There are many other deserted houses near,
with shutters always closed; dull, blank,
melancholy looking buildings, like faces with
sightless eyes; and the road is very quiet,
and knows business, fashion, pleasure, no
more. The stream of prosperity and patronage
has been turned, and flows now to the nearest
railway station, leaving nothing to our very
little town but the remembrance of the past.
In short, we have gone through the rise and
fall which are said to be proper to all human
affairs and empires, with the utmost neatness
and propriety, and having now accomplished
the business and subsided into insignificance,
we hope to be left to follow our own little
devices in peace, without further interference
from fashion or modern improvements.

Like most other dwellers in the country,
we can find no more important occupation
than that of fighting and quarrelling with
each other about everything or nothing. Of
course, the most fruitful sources of disagreement
are our pets. Only last week my aunt
fell out with Miss Brooks because her large
dog was inconveniently taken ill in the sitting-room
at tea-time; and the very week before
that, a ten years' friendship between Mrs.
Blythe and Miss Carter was interrupted by a
dispute concerning the propriety of giving
castor-oil to sick canaries. Indeed, sometimes
when the village has been particularly
dull and stagnant, I have had serious thoughts
of requesting my aunt to keep a pig, or some
other obnoxious animal, for the express
purpose of giving rise to a little pleasing excitement
in the way of annoyance to our neighbours,
quarrels, misunderstandings, and
reconciliations. Why, for two whole years our
village had no other amusement than watching
and commenting on a dispute between
Mr. Tomkins and Mr. Carter concerning a
cow! This is the truth of the story:—Mr.
Tomkins had a favourite Alderney cow—a
very pretty little creature, and Mr. Carter
had a favourite fence, a cross-barred fanciful
affair, in which he took great pride and
delight. When the cow first appeared in
Mr. Tomkins's field, Mr. Carter took an
amazing fancy to it, admired it quite
extravagantly, thought it an ornament to the view
from his windows, allowed it even to come
sometimes into his own little paddock, and
there let it wander about at its own sweet
will. One summer, however, it grew suddenly
bold; would be found sitting in flower-beds;
once put its head in at the dining-room
window; would take a walk on the lawn, and
once or twice attempted to eat the creeping
plants on a summer-house, which it converted,
Mr. Carter said, into a highly picturesque
ruin. He particularly admired it when it
rubbed itself against one especial tree with a
background of sunset; he said it gave an
Arcadian character to his grounds. Until one
day—one fatal day—he found his beautiful
cross-barred fence broken down in two places.
Every man in the village was accused, and
every woman, and every boy, and, last of all,
Mr. Carter's own gardener was accused, and
indeed I think he was the culprit, but he had
always cherished a peculiar hatred to the
cow, and so laid the blame upon it — and
instantly Mr. Carter (by a sort of inspiration,
he said), was convinced, and hated it too. He
began to see that there was a deep design of
annoyance in the whole matter ; that the cow
had been trained to break down cross-barred
fences, and had destroyed his in accordance
with its master's express orders and commands.
It was immediately declared to be a
nuisance, a mischievous creature ; all its
misdeeds, which had been formerly of no
consequence, were magnified into murder, — and
every time the wretched creature was seen
trespassing even on the outskirts of Mr.
Carter's hedges and ditches, he became
dreadfully excited. He was continually
confounding the poor cow, and chasing
it, and making everybody else chase
it ; and at last, overcome by a feeling of
injured innocence and insulted dignity, he wrote
a grand epistle to Mr. Tomkins, demanding
in the most exalted language that the cow
should be tied by the leg, or otherwise
confined to its master's own grounds. It was
indeed a very fine piece of composition, all
about the scales of justice, and what the
Romans did or would have done under similar
circumstances ; and Mr. Carter was very
proud of it, and felt sure it would quite
annihilate both Mr. Tomkins and his cow. It
remained unanswered for a week, and then Mr.
Tomkins wrote a short note, to the effect that
if Mr. Carter didn't like the cow in his
grounds he had better turn it out. Next day
Mr. Carter watched all the morning for Mr.
Tomkins, and seeing him at last in the
distance, put on his hat and sallied forth with
crossed arms and a fierce countenance and
went to meet him, on purpose to cut him
dead. After that, Mr. Tomkins would never
meet Mr. Carter, and Mr. Carter would never
meet Mr. Tomkins at our tea-parties ; and
whenever they met accidentally they never
saw each other in the least. We ladies were
very nervous when these tremendous
encounters took place, and the excitement of
them lasted a whole week.

There are some few philosophers amongst
us, however, who do not fight about their
pets; but these are our poorer neighbours,
who have something else to do and to think
about. One of them, indeed—old Mrs. Hill,
—is quite a noted philosopher, and many a
lesson on forgiveness of injuries and contentment
have I received from her. She lives in
a cottage of her own, in a large orchard, at
the end of a very crooked path; and whenever
you go there, you find it in a state of
the greatest disorder and confusion; and
Mrs. Hill always says, " Oh, ma'm! if you
had but come to-morrow! I was just going
to clean up, and put things tidy."

She is an old, old woman. Such a face she