e rabid about the
little brook between their estates, of which each wishes to arrogate to
himself the exclusive fishing. Their keepers watch like the Austrian
guard on the Danube, in a life of perpetual assault and battery. Last
Saturday, March 3rd, 1847, one Benjamin Hodgekin, aged fifteen, had the
misfortune to wash his feet in the debateable water; the belligerent
powers made common cause, and haled the wretch before the Petty
Sessions. His mother met me. She lived in service here till she
married a man at Marksedge, now dead. This poor boy is an admirable
son, the main stay of the family, who must starve if he were
imprisoned, and she declared, with tears in her eyes, that she could
not bear for a child of hers to be sent to gaol, and begged me to speak
to the gentlemen.' He started up with kindling eyes and vehement
manner. 'I went to the Justice-room!'

'My dear! with the groundsel?'

'And the knitting-needles!'

On rushed the narration, unheeding trifles. 'There was the array: Mr.
Calcott in the chair, and old Freeman, and Captain Shaw, and fat Sir
Gilbert, and all the rest, met to condemn this wretched widow's son for
washing his feet in a gutter!'

'Pray what said the indictment?' asked Mrs. Ponsonby.

'Oh, that he had killed an infant trout of the value of three
farthings! Three giant keepers made oath to it, but I had his own
mother's word that he was washing his feet!'

No one could help laughing, but Fitzjocelyn was far past perceiving any
such thing. 'Urge what I would, they fined him. I talked to old
Brewster! I appealed to his generosity, if there be room for
generosity about a trout no bigger than a gudgeon! I talked to Mr.
Calcott, who, I thought, had more sense, but Justice Shallow would have
been more practicable! No one took a rational view but Ramsbotham of
the factory, a very sensible man, with excellent feeling. When it is
recorded in history, who will believe that seven moral, well-meaning
men agreed in condemning a poor lad of fifteen to a fine of five
shillings, costs three-and-sixpence--a sum he could no more pay than I
the National Debt, and with the alternative of three months'
imprisonment, branding and contaminating for life, and destroying all
self-respect? I paid the fine, so there is one act of destruction the
less on the heads of the English squirearchy.'

'Act of destruction!'

'The worst destruction is to blast a man's character because the love
of adventu