ness. that maintained an incessant wag), continued to dig and scratch, throwing out showers of earth, and whining with impatience and eagerEvery now and then, when quite gasping and exhausted, they came out for a moment's air; whilst the boys took their turn, poking with a long stick, or loosening the ground with their hands, and Thomas stood by superintending and encouraging both dog and boy, and occasionally cutting a root or a bramble that impeded their progress. Fanny, also, entered into the pursuit with great interest, dropping here and there a word of advice, as nobody can help doing when they see others in perplexity. In spite of all these aids, the mining operation proceeded so slowly, that the experienced keeper sent off his new attendant for a spade to dig out the vermin, and I pursued my walk. After this encounter, it so happened that I never went near the gipsy tent without meeting Thomas Lamb-sometimes on foot, sometimes on his pony; now with a gun, now without; but always loitering near the oaktree, and always, as it seemed, reluctant to be It was very unlike Thomas's usual manner to seem ashamed of being caught in any place, or in any company; but so it was. Did he go to the ancient sibyl to get his fortune told? or was Fanny the attraction? A very short time solved the query. seen. cried out against the match. It was rather a bold measure, certainly; but I think it will end well. They are, beyond a doubt, the handsomest couple in these parts; and as the fortune-teller and her eldest grandson have had the good sense to decamp, and Fanny, besides being the most grateful and affectionate creature on earth, turns out clever and docile, and comports herself just as if she had lived in a house all her days, there are some hopes that in process of time her sin of gipsyism may be forgiven, and Mrs. Lamb be considered as visitable, at least by her next neighbours, the wives of the shoemaker and the parish clerk. At present, I am sorry to have it to say, that these worthy persons have sent both Thomas and her to Coventry-a misfortune which they endure with singular resignation. And now, since farewell must be said, I do not know that I can find a fitter moment. We are all as happy as people in a last page ought to be;-the lovers in an union of affection, the rest of the village in the news and the wonderment. Farewell, then, courteous reader! "To all, to each, a fair good night, And pleasant dreams and slumbers light!" PREFACE.* THOSE gentle readers, be they few or many, who may have paid the two Volumes entitled Our Village the compliment of holding them in recollection, will easily recognize the same locality, the same class of people, and often the same individuals, in the present collection of Country Stories, which is, indeed, at all points, a continuation of the former work. The Authoress has only to hope that it may be received with similar indulgence; and to deprecate a too literal construction of facts, One night, towards the end of the month, the keeper presented himself at our house on justice business. He wanted a summons for some poachers who had been committing depredations in the preserve. Thomas was a great favourite; and was, of course, immediately admitted, his examination taken, and his request complied with. "But how," said the magistrate, looking up from the summons which he was signing, "how can you expect, Thomas, to keep your pheasants, when that gipsy boy with his finders has pitched his tent just in the midst of your best coppices, killing more game than half the poachers in the country?" "Why, as to the gipsy, sir," replied Thomas, "Fanny is as good a girl-" "I was not talking of Fanny," interrupted the man of warrants, smiling" as good a and names, and dates. girl," pursued Thomas-"A very pretty girl!" ejaculated his worship,-" as good a girl," resumed Thomas, "as ever trod the earth!"-"A sweet pretty creature, certainly," was again the provoking reply. “Ah, sir, if you could but hear how her little brother talks of her!"-"Why, Thomas, this gipsy has made an impression."-"Ah, sir! she is such a good girl!"-and the next day they were married. It was a measure to set every tongue in the village a wagging: for Thomas, besides his personal good gifts, was well to do in the world-my lord's head keeper, and prime favourite. He might have pretended to any farmer's daughter in the parish: every body INTRODUCTION. EXTRACTS FROM LETTERS. "ANY changes in our Village since the last advices? What news of May and Lizzy and Fanny and Lucy? And does the Loddon continue to flow as brightly as when we gathered musk-roses together in the old grounds of Aberleigh?" These interrogatories formed part of a letter from India, written by my pretty friend Emily *To the third volume, as originally published. the operation, or clustered into groups near the door. L., now the wife of an officer of rank on that station; and my answer to her kind questioning, may serve to satisfy the curiosity of other "You used to say, and there was too much gentle readers as to the general state of our truth in the assertion, that for pigs, geese and little commonwealth, and form no unfit intro- children, and their concomitants, dirt and duction to the more detailed narratives that noise, this pretty place was unrivalled. But follow. They who condescended to read the then you were here when the two first evils letter-press will have the advantage of my were at their height, in June and July. At fair correspondent. Indeed I doubt whether present the geese have felt the stroke of she herself may not derive her first informa- Michaelmas, and are fatted and thinned; pigs tion from the printed book; my epistle being, too have diminished; though as the children as far as I can judge, wholly illegible to all are proportionably increased, we are not much but the writer. Never was such a manuscript better off in point of cleanliness, and much seen! for being restricted to one sheet of worse in regard to noise :-a pig being, except paper, and having a good deal of miscella- just when ringing or killing, a tolerably silent neous matter to discuss before entering on animal; and a goose, in spite of the old our village affairs, I had fallen into a silly Roman story, only vociferous by fits and fashion of crossing, not uncommon amongst starts; whereas little boys and little girlsyoung ladies; so that my letter first written at least, the little boys and little girls herehorizontally like other people's, then perpen-about-seem on the full cry or the full shout dicularly to form a sort of checker-work, then from sunrise to sunset. Even the dinner diagonally in red ink, the very crossings crossed! and every nook and cranny, the part under the seal, the corner where the date stood, covered with small lines in an invisible hand, the whole letter became mass of mysterious marks, a puzzle like a Coptic inscription, or a state paper in cypher to those unacquainted with the key. I must put an extract into print if only for the benefit of my fair correspondent; and here it is: hour, that putter down of din in most civilized countries, makes no pause amongst our small people. The nightingale who sings all day and all night to solace his brooding mate, is but a type of their unwearying power of voice. His sweet harmony doth find intervals; their discord hath none. "And yet they have light hearts too, poor urchins; witness Dame Wilson's three sunburnt ragged boys who with Ben Kirby and a few comrades of lesser note, are bawling and squabbling at marbles on one side of the road; and Master Andrews's four fair-haired girls who are scrambling and squalling at baseball on the other! How happy they are, poor things, and with how few of the implements of happiness beyond sunshine and liberty and their own young life! Even the baker's and the wheelwright's children are stealing a run and a race up the hill as they go to school, and managing to make quite noise enough to attract attention; although quiet than their compeers in tatters, and hardly so merry; it being an axiom which I have rarely known to fail in country life, that the poorer the urchin, the fuller of glee. Short of starvation, nothing tames the elves. Blessed triumph of youthful spirits! merciful compensation for a thousand wants! "Any change in our village?' say you.Why no, not much. In the outward world scarcely any, except the erection of two handsome red houses on the outskirts, which look very ugly just at present, simply because the eye and the landscape are unaccustomed to them, but which will set us off amazingly when the trees and the buildings become used to each other, and the glaring new tint is toned down by that great artist, the weather. For the rest the street remains quite in statu quo, unless we may count for alteration a rifacimento which is taken place in the dwell-being in whole frocks, they are rather more ing of our worthy neighbour the baker, whose oven fell in last week, and is in the act of being re-constructed by a scientific bricklayer (Ah dear me! I dare say he hath a finer name for his calling) from the good town of B. The precise merits of this new oven I cannot pretend to explain, although they have been over and over explained to me; I only know that it is to be heated on some new-fangled principle, hot water, or hot air, or steam, or cinders, which is to cost just nothing, and is to produce the staff of life, crust and crum, in such excellence as hath not been equalled since Alfred, the first baker of quality on record, had the misfortune to scorch his hostess's cake. I suspect that the result of this experiment will not be very dissimilar; but at present it is a great point of interest to the busy and the idle. Half of our cricketers are there helping or hindering, and all the children of the street are assembled to watch "Even as I write there is another childish rabble passing the window in the wake of our friend Mr. Moore's donkey-cart. You remember Mr. Moore's fine strawberries, Emily? the real wood strawberry, which looked like a gem, and smelt like a nosegay? But strawberries are out of season now; and the donkey cart has changed its gay summer freight of fruit and flowers, and is coming down the hill heavily laden with a full dirty homely load of huge red potatoes, to vend per peck and gallon through the village, or perhaps to carry as far as B., where some amateurs of the lazy root,' curious in such underground. matters, are constant customers to Mr. Moore's pink eyes.' It is not, however, for love of that meritorious vegetable that the boys follow the potatoe-cart. One corner is parted off for apples, in hopes to tempt our thrifty housewives into the cheap extravagance of a pudding or a pie. Half a bushel of apples as yellow and mellow as quinces are deposited in one corner, and the young rogues have smelt the treasure out. to speak to her in his life,-John Ford, brother to William, a tall, sinewy, comely blacksmith, who on six days of the week contrives so to become the anvil with his dingy leather cap, and his stiff leather apron, his brawny naked arms and smoky face, that he seems native to the element, a very Vulcan; whilst on the seventh, he emerges like a butterfly from the chrysalis, and by dint of fine clothes and fair water, becomes quite the beau of the "Now to answer your kind inquiries. May village, almost as handsome as Joel himself. -to begin at home! - May-many thanks Since he has been married to his pretty wife, for your recollection of my favourite!-May every body remembers what a bright pattern is as well as can be expected. She is literally of fraternal friendship John Ford used to be and figuratively in the straw, being confined thought-how attentive to William! how with one puppy-only one; and presenting constant in his visits! When William had a in her fair person a very complete illustration of the old proverb respecting a hen with one chick. Never was such a fuss made about a little animal since greyhounds were greyhounds, and the tiny creature is as pert, petulant, and precocious a personage as any spoilt child that ever walked on four legs or two. I must confess, in vindication of May's taste, who never before showed such absolute devotion to her offspring, that the puppy has beauty enough for a whole litter. It is a fawn-coloured with a dash of white, and promises to be ticked. Are you sportswoman sufficient to know that ticked means covered all over with white spots about the size of a pea? a great addition to greyhound beauty, and a sure sign of greyhound blood; a mark of caste, as they say in your country, and one the more to be relied on since it is a distinction of nature, and not of man. "The shoemaker's pretty daughter is also as well as can be expected.' She is out of doors to-day for the first day since her confinement, and the delicate doll-like baby, which she is tossing as lightly and gracefully as if it were indeed a doll, and showing so proudly to her father's old crony, George Bridgwater, is her own. Her marriage confounded the calculations of all her neighbours, myself included: for she did not marry her handsome admirer Jem Tanner, who has wisely comforted himself by choosing another flame, nothing so sure a remedy for one love as rushing straight into another; nor Daniel Tubb, the dashing horse-dealer, who used to flourish his gay steed up the street and down the street, "all for the love of pretty Bessie;' neither did she marry Joseph Bacon, the snug young grocer, who walked every Sunday seven miles to sit next her at chapel, and sing hymns from the same book; nor her father's smart apprentice, William Ford, although a present partnership in the business, and a future succession would have made that match quite a mariage de convenance :-none of these, her known and recognized lovers, did the fair nymph of the shoe-shop marry, nor any of her thousand and one imputed swains. The happy man was one who had never been seen cold, the winter before the wedding, John used to come and ask after him every night. O that love! that love! What fibs it makes honest people tell! "Lucy is gone-gone to superintend the samplers and spelling-books two counties off. Our blooming gipsy, Fanny, has also taken her departure. Her husband found that the gipsy blood could not be got over, especially as his pretty bride, besides her triple sins of gipsyism, of prettiness, and of being his bride, had the misfortune to catch, with a quickness which seemed intuitive, ways and manners suited to her new station, to behave as well as any of her neighbours, and better than most of them an affront which the worthiest of her society found unpardonable. So Thomas is gone to hold the same office at my Lord's estate in Devonshire; where if they have the wit to keep their own counsels, the mésalliance will never be suspected, and Fanny will pass for a gamekeeper's wife of the very first fashion. “Lizzy! Alas! alas! you ask for Lizzy! - do you remember how surely at the closed gate of the flower court, or through the open door of her father's neat dwelling, we used to see the smiling rosy face, so full of life and glee; the square sturdy form, strong and active as a boy; the clear bright eyes, and red lips and shining curly hair, giving such an assurance of health and strength? And do you not recollect how the bounding foot, and the gay young voice, and the merry musical laugh seemed to fill the house and the court with her own quick and joyous spirit, as she darted about in her innocent play or her small housewifery, so lively and so vigorous, so lovely and so beloved? Do you not remember, too, how when we stopped to speak to her at that ever-open door, the whole ample kitchen was strewed with her little property, so that you used to liken it to a great babyhouse? Here her kitten, there her doll; on one chair an old copy-book, on another a new sash; her work and needle-book and scissors and thimble put neatly away on her own little table; her straw hat ornamented with a tuft of feathery grasses, or a garland of woodbine, hanging carelessly against the wall; and pots of flowers of all sorts of the garden and the field, from the earliest bud to the latest blossom, ranged in the window, on the dresser, on the mantel shelf, wherever a jug could find room. Every thing spoke of Lizzy, her mother's comfort, her father's delight, the charm and life of the house; and every body loved to hear and see so fair a specimen of healthful and happy childhood. It did one's heart good to pass that open door. But the door is closed now, always closed; and the father, a hale and comely man, of middle age, is become all at once old and bent and broken; and the smiling placid mother looks as if she would never smile again. Nothing has been displaced in that sad and silent dwelling. The straw hat, with its faded garland, still hangs against the wall; the work is folded on the little table, with the small thimble upon it, as if just laid down; jars of withered flowers crowd the mantel and the window;-but the light hath departed; the living flower is gone; poor Lizzy is dead! Are you not sorry for poor, poor Lizzy? "But this is too mournful a subject:-we must talk now of the Loddon, the beautiful Loddon-yes, it still flows; ay, and still overflows, according to its naughty custom. Only last winter it filled our meadows like a lake; rushed over our mill-dams like a cataract, and played such pranks with the old arch at Yorkpool, that people were fain to boat it betwixt here and Aberleigh; and the bridge having been denounced as dangerous in summer and impassable in winter, is like to cause a dispute between those two grand abstractions, the parish and the county, each of which wishes to turn the cost of rebuilding on the other. By their own account, they are two of the poorest personages in his majesty's dominions; full of debt and difficulty, and exceedingly likely to go to law on the case, by way of amending their condition. The pretty naughty river! There it flows bright and clear as when we walked by its banks to the old house at Aberleigh, looking as innocent and unconscious as if its victim, the bridge, had not been indicted-No-that's not the word! -presented at the Quarter Sessions; as if a worshipful committee were not sitting to inquire into its malversations; and an ancient and well-reputed parish and a respectable midland county going together by the ears in consequence of its delinquency. There it flows clear and bright through the beautiful grounds of Aberleigh! The ruined mansion has been entirely pulled down; but the lime-trees remain, and the magnificent poplars and the gay wilderness of shrub and flower. The fishing. house has been repaired by the delicate hand of taste, and it is a fairy scene still; a scene worthy of its owners and its neighbours, wanting nothing in my eyes but you to come and look at it. "Come very soon, my dear Emily! Tell Colonel L., with our kindest remembrances, that we shall never love him quite so well as he deserves, until he brings you back to us. Come very soon! and in the mean while be sure you send me a full account of yourself and your whereabouts,' and do not fail to repay my brief notices of the simple scenery and humble denizens of our village, by gorgeous stories of oriental wonders, - of the Ganges, the palmettos, the elephants, and the Hindoos. 6 "And now, my dear friend, farewell! "Ever most affectionately yours," &c. &c. &c. GRACE NEVILLE. Two or three winters ago, our little village had the good fortune to have its curiosity excited by the sudden appearance of a lovely and elegant young woman, as an inmate in the house of Mr. Martin, a respectable farmer in the place. The pleasure of talking over a new-comer in a country village, which, much as I love country villages, does, I confess, occasionally labour under a stagnation of topics, must not be lightly estimated. In the present instance the enjoyment was greatly increased by the opportune moment at which it occurred, just before Christmas, so that conjecture was happily afloat in all the parties of that merry time, enlivened the tea-table, and gave zest and animation to the supper. There was, too, a slight shade of mystery, a difficulty in coming at the truth, which made the subject unusually poignant. Talk her over as they might, nobody knew any thing certain of the incognita, or her story; nobody could tell who she was, or whence she came. Mrs. Martin, to whom her neighbours were, on a sudden, most politely attentive in the way of calls and invitations, said nothing more than that Miss Neville was a young lady who had come to lodge at Kinlay-end; and, except at church, Miss Neville was invisible. Nobody could tell what to make of her. Her beauty was, however, no questionable matter. All the parish agreed on that point. She was in deep mourning, which set off advantageously a tall and full, yet easy and elastic figure, in whose carriage the vigour and firmness of youth and health seemed blended with the elegance of education and good company. Youth and health were the principal characteristics of her countenance. There was health in her bright hazel eyes, with their rich dark eye-lashes; health in the profusion of her glossy brown hair; health in her pure and brilliant complexion; health in her red lips, her white teeth, and the beautiful smile that displayed them; health in her very U dimple. Her manners, as well as they could | Then the noises;-wind, in all its varieties, be judged of in passing to and from church, leading one of the little Martins by the hand, and occasionally talking to him, seemed as graceful as her person, and as open as her countenance. All the village agreed that she was a lovely creature, and all the village wondered who she could be. It was a most animating puzzle. There was, however, no mystery in the story of Grace Neville. She was the only child of an officer of rank, who fell in an early stage of the Peninsular war: her mother had survived him but a short time, and the little orphan had been reared in great tenderness and luxury by her maternal uncle, a kind, thoughtless, expensive man, speculating and sanguine, who, after exhausting a good fortune in vain attempts to realize a great one, sinking money successively in farming, in cotton-spinning, in paper-making, in a silk-mill, and a mine, found himself one fair morning actually ruined, and died (such things have happened) of a broken heart, leaving poor Grace at threeand-twenty, with the habits and education of an heiress, totally destitute. The poor girl found, as usual, plenty of comforters and advisers. Some recommended her to sink the little fortune she possessed in right of her father in a school; some to lay it by for old age, and go out as a governess; some hinted at the possibility of matrimony, advising, that at all events so fine a young woman should try her fortune by visiting about amongst her friends for a year or two, and favoured her with a husband-hunting invitation accordingly. But Grace was too independent and too proud for a governess; too sick of schemes for a school; and the hint matrimonial had effectually prevented her from accepting any, even the most unsuspected, invitation. Besides, she said, and perhaps she thought, that she was weary of the world; so she wrote to Mrs. Martin, once her uncle's housekeeper, now the substantial wife of a substantial farmer, and came down to lodge with her in our secluded village. Poor Grace, what a change! It was midwinter; snowy, foggy, sleety, wet. Kinlay end, an old manor-house dilapidated into its present condition, stood with its windows half closed, a huge vine covering its front, and ivy climbing up the sides to the roof-the very image of chillness and desolation. There was, indeed, one habitable wing, repaired and fitted up as an occasional sporting residence for the landlord; but those apartments were locked; and she lived, like the rest of the family, in the centre of the house, made up of great, low, dark rooms, with oaken panels, of long, rambling passages, of interminable galleries, and broad, gusty staircases, up which you might drive a coach and six. Such was the prospect within doors; and without, mud! mud! mud! nothing but mud! combined with bats, rats, cats, owls, pigs, cows, geese, ducks, turkeys, chickens, and children, in all varieties, also; for besides the regular inhabitants of the farm-yard,-biped and quadruped,-Mrs. Martin had within doors sundry coops of poultry, two pet lambs, and four boys from six years old downward, who were, in some way or other, exercising their voices all day long. Mrs. Martin, too, she whilome so soft-spoken and demure, had now found her scolding tongue, and was, indeed, noted for that accomplishment all over the parish: the maid was saucy, and the farmer smoked. Poor Grace Neville! what a trial! what a contrast! she tried to draw; tried to sing; tried to read; tried to work; and, above all, tried to be contented. But nothing would do. The vainest endeavour of all was the last. She was of the social, cheerful temperament, to which sympathy is necessary; and having no one to whom she could say, how pleasant is solitude! began to find solitude the most tiresome thing in the world. Mr. and Mrs. Martin were very good sort of people in their way-scolding and smoking notwithstanding; but their way was so different from hers: and the children, whom she might have found some amusement in spoiling, were so spoilt already as to be utterly unbearable. The only companionable person about the place was a slipshod urchin, significantly termed "the odd boy ;" an extra and supplementary domestic, whose department it is to help all the others, out of doors and in; to do all that they leave undone; and to bear the blame of every thing that goes amiss. The personage in question, Dick Crosby by name, was a parish boy taken from the work-house. He was, as nearly as could be guessed, (for) nobody took the trouble to be certain about his age) somewhere bordering on eleven; a long, lean, famished-looking boy, with a pale complexion, sharp thin features, and sunburnt hair. His dress was usually a hat without a crown; a tattered round frock; stockings that scarcely covered his ankles, and shoes that hung on his feet by the middle like clogs, down at heel, and open at toe. Yet, underneath all these rags, and through all his huffings and cuffings from master and mistress, carter and maid, the boy looked, and was, merry and contented; was even a sort of wag in his way; sturdy and independent) in his opinions, and constant in his attachments. He had a pet sheep-dog (for amongst his numerous avocations he occasionally acted as under-shepherd) a spectral, ghastly-looking animal, with a huge white head and neck, and a gaunt black body.-Mephistopheles might have put himself into such a shape. He had also a pet donkey, the raggedest brute upon the common, of whom he was part owner, and for whose better maintenance he was some |