, but of late resorted to over-much by the
grievance-mongers, (and no wonder, since they had become the popular
party,) was threatened with an application to the magistrates for the
withdrawal of its license. Sundry old women, whose grandsons were
notoriously ill-disposed towards the stocks, were interdicted from
gathering dead sticks under the avenues, on pretence that they broke
down the live boughs; and, what was more obnoxious to the younger
members of the parish than most other retaliatory measures, three
chestnut trees, one walnut, and two cherry trees, standing at the bottom
of the park, and which had, from time immemorial, been given up to the
youth of Hazeldean, were now solemnly placed under the general defence
of "private property." And the crier had announced that, henceforth, all
depredators on the fruit trees in Copse Hollow would be punished with
the utmost rigor of the law. Stirn, indeed, recommended much more
stringent proceedings than all these indications of a change of policy,
which, he averred, would soon bring the parish to its senses--such as
discontinuing many little jobs of unprofitable work that employed the
surplus labor of the village. But there the Squire, falling into the
department, and under the benigner influence of his Harry, was as yet
not properly hardened. When it came to a question that affected the
absolute quantity of loaves to be consumed by the graceless mouths that
fed upon him, the milk of human kindness--with which Providence has so
bountifully supplied that class of the mammalia called the "Bucolic,"
and of which our Squire had an extra "yield"--burst forth, and washed
away all the indignation of the harsher Adam.

Still your policy of half measures, which irritates without crushing its
victims, which flaps an exasperated wasp-nest with a silk pocket
handkerchief, instead of blowing it up with a match and train, is rarely
successful; and, after three or four other and much guiltier victims
than Lenny had been incarcerated in the stocks, the parish of Hazeldean
was ripe for any enormity. Pestilent jacobinical tracts, conceived and
composed in the sinks of manufacturing towns--found their way into the
popular beer-house--heaven knows how, though the Tinker was suspected of
being the disseminator by all but Stirn, who still, in a whisper,
accused the Papishers. And, finally, there appeared amongst the other
graphic embellishments which the poor stocks had received, the rude
_gr