for be decided to stay there a whole week,
giving, by his single presence, an unwonted
stimulus to the trade of our village. Great,
therefore, was the grief of all when he went
away. The coaching interest looked after
him till the diminished forms of pony, chaise,
and man, disappeared over the hill-top, and
the sound of his wheels died away. Will he
ever come again? Some think he will; but
others shake their heads, and say it may be
many a day first. But they will wait
patiently, and so will the Guy. Its bar has
contracted, and its whole life shrank into one
dismal corner of the building. But its fifteen
beds are still made up, and, we are proud to
say, that its extensive accommodation for
man and beast has never been reduced.

I do not know whether it be a natural
consequence of our steady adherence to those
principles, which I have faintly indicated;
but it appears to me that all the inhabitants
of Rutstead, either make money and die well
off, or else live in great poverty and dependence,
till after going into the union and
coming out again, and hovering about that
splendid building, like dazzled moths, are
finally drawn into it, and slowly consumed.
Our chemist, who sells human-medicine and
horse-medicine, besides tobacco, pepper, and
other articles of domestic use, is publicly
known to have made money in that dusty
and deserted shop of his. He is not an active
man; he spends more time in picking pimples
on his face, than in anything else; and he
has a wife who gets dirty, dog's-eared Minerva
Press novels from a sweet-stuff' shop across
the road, and reads them again and again;
and, addressing the unknown author of A
Year and a Day, in four volumes, writes in
pencil, at the foot of his most eloquent
chapters, "Oh, why wert thou not a poet! " She
is no help to him in the business, and he
mildly observes that some people like a shop,
while others never take to it! How he
made money with such notions, I know not,
but everybody knows he has. So has Grimshaw,
the butcher, though I never saw four
joints hanging up at once in his clean-swept
shop, which, with the tree before the door,
and its footway paved with pebbles, is as
pretty a place as you will find in our neighbour-
hood. He never ventures to expel the
vital spark—which he professionally regards
as a something which keeps sweet the flesh
of sheep or beeves—until he has gone round
on horseback to all his customers, and satisfied
himself that their united orders amount
to a whole animal. Again, there is Groyn,
the builder, who owns half the houses within
five miles round, and who is a staunch
upholder of our principles,—as sturdy a
defender of his right to build for every one
within that distance as the heart of our
village could desire. He smokes, and plays
at bowls and skittles, at the Guy, and boasts
in his cups that he can buy and sell
Grinstone, the landed proprietor, and shouts it out
loud enough to be heard by Grinstone, in his
pillared mansion over the way; and I have
no doubt he could, though he never cared a
pin for poor Richard's maxims, and, as far as
I can see, ought to have been bankrupt long
ago. He is a notorious gormandiser, though
only for the public benefit. Live and let live,
he says, is his notion; and, when he is stuffing
more than usual, he will keep repeating that
noble-spirited maxim, and will give it you on
every occasion with such an air of being then
struck with the idea for the first time in his
life, that if any one at the same table hurled
one of the dishes at his head in a moment of
rage, I could understand it. There is such a
disagreeable self-possession about him, when
he is not eating—such an embarrassing air of
knowing what you are going to say, and
smiling deprecatingly before you say it, that
I abhor him from my soul. Why should
that man flourish, and have the gout for
weeks together, when Spokes, the wheel-
wright, works early and late, and cannot
make both ends meet; and poor, old Mrs.
Weeks has forty-three direct descendants, all
living, who could not, altogether, prevent her
selling her old walnut chest of drawers, and
antique piece of needlework, and going into
the union at eighty-five?

But if I were in the mood for asking
peevish questions about what I see and know
in our village, this paper would never come
to an end. I might desire to know why
beggars enjoy so sacred a character among
us, and know it so well, that we dare not say
our gardens are our own. They open our
gates, and come round and bully us at our
back doors, and even quote Scripture at us,
until we tremble in our shoes. Why does a
tyrannical public opinion compel us to bear
this meekly, and forbid us to send them up
the lane to Mr. Colewort, the market
gardener, who is generally in want of hands.
I might ask why we have four chapels and a
Mormonite cobbler's, where the elect meet
nightly, and whence, in long processions, singing
merry hymns to vulgar tunes, they go
forth to publicly baptise grown men and
women in a horse-pond by the roadside, and
not a solitary school within two miles. And
if I did not know this last fact to be true, I
might ask why we are so prejudiced and
ignorant—so proud of being out of the sound
of Bow bells, and so united to resist all projects
of improvement—why, within twelve
miles from the Royal Exchange in Cornhill,
London, we nail horseshoes over doors, and
have a public excitement about a ghost now
and then— or why poor widowed Mrs. Cottle,
when the Mormon elders met together and
formally cursed her for some trifling
disobedience, went melancholy, and tried to
hang herself, and failed at first; until, after
moping about for months, she hung herself
effectually; whereon, the wrathful elders
met again, and were much edified but
uuappeased.