the poorer, are always ready to go anywhere
for a daily meal.

The steamers from Cork had transferred
their ragged, weeping, laughing, fighting
cargoes; the last stray groups of English had
been collected from the western counties;
the Government officers had cleared and
passed the ship. With the afternoon tide two
hundred helpless, ignorant, destitute souls
were to bid farewell to their native land.

The delays consequent on miscalculating
the emigrating tastes of England, had
retarded until mid-winter, a voyage which
should have been commenced in autumn.

In one of the shore-boats, sat a portly man
—evidently neither an emigrant nor a sailor
—wrapped in a great coat and comforters; his
broad brimmed beaver secured from the
freezing blast, by a coloured bandanna tied
under the chin of a fat whiskerless face. This
portly personage was Mr. Joseph Lobbit,
proprietor of "The Shop," farmer, miller, and
chairman of the vestry of the rich rural
parish of Duxmoor.

At Duxmoor, the chief estate was in Chancery,
the manor house in ruins, the lord of
it an outlaw, and the other landed proprietors
absentees, or in debt; a curate preached,
buried, married, and baptised, for the health
of the rector compelled him to pass the
summer in Switzerland, and the winter in
Italy; so Mr. Lobbit was almost the greatest,
as he was certainly the richest man in the
parish.

Except that he did not care for anyone
but himself, and did not respect anyone who
had not plenty of money, he was not a bad
sort of man. He had a jolly hearty way of
talking and shaking hands, and slapping
people on the back; and until you began to
count money with him, he seemed a very
pleasant liberal fellow. He was fond of
money, but more fond of importance; and
therefore worked as zealously at parish-
business, as he did at his own farm, shop and
mill. He centered the whole powers of the
vestry in his own person, and would have
been beadle, too, if it had been possible. He
appointed the master and matron of the
workhouse, who were relations of his wife;
supplied all the rations and clothing for
"the house;" and fixed the prices in full
vestry (viz., himself, and the clerk, his cousin),
assembled. He settled all questions of out-
of-door relief, and tried hard, more than once,
to settle the rate of wages too.

Ill-natured people did say that those who
would not work on Master Lobbit's farm, at
his wages, stood a very bad chance if they
wanted anything from the parish, or came for
the doles of blankets, coals, bread, and linsey-
woolsey petticoats; which, under the
provisions of the tablets in Duxmoor Church, are
distributed every Christmas. Of course, Mr.
Lobbit supplied these gifts, as chief shop-
keeper, and dispensed them, as senior and
perpetual churchwarden. Lobbit gave capital
dinners: plenty smoked on his board, and
pipes of negro-head with jorums of gin punch
followed, without stint.

The two attorneys dined with him—and
were glad to come, for he had always money
to lend, on good security, and his gin was
unexceptionable. So did two or three bull-
frog farmers, very rich and very ignorant.
The doctor and curate came occasionally;
they were poor, and in his debt at "The
Shop," therefore bound to laugh at his jokes
—which were not so bad, for he was no
fool—so that, altogether, Mr. Lobbit had
reason to believe himself a very popular man.

But there was—where is there not?—a
black drop in his overflowing cup of
prosperity.

He had a son, whom he intended to make a
gentleman; whom he hoped to see married to
some lady of good family, installed in the
Manor House of Duxmoor, (if it should be
sold cheap, at the end of the Chancery suit),
and established as the squire of the parish.
Robert Lobbit had no taste for learning, and
a strong taste for drinking, which his father's
customers did their best to encourage. Old
Lobbit was decent in his private habits; but,
as he made money wherever he could to
advantage, he was always surrounded by a levee
of scamps, of all degrees—some agents and
assistants, some borrowers, and would-be
borrowers. Young Lobbit found it easier to
follow the example of his father's companions
than to follow his father's advice. He was as
selfish and as greedy as his father, without
being so agreeable or hospitable. In the
school-room he was a dunce, in the play-
ground a tyrant and bully; no one liked
him; but, as he had plenty of money, many
courted him.

As a last resource his father sent him to
Oxford; whence, after a short residence, he
was expelled. He arrived home drunk, and
in debt; without having lost one bad habit,
or made one respectable friend. From that
period he lived a sot, a village rake, the king
of the tap-room, and the patron of a crowd of
blackguards, who drank his beer and his
health; hated him for his insolence, and
cheated him of his money.

Yet Joseph Lobbit loved his son, and tried
not to believe the stories good-natured friends
told of him.

Another trouble, fell upon the prosperous
churchwarden. On the north side of the
parish, just outside the boundaries of
Duxmoor Manor, there had been, in the time
of the Great Civil Wars, a large number of
small freehold farmers; each with from forty
to five acres of land; the smaller, fathers
had divided amongst their progeny; the
larger had descended to eldest sons by force
of primogeniture. Joseph Lobbit's father had
been one of these small freeholders. A right
of pasture on an adjacent common was
attached to these little freeholds; so, what with