sir Emanuel has never been known to utter a word to his most intimate friends, either of this curious fact, or of the sojourn of those years. The country people talk fluently by their firesides of Sir Emanuel in his wild youth as the head of some wild race, the lord of some dark-eyed, dark-skinned princess. They have romanced out a grand story of his leading the devoted natives to battle, with all the terrors of European arms, and winning great victories and domains for them. They account for his return by the death of his princess, a creature of wondrous beauty, and by the natural longings for one’s native land. Not a syllable of this story has a basis of ascertained fact, not the ground of a single allusion the most distant; all those years are a blank to every one but Sir Emanuel himself. Nothing more is known than that he returned to find his father dead, and his younger brother, the rector, holding the estate for him. He had neither brother nor sister besides Thomas the rector. In a few years, during which he was about a great deal in London, and from which gentlemen of his own tastes sometimes came down and shut themselves up for days with him in his tower, and were seen riding about with him, Sir Emanuel married. Not, however, one of the daughters of any of the neighbouring aristocratic families, but the daughter of the bailiff of his estate. His wife had still fewer relatives than himself, she had no brother or sister. She was a naturally fine woman, and bore her elevation with modesty and good sense. The habits of Sir Emanuel became more secluded than before. The neighbouring families rarely called on him. His life was chiefly spent in prosecuting the studies of his tower, in field sports, in fishing, and in occasional visits to the metropolis.

Such a character was sure to become the object of the most extraordinary rumours in the country round. His astronomical studies, his frequent walks at midnight to his solitary tower, followed by two large black dogs, his being seen by the keepers sometimes wrapped in his cloak, silently pacing along that bleak and elevated ridge in darkness and in the wildest tempests, was enough to add in the popular mind, to his astronomy, other and darker studies. The peasantry universally believed that he dealt in the black art; they asserted that he had been seen at the same hour in two different places thirty miles apart; they said that there was nothing lost anywhere in the neighbourhood but he would say, immediately on hearing of it, where it was, or who had got it; and that he was always right. He always told the farmers what sort of a summer or winter it would be, which was certain to take place; and he had been known on hearing of a wedding, whether in high or low life, to shake his head and say that would not be lucky, and it never was. All these things he probably pronounced from the simple sources of natural sagacity and extended knowledge, perfectly legitimate in its character; but the people far around took another and more mysterious view of it. They observed that though his brother was the clergyman, and the living belonging to the family, he rarely appeared at church; and the peasantry when they saw him felt a secret terror, though he always accosted them most kindly; was always cheerful, and even jocose, and never heard of a case of distress which he did not send to relieve.

Sir Emanuel, contrary to his wont, called on the Degges, and they returned his call, curious to make the acquaintance of a man of so peculiar a reputation. They were greatly struck with the polished friendliness of his manner, his frank cordiality, and his superior intelligence. He assured them that he had great pleasure in the prospect of cultivating their friendship. Lady Clavering had been deceased some years; he had but one son, Henry Clavering, who had been the school-fellow of George Woodburn, at Repton, and who was on terms of great friendship with all the family at Woodburn Grange.

And thus I have presented a few of the leading dramatis personæ; others are waiting in the side-scenes ready to make their appearance.

CHAPTER V.

BETTY TRAPPS COMES TO NOTICE.

The life of Rockville, Woodburn, and their vicinities presented little to chronicle for some time. Simon Degge was angrily commented upon by the neighbouring squirearchy, for having thrown open the game on his estate to the farmers. “This is the way,” they said at their mutual dinners, “with these plebeians. Having no taste for gentlemanly sport themselves, they would like to see it annihilated, and the landed proprietors reduced for amusement to flocking to Castleborough, and winding cotton-balls, or manufacturing stockings.” This idea was very much applauded, and made the ladies of the county very merry. “We must all go to help the gentlemen,” they said, “and seam hose, and help to ‘take in.’” Mr. Markham, the rector of Rockville, though agreeing with his landed friends in the main idea, said he was bound to say that Mr. Degge was rather a keen sportsman, and a prodigious good shot. He had seen him drop his birds right and left in a most masterly way; where he had picked up the skill rather puzzled him. Certainly, it could not come by nature, as Dogberry thought reading and writing did; but it must be admitted that he was a prodigiously clever man. And, in fact, unless he had been, how could he have got on so?

“How do good-looking fellows manage to marry rich heiresses?” asked Sir Benjamin Bullockshed.

“Ah, well; but that was not altogether the way that Mr. Degge had mounted into such fortune. No, no; it was too well known that he had got rich before he got the rich wife. He was not going to be the panegyrist of Degge; he did not approve of letting either farmers or hosiers loose on the game. By no means; and, besides, Degge had no taste at all for coursing, nor for hunting.”

“How should he?” asked Sir Thomas Tenterhook. “Probably, in his younger days he might manage to leap over a counter, but I should like to see him take a good hawthorn fence with a ditch on the other side, or a five-barred gate.”

“But he could do it; nay, I have seen him do it,” said Mr. Markham, “in riding over his farm one day; and if he had hunted all his life, he could not have shown himself more at home in the saddle.”

“Gad! Markham,” said Sir Thomas, “but Degge has turned your head marvellously in a very little time. Why, you are a regular trumpeter for him. By your account he is possessed of all the graces and endowments of a specimen man.”

“Oh! don’t you believe it, Sir Thomas. It is nonsense,” replied Mr. Markham; “it is useless to deny what is plain to everybody; but I join you in all you say of Degge’s vulgar impudence in presuming to snatch a property, as it were, out of the hands of such a gentleman as Sir Benjamin Bullockshed, and in letting loose half the hosiers of Castleborough on Sir Benjamin’s game.”

“On Sir Benjamin’s game!” said Sir Roger Rockville; “on all our game. He has encouraged the poachers to an audacity never known before. They all say, ‘There, Mr. Degge has shown his sense. He knows that game is everybody’s.’ Our keepers have now no rest day nor night. The fields, the woods, the copses swarm with poachers. After them, and they are over the hedges into Degge’s land, and touch ’em there who dare. Sooner than we should convict them, he would give every man of them a keeper’s licence. That arch scamp, Joe Scammell, I am told, sends cart-loads of hares and pheasants to Castleborough every week. Can no one lay hold of that fellow? His offences are now so many, he might be transported.”

“But what matters half-a-dozen Scammells being sent out of the country,” said Sir Thomas Tenterhook, “when every labourer or artizan is encouraged by the example of Degge, who is only a poacher on a larger scale? They preach that all must live. Now let me tell you something. Close to my estate, and by the high road to Castleborough, there lives a shoemaker, in a village, who was had up and fined for shooting a hare in his garden last winter but one. That fellow the very next season took out a licence, for the right of a shot over his own garden, and he could not be turned out of it. So Degge made him one of his keepers, and thus qualified him; and all this last autumn and winter, he has sat at his window and shot my hares and pheasants. Not content with daylight, he has kept this fine game by moonlight. Gad! the fellow is making a little fortune out of it.”

There was a universal murmur of indignation at such an instance of unheard-of audacity.

“Yes,” said Sir Benjamin Bullockshed, “that is precisely the case in point. My game is drained off by constantly getting into some one of Degge’s fields, and being killed by one of his stocking-weaver acquaintances. I say, Mr. Markham, spite of your praises of Simon Degge, the man is a nuisance, a sheer, intolerable unmitigated nuisance.”

“Hear! hear!” resounded round the dinner-table, in which Mr. Markham, rather alarmed for his reputation, joined; and the ladies rose, to retire to the drawing-room, expressing their hearty approbation.

Simon Degge, meantime, did not trouble himself about these wrathful comments upon him in the neighbouring great houses. He had the pleasure of hearing all throughout Hillmartin, that the people there were highly pleased with the check he had given to Sir Benjamin Bullockshed, whose injustice to the farmers of this farm had been a subject of indignant comment for years. As his crops grew, he fenced off what he wanted to secure from the game, with a wire fencing, which he found perfectly effectual, leaving a considerable strip along the woodsides to the depredations of these creatures. When the harvest was got, he removed his wire-fence, and allowed the game to wander anywhere, and all autumn and winter he found an abundant supply for himself and friends, who had thus a great inducement to come out from Castleborough for a good day’s shooting every now and then. This was not less irritating to the Bullocksheds and Rockvilles, than it was delightful to the people and farmers all round, who not daring to open their mouths, yet saw with evident satisfaction this poetical justice executed on men who had never shown the least sense of justice in their own conduct whenever game was concerned.

The objects of social improvement which interested Mr. and Mrs. Degge in Castleborough, were introduced by them into the little arena of Hillmartin. The condition of the poor was looked into, and their distresses relieved. Their children were afforded a good school, and many a comfort flowed unostentatiously into the homes of the aged or the sick that was never known before.

Thus a new link was established between town and country, which, though it did not extend to the Bullocksheds and Rockvilles, did extend to the Woodburns, the Claverings, and some other county families. By the intercourse of the Degges, the Woodburns, the Heritages, and the Claverings, Sir Emanuel and his brother Thomas, the rector of Cotmanhaye, his wife and son, a very charming little circle was formed, in which English country life presented its most genial aspect. After a few formal visits and dinings, Mr. and Mrs. Degge began by degrees, one or other of them, or both together, to drop in at Woodburn Grange unceremoniously, and the Woodburns at Hillmartin. Simon Degge was glad to have something regarding his farm or country concerns to ask Mr. Woodburn about, and to take a ride with Leonard Woodburn when he went to superintend his own farm. Sometimes they extended their ride to Cotmanhaye Manor, and had a chat with Sir Emanuel, or, if he were absent, with the rector, who was a zealous farmer himself, and rented a large farm of his brother, on which his only son, Charles, resided, a couple of miles off. They always found Sir Emanuel extremely affable and even jocosely kind, and always familiar with all the topics of the day, whether political or concerning the affairs of the country round. His peeps into the worlds of the heavens did not seem to render him in the least indifferent to or unobservant of what passed in this. He never obtruded the display of his extensive knowledge of foreign countries, or of men and things in the great world of London and the nation at large, but these were frequently showing themselves in incidental remarks on the topics under discussion. Frequently he ordered his horse and accompanied them in their ride, and during the winter he invited them to join him in snipe and woodcock shooting, these birds abounding in some swampy places on his property, as did wild geese and ducks about the reedy back-waterings of the river. On these occasions he not only showed himself a dead shot, but careless of weather and capable of enduring amazing exertion.

The festivities of the winter brought these families much together. Woodburn Grange presented all the genial and gay abundance of fare—fat turkeys and geese, mince-pies, pork-pies, possets, and a world of light delicacies, blazing fires, and country sports and dances, even blind-man’s-buff, turn-trencher, and other romps, which had been preserved at the Grange from father to son as essential customs of country-life. These had a novelty, and, therefore, a greater charm for the young people from the town, than the more ordinary dinner-parties and dances of the great halls. Even Sir Emanuel Clavering became a laughing boy again at the rural revels of the Grange, and vied with the lightsome, butterfly gaiety of Letty, amid these domestic saturnalia. Sir Emanuel even opened his house to several gay parties, and embellished his handsome suite of rooms with a display of arms of richest and quaintest workmanship, caskets of ivory of most delicate carvings, and others inlaid with jewels and gold, with silken draperies of richest colours and strange devices, and china jars and vessels, some of stupendous size, and most superb forms, and painted enamelings. He himself moved everywhere amongst his guests, as affable, kind, gracefully courteous and cordial, as if he, too, never studied anything but to enjoy his fortune and position as a finished gentleman. Except his brother and his brother’s wife, he was now alone in his house, for his son was and had been some time abroad. All were charmed with Sir Emanuel, and wondered that he had spent so secluded a life in the country. Perhaps the cause was not far to seek, when it was recollected that Sir Roger Rockville, the Bullocksheds, and Tenterhooks had been his chief neighbours.

As the winter passed, and the spring days grew in warmth and pleasantness, the intercourse of these families grew too. Mr. and Mrs. Degge would call and join the young people of the Grange in their walks or rides, and Mrs. Degge would drop in and have a pleasant chat with Mrs. Woodburn, Ann, and Letty, as they went on with their different concerns. The great concern of Letty, indeed, seeming to be to laugh and chatter, as if there were no such things as care or matter-of-fact duty in the world. She had to show Mrs. Degge the herds of young ducks and chickens, the birds’ nests in curious places in the garden, the dogs, and the rabbits kept in the hutches, as if she had been an actual boy, and to the evident delight of their visitor, while a flood of intervening small-talk produced bursts of merry laughter, which, reaching the house, made the graver mother exclaim, “What can that girl be about?”

A great variety in this little circle was furnished by the Friends’ family of the Heritages. It was not the custom of these worthy Friends to give festive parties, nor did they frequent those of their neighbours, if there was to be much worldly amusement, especially of dancing, cards, or the like. They preferred to make familiar calls during the day, on which occasions they were always extremely friendly, and as pleasantly cheerful as any people in the world, but always with a certain substratum of gravity and soberness. These visits were generally made by Mrs. Heritage and her daughter Millicent. The mother was sure to ask about what she saw going on in farming household affairs. In winter she was very much interested in Betty Trapps’s spinning-wheel, which, when she had nothing else very pressing, was sure to be humming away in the warm, clean house-place, as it was called, a sort of intermediate room between the kitchen and the parlour, where the farm-men and the servants took their meals, and where Mr. Woodburn furnished them with suitable books for their evening’s reading in winter, but where the men generally stretched their legs before the blazing fire, and dropped asleep, and then stole off to bed. Betty Trapps greatly amused the Heritage ladies, mother and daughter, with her country shrewdness and plain-spokenness.

“Dost thou manage to get good tow?” asked Mrs. Heritage, one day.

“Oh, yes,” Betty said, “as good as I expect.”

“Dost thou not expect it to be good, then?” asked Mrs. Heritage.

“Yes, I expect it,” said Betty, “because I look pretty sharp after it. They wunna readily find a norp[1] in me.”

“Surely,” said Mrs. Heritage, “there cannot be much cheating in tow?”

“There are tricks in all trades,” said Betty, dryly, “and there are tricks in tow. I get mine from Widow Pechell, in Hillmartin, and as I scrutinised it pretty closely when I first went to her shop, says Mrs. Pechell, ‘Ay, thou may look, lass, but nobody is ever deceived in my tow, for they awlis expect a bit of bad in the middle, and they are sure to find it there.’”

“That was candid,” said Miss Millicent Heritage, laughing gently.

“But didst thou find some bad in the middle?” asked Mrs. Heritage.

“Yes, sure enough I did,” said Betty; “but I just took it out of the rock, and laid it on the counter, and said, ‘Now, weigh it, missis,’ and since then I never find any bad in the middle, because Mother Pechell knows it’s just no use. She may try that on with norps.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Heritage, rising, “when I want to buy tow, Betty, I will get thee to do it for me.”

Betty turned her wheel more briskly at this compliment to her sagacity, and added, “You might do worse, Mrs. Heritage; and yet I think Sukey Priddo can help you in such bargains quite as well.” Sukey Priddo was Mrs. Heritage’s housekeeper, and a sister Methodist of Betty’s.

“Oh! Sukey Priddo is a good, careful, managing soul,” said Mrs. Heritage, turning round and smiling as she went out; “but not half so sharp as thee, I think. Farewell, Betty.”

The Heritages, though they rarely gave parties, were always glad to see any of their friends at tea at five o’clock, and after that, in summer, to a walk in the grounds, and supper at eight, soon after which they liked their friends to depart, as they had family reading at nine, and all the house in bed at ten. It was a hospitable, abundant house. No good things of life were ever wanting there, for though the Friends have always been a temperate people, and have had a horror of drunkenness as actually degrading, they have always maintained luxurious tables—a luxury wedded to moderate indulgence—and have, combined with their avoidance of agitative passions, the great and healthy longevity they display.

At the simple but plenteous board of Fair Manor, our friends of Woodburn and even of Cotmanhaye—for Sir Emanuel had gradually been drawn out to occasional visits as far as there, and seemed as if he could not sufficiently admire the grave wisdom of Mr. Heritage, and the oriental beauty of the fair Millicent—have met quite another class and circle of persons. These were inhabitants of Castleborough, chiefly Friends, and their habits of thought, speech, and opinion, were a curious study to the more general denizens of the every-day world. There was a tone of what might be called practical and moral economy about them. Their plain dresses and simple manners were accompanied by a mode of looking at everything so different from that of the world—even the religious world in general—as made it rather a piquant study to those not intimate with them. Having abandoned all the usual amusements of society, as vain, frivolous, and often very immoral, and, therefore, unbecoming true Christians,—hunting, racing, theatres, balls, concerts, cards, and other games of hazard, or of skill employed for gain,—even abstaining from music, singing, or other things which might lead to lightness and dissipation, they were thrown greatly upon trade for a resource against ennui almost as much as for profit. In the domestic life, books of the most moral and grave kind, and the discussion of the great topics of philanthropy, of opposition to war, slavery, and political religions, and plans for prison discipline, and the relief of distress, and the spread of education amongst the people: these were their favourite topics; but of these their conversation was of the simplest kind. There was often a childlike character about it. In all great moral points they were simple, direct, substantial, and without grace or ornament,—grand. Brave and able must have been the man who could compete with them on any of these heads, for they were on the rock of eternal truth, and no human force could push them from it. Outside of this they could find amusement in the most simple of simplicities. You might see them at the tea-table at Fair Manor amuse themselves—that is, the young people, the elder ones looking on—with endeavouring to lift, by a close application of fingers and thumb to their smooth backs, the small dessert or tea-table plates which they used; or riddles and sober conundrums, could maintain a very innocent mirth for a whole evening.

There were, however, a number of curious, and one or two remarkable characters amongst the kind visitors from Castleborough, whom we shall occasionally meet there. Not the least striking figures in these parties, however, were David and Dorothy Qualm, and Sylvanus Crook. These were part and parcel, as it were, of the Fair Manor circle. David Qualm, as I have said, was the brother-in-law of Joseph Heritage, Dorothy Qualm being Jasper’s sister. This worthy couple lived, as we have said, at Still Lodge, just outside the grounds of Fair Manor. Still Lodge!—a most appropriate name. The very element of David and Dorothy Qualm was silence. So far as could be observed, they managed to understand and communicate with each other at the least expense of words conceivable. Their movements were as quiet as their words. What they did, said, thought of, what was their specialty, no one had ever been able to discover. And yet their specialty was huge, prominent, unavoidable—it was quietude. No passion, except it were a passion for peaceful inertia, marked, much less disturbed, their days. Their house was small and modest, but always exquisitely neat. It seemed a sin to tread on those bright, nice, unfaded, unworn carpets. On the mat at the entrance-door you read the large-lettered admonition, “Please, wipe thy shoes.” The garden was always neatness itself—staid and tempered in the very colours of its flowers. Dorothy Qualm had once been seen ordering the gardener to dig up and throw out some gorgeously red peonies, as too un-Friendly and gaudy in hue. David Qualm never was seen to garden, to engage in anything active, or visible even, except in tranquilly smoking his pipe, and in riding out on a small, stout Welsh pony, called Taffy, by the side of his tall, portly brother-in-law, Jasper Heritage, who rode, as befitted him, a large black horse. The high and substantial apparition of Jasper Heritage, and the little figure of pony and rider inevitably at his side, were familiar objects around Woodburn. Their striking difference in bulk and stature had inspired some wag to name them David and Goliath. Once Sylvanus Crook was greatly scandalised by finding chalked on the wall of the entrance-lodge where he lived, as he went out early one summer morning,—

David was a little man,
Goliath he was tall,
And you may see them any day
At Fair Manor Hall.

Sylvanus hurried in for a sponge and bucket of water, and perhaps never showed more adroitness in his life than in wiping out the offensive rhyme before his wife could get a glimpse of it. But many an earlier riser than Sylvanus had already read it, and it had entered into the oral curiosities of Woodburn, and even travelled to Castleborough.

In company David Qualm preserved the same solid reticence, the same inexhaustible capacity for silence as in his own domicile. At home, his pipe was his constant companion even more inseparable than his equally quiescent wife. What was he? He was the companion of Jasper Heritage, and that was all, so far as the most inquisitive mortal ever knew. Did he and brother Jasper ever converse at home, or in their rides? No one lives to tell us. Probably, in their own phrase, they were brought into nearness with each other, as Oliver the Protector said to George Fox at Whitehall, “Come again, George, come often; for if thou and I were oftener together, we should be nearer to each other.” David Qualm, in his brown Quaker suit, with his brown wig and his cocked hat, with the ample brim suspended by silk cords in the most orthodox style of that day of Quakerism, was a figure to be carved in stone, for no stone could surpass him in the abundance and perpetuity of silence.

Sylvanus Crook, the lodge inhabiter—his wife was the gate-keeper—Sylvanus, the overlooker of the grounds and gardeners, the house-steward, the purveyor of all necessaries, and bearer of all important messages—in a word, the factotum of Fair Manor—was a middle-sized man of forty, of light build, and clad in light drab, with short knee-breeches and grey ribbed stockings. His hat, too, was three-cocked, but had a less precise and more weather-beaten air than that of David Qualm, but was generally believed to be David’s, which in due course had descended on Sylvanus. In mind, in manner, in all else, Sylvanus, however, was the antithesis of David. Sylvanus had talk enough and busy mind enough for anybody. He read—having the run of Mr. Heritage’s library, but foraged most amongst Friends’ books: the histories of their trials, persecutions, and the expositions of their opinions. Sylvanus was a sturdy champion of Quaker principles and customs, and skilful must the polemical acrobat be who ventured a wrestle with him on that familiar and sacred ground. Many a combat had Sylvanus and Betty Trapps on the comparative merits of Quakerism and Methodism, and on sundry topics besides. Betty often turned the laugh against Sylvanus, but he was like a true Englishman, as described by Napoleon—he never knew when he was beaten. Sylvanus was the indispensable man at Fair Manor, and was one of those who, though servants, are acknowledged as brothers, and was admitted frequently to the society which frequented that great resort of Castleborough Friends.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] An ape; used now by the country people for a simpleton.

CHAPTER VI.

THORSBY AMONGST THE WOODBURNS.

Amongst the Castleborough gentlemen who were on terms of intimacy with the family of Simon Degge, and who, therefore, frequently was to be met at Hillmartin, was a Mr. Henry Thorsby. This Mr. Thorsby was a young man of one of the oldest and most leading families of Castleborough. He was a manufacturing hosier; hosiery being one of the two great staples of the town—the other being lace. These hosiers employed a great number of frame-work-knitters in both town and country. These people, in fact, handloom-weavers, worked in the stocking-frame, receiving the cotton from the hosier, and bringing in to the town-warehouse their woven stockings at so much per dozen every Saturday. A first-rate house, therefore, employed some hundreds of men or women, as it might he, for both men and women are stocking-weavers, or, as they are termed, stockingers.

Mr. Henry, or as he was more commonly called, Harry Thorsby, was the son of a great hosier, who had led a very free and bon vivant life; had been a fearful sufferer from the gout; and had died recently from an attack of it which had been driven to the stomach. He had left only his widow and this one son, who was regarded as one of the most substantial burghers of the place. He had large warehouses, a large and handsome house, in which his mother presided, and to whom he was the apple of her eye. In her eyes her son Harry was one in a thousand; never was such a handsome, good-hearted fellow; he was, she said, as good as twenty daughters to her, and always had been.

In fact, Harry Thorsby was a very good-looking and pleasant young man. He was something above the middle height, rather broadly built, but extremely active. He had a handsome, somewhat large face, of what is called the oval contour, well-defined features, a bushy head of black hair, a rather dark complexion, and well-shaped black whiskers. Thorsby, like his father, had a very sociable and rather jovial turn—that was the rock in his path. His mother, indeed, had often with tears shown him that danger, and implored him to take warning by his father’s example, who had shortened his life by indulgence in wine, and what he called good company; and who might have possessed double the wealth, and the first place in the town,—yes, not even second to Mr. Simon Degge,—had he avoided the snare of good fellowship. Harry would not hurt his mother’s feelings for the world, and he always said,—“Oh, mother, you need not have any anxiety on my account. I am not by any means fond of wine, though I do like a little pleasant company; but I shall not forget what I have seen, and I shall not forget you, mother.”

Harry Thorsby was fond of his horse, and followed the hunt. He might often be seen during the season, in his scarlet coat riding out of town on a fine morning to the meet of the day, looking very gallant and happy; and grave fellow-manufacturers as they passed to their warehouses, while they nodded and smiled in passing, said to themselves,—“Thorsby will be Thorsby; what is bred in the bone will never be out of the flesh. Harry, like his father, finds something pleasanter than his counting-house.”

But, exclusive of this taste for hunting, and for shooting, which was equally a passion of his, Harry Thorsby was a good tradesman, and a steady attendant on his counting-house and warehouse and business altogether. Business over, however, he was much in the company of the young men of position in the town. He was an extremely merry, amusing fellow in company; told an anecdote well, and sung fairly. His nature seemed to demand life and variety. He was extremely excitable, but not to anger,—for he was extremely forbearing under provocation; his tendency was to pleasure, fun—what is termed larking—and to all the jollity of youth.

One of these larks he often was very merry over amongst his intimate friends. He and his mother often breakfasted at a small round table, and the breakfast was brought in on a circular-turned mahogany tray, which had grown rather rotund at the bottom so that it would easily turn round on the table. His mother being very fond of a gossip, and having always a great deal to tell him in his tête-à-tête, had scarcely began her coffee when Harry had despatched his first cup; unperceived, therefore, he would gently turn the tray round, finish her cup too, and then remind her that both were empty. This process went on to the end of Harry’s three cups, when he would spring up and say he must be off to business. “I hope you’ve made a good breakfast, Harry,” his mother would say, rising at the same time; “as for me, I don’t know how it is, but I feel neither fuller nor fatter.”

Harry went laughing slily to himself away, saying, “Well, mother, you have been amusing me with your talk so much, you don’t know whether you have breakfasted or not. Get some more. You’re never wrong if you eat till you are satisfied.” And the old lady would say, “Well, my lad, I think I must, for I feel quite sinking.” And he would leave her wondering how it was, but pouring comfortably out another cup.

Another manœuvre was not quite so innocent. Being sent, as a boy, on his father’s Arab mare, on a disagreeable journey, he dismounted outside of the town, daubed the poor mare’s face and knees with mud, and led her back home, saying that she had fallen and thrown him, and hurt him so much, that he could not go. His clothes being smeared plentifully, too, added to the probability of the story. But if Harry had any feeling, he was severely punished for his ruse, for his father, in a great rage, took the riding-whip and gave the innocent mare, who never made a false step in her life, a most unmerciful beating, and soon after sold her. This fact had reached Betty Trapps through Sylvanus Crook, and she prognosticated something awful of so cruelly artful a lad. Cruelty, however, was far from one of Harry Thorsby’s sins of manhood. He showed often very humane feeling.

Thorsby was frequently at Hillmartin; and there was a belief that he aspired to the hand of a rich Miss Mountain, of Castleborough. However that might be, he soon had occasion to accompany Ann and Letty home one evening, and from that day was as frequent and familiar a visitor at the Grange. George Woodburn had seen something of him at different times in Castleborough and in the hunting-field, and there soon grew up a great friendship. They made appointments to go to the hunt together. George invited him to come and shoot with him; for, besides the game on Woodburn Farm, Sir Emanuel Clavering had given George free range on his lands; and in a while Thorsby was on the most familiar terms at the Grange. Everybody liked him. He was so intelligent and so full of the spirit of good nature and of life enjoyment. He often came and passed the night there, that he might talk with Mr. and Mrs. Woodburn, and sing a variety of popular airs with Letty, which Ann accompanied on the piano.

George Woodburn was a young man of very pleasing person, but considered, by young men in general, peculiar. He had been educated at Repton, the great Derbyshire grammar school, where he had made the acquaintance of the sons of the principal nobles and gentry of the county. Henry Clavering, the son of Sir Emanuel, their near neighbour, had been one of his schoolfellows, and they had ever since been great friends. They had enjoyed together all the pleasures and sports of country life. Clavering was now away, and Thorsby was a very acceptable companion for George. It was in the country and at home, however, that this companionship was enjoyed, for George could never be persuaded to join Thorsby’s social circles in town. George had a steadfast dislike of towns and great companies. From a boy there had been a certain gravity in his character, combined with the utmost kindliness of disposition. He loved above everything the country and country life. His heart and soul were in his profession of agriculturist. In everything connected with farming and with the objects of nature lay his whole happiness. He knew every creature, great and small, that inhabited the fields; their haunts and habits were as familiar to him as the doings in his own family. Every species of insect was known to him, and might be said to be loved by him. As a boy he could tell you not only of every bird that built in the hedges, the orchard-trees, the cart-sheds, and the eaves, but the mason-bees that built in the old garden-wall he could show you passing in and out, and name them by names of his own, knowing every one individually.

He had from a mere lad accustomed himself to exposure to all kinds of weather, hot or cold, to battle with the wildest snows in looking after the sheep, to the most drenching rains, following the plough, or carting out compost for the land. There was no kind of manual labour on the farm in which he was not as expert as any labourer or farm-servant of them all. No one could beat him in mowing, reaping, ploughing, threshing, or in any kind of work. He could plash a hedge, cut a ditch or a drain, or fell a tree with any of them. His strength was prodigious, from constant exercise, and from absence of any enfeebling indulgence, for he had an innate aversion to much wine or beer, preferring what he called the mother and staple of all drinks—the crystal daughter of the rock.

In these respects George Woodburn was a most beneficial companion for Harry Thorsby, for George’s unequivocal dislike of anything dissipated, his equally unmistakeable enjoyment of the simplest pleasures of the country, struck Thorsby with wonder; and when he saw George’s real pleasure in the moderate number of friends that he mixed with, and his enormous capacity for enduring exertion, he wondered the more. In their shooting excursions he would have tired down a horse, and never appeared to know what fatigue was in himself.

“George,” said Thorsby, “how I do envy you your philosophical contempt for the pleasures of gay society, for you seem to enjoy what you do like with such a genuine gusto.”

“But it is no merit, my dear fellow,” George would reply; “for all those things that you call jollities and gaieties are my aversion. To spring out of bed on a summer’s morning, and see the sun shining over the beauteous landscape, steaming and smoking in the ascending dew; to hear the cuckoo calling me in her quaint foreign tongue, the thrushes and blackbirds shouting out their delight, some scores of them, as if they had not hearts big enough for their joy; to hear all the varied sounds of life, from the larks in the sky, from the creatures in the yard; to see the cattle and the flocks all luxuriating in the green or golden fields; to hear human voices making up the concert of nature, and, above all, the merry tongue of Letty, and the grave, loving tones of Ann, already out in the garden; to mount my horse, and ride away through fields and woods amid all the gladness of heaven and earth; to feel the fulness of life beating in my veins and gushing through my heart—Ah! what are all your simpering fine people, and your candle-light companies to me! Thorsby, I see men solitarily passing their lives in the lonely fields, or felling and fagoting in the lonely woods, whose very existence will never be known beyond their own hamlet; and do you think they are miserable? I tell you, no—so long as they can earn a decent reward for their labour. I often talk with these men, the Crusoes of the fields, of whom you fine people never think, or value them more than the sheep which graze beside them, and I find that God has breathed into them, frequently, in His silent language, of the sun, the moon, and stars, of the whispering breezes of evening, the colours of the sky, and the odours of turf and forest—things the haunters of crowds and lamplit festivities never dream of. These humble creatures, amid all their ignorance, in all their unvalued life, go home at night to loving hearts, and taste a happiness in communion with a few loved objects, which never can come to those whose affections are dissipated by running over countless forms and faces without settling on any. I would rather be one of these poor, despised, unknown, uncared-for creatures than the finest, wealthiest man or woman who lives the mere life of fashion and conventionalism.

“Our philosophical poet Wordsworth has exactly hit my idea of the philosophy of existence:—

“‘Yet life, you say, is life; we have seen and see,
And with a living pleasure we describe;
And fits of sprightly malice do but bribe
The languid mind into activity.
Sound sense, and love itself, and mirth and glee,
Are fostered by the comment and the gibe.
Even be it so: yet still among your tribe,
Our daily world’s true worldlings, rank not me.
“Nor can I not believe but that hereby
Great gains are mine: for thus I live remote
From evil-speaking; rancour never sought,
Comes to me not; malignant truth, or lie.
Hence have I genial seasons; hence have I
Smooth passions, smooth discourse, and joyous
thought.’”

Had George Woodburn been an austere or moping sort of young man, such conversations as these would not have surprised Harry Thorsby; but when he saw, that in everything George Woodburn found a pleasure as fresh as a mountain spring, that he was at home in the evening, all fun and playfulness, with his sisters, listened with delight to their music and singing, though he took no share in these things himself; with what sound sense and early wisdom he entered into the conversation with his parents and friends on any topic of domestic or public concern, he was deeply struck by it, and entertained a profound respect and esteem for so uncommon a specimen of modern youth.

There was one person, however, in the Woodburn Grange family, who looked on the introduction of Harry Thorsby on so familiar a footing as a real misfortune, and that was Betty Trapps. From the first moment of his entering the house, she regarded him with a cold and unwelcome eye. “Well,” said she, when asked whether she did not think him a very pleasant man, “he is not one of my men. I say, if I must speak my mind, dunna put much faith in him. Beware, I say, beware of cockatrices.”

“Oh, Betty!” exclaimed the stern Ann, “how can you be so uncharitable? Mr. Thorsby is a most respectable gentleman, known to be so to all Castleborough. Surely a friend of the Degges and of the Heritages cannot be a very bad man.”

“I did not say he was a bad man,” said Betty. “I only said he wasna one of my sort.”

“Why no,” said Letty, indignantly, “he is not a Methodist; but for all that, it does not follow that he is a cockatrice. What do you mean by cockatrices?”

“Ah! Miss Letty, beware! beware!” said Betty, looking very serious. “I say not to your young fluttering heart more, nor to any one else. I see a great candle and a little, pretty, very pretty moth, a-flying round it. If it burns its wings, then it won’t be the fault of Betty Trapps.”

Letty laughed outright. “Why, Betty, you are growing prophetic; but what about the cockatrices? I have often heard of such nondescripts, but I never saw one yet.”

“I’m not so sure of that,” said Betty. “If you have not I wish you never may. But as to this Thorsby, he crows when he laughs. He crows and chuckles, and shakes those black locks of his. Oh! he is too full of wild fire by half. See if it dunna run clean away with him one of these days.

“‘A crowing hen and crowing men,
Twist off their heads and sleep again.’”

“Betty!” said Ann, “what do you mean with your superstitious rhymes? Would you twist off Mr. Thorsby’s head?”

“Oh no!” said Betty. “I would not twist off his head; I’d only turn it hind before, that when he thought he was coming here he might be going somewhere else. I would not trust him or his head. I only mean that crowing hens and crowing men are out of natur. There’s no sureness of ’em. Mark! I don’t say there’s any guillery in this young man; but he’s no stop in him.”

“Well,” said the young ladies, “we hope you and Mr. Thorsby will become better friends as you get to know one another better. He thinks very much of you, Betty.”

Betty shook her head. “I’ve said my say,” she rejoined. “What must be, must be. It’s none of my doings nor shapings. Pray God all come out right.”

Thorsby was always very affable and very pleasantly jocose with Betty. Of course, he was not apprised of her unfavourable idea of him; but he saw that she did not willingly converse with him, but then he knew that she was reckoned an oddity, and he thought it her way. As time went on Betty seemed to soften down a little. He frequently offered her money when he had been staying there; but she would never take it. “It is for the trouble I give it you, Betty,” said Thorsby.

“You give me no trouble,” answered Betty. “I have just the same to cook and to do whether you are here or aren’t here. You can give it to Thomasin”—the other maid.

Thorsby found the very way to call Betty out was to give her a little wipe about Methodism, when she was sure to take up cudgels, as she called it, on that point; but this did not seem to raise Mr. Thorsby in her favour.

As time went on the intimacy of this little circle of families increased. Sometimes Sir Emanuel rode up to the Grange, and after chatting for an hour with the ladies, and walking with them round their garden, noticing their trees and young broods of different feathered stock, and telling them an anecdote of his foreign sojourns, and then carrying off the ever-ready Letty for a ride, and picking up, perhaps, Miss Heritage by the way, he would invite a number of them, and their parents, brothers, and sisters, to come up and spend an evening, and see the wonders of the heavens through his great telescope in the tower. Advancing spring and summer drew the young people out to rides and walks through the fields and woods, and to boat sails on the river. Summer made all busy at the Grange: the swarming of bees, the making of cheese and butter, the labourers all engaged in weeding the green corn, and coming in in troops for plentiful dinners and suppers, kept Betty Trapps in constant action, and in nimble bandying of country wit with these workpeople. Betty sat at table and carved for them, and dealt out sly hits to one or another as she dealt out plates well-heaped with boiled beef or bacon, and plenty of broad beans, cabbage, and other vegetables. There was often more genuine wit and humour circulating amongst these sons of the soil than illumines the boards of very great men.

“Ah! you there, Joe Clay,” cried Betty, “let me give you some more greens.”

“O! no more greens, thank you,” said Joe ruefully, “but a little more cabbage if you please, Betty.”

There was a loud burst of laughter, which the uninitiated would not have seen the gist of; but Joe Clay had married a Green, who led him anything but a green life. Not even Xantippe could have cut gibes with her.

“How’s your wife’s mother, Nathan Hopcroft?”

Nathan Hopcroft, a stupid-looking fellow, shakes his head. “Th’ owd ooman’s stark dead, Missis; and I canna bury her; an’ I mun ha’ it done.”

“Good rest to her,” said Betty, “she had long ceased to know much of this world—and, Nathan, if you canna bury her, you know where to go.”

“Where?”

“To the club.”

“Ay, I’ve been there, an’ said I mun ha’ it done, but they said, ‘No, the coffer were empty; I was very able to do’t mysen,’ an’ I ar’n’t. Th’ pigs hanna done well this year, and ar Jack’s rabbits has been stown—nothing but ill luck. Nay, they wanted me to pay th’ doctor’s bill.”

“What doctor had you?”

“Owd Doctor Drawatter.”

“What! him with th’ pigtail and powdered head,” said Betty, “and that fine gold-headed cane, and that smooth finiking voice? My gracious! that such a fine powdery peacock sort of a doctor should come to you, Nathan.”

“Ay, and what do you think he said? When I told him poor folks couldna pay doctors’ bills—they had enough to do to get bread—he says, ‘Pooh, pooh, man! the poor are the best off of any people; they’ve got no dignity to support, like gentlemen, and gentlemen doctors.’”

“There’s something in that, though,” said Betty, “though you laugh at it.”

“Ay,” said another man, “if they would na plague us wi’ lawyers and doctors, we might do. There’s Lawyer Metthard been selling up poor Judy Selston for rent, poor old soul, and now she must end her days i’ th’ workhouse.”

“Oh, drat that Lawyer Metthard,” said Betty. “He should be called Meteasy, for he’s only too easy to meet, and not so easy to get away from.”

Betty’s sally was warmly applauded, and was sure to be reported all over the parish. “But, Betty,” says another, “pr’ythee give me just a spoonful more beer.”

Betty, who was an English female Eulenspiegel, though she never had heard of him even in his English name of Owlinglass, and often amused herself by taking people literally at their word, took up a table-spoon, filled it with beer, and handed it to the astonished labourer.