ge. Here we turn again, past that other white farmhouse,
half hidden by the magnificent elms which stand before it. Ah! riches
dwell not there, but there is found the next best thing--an industrious
and light-hearted poverty. Twenty years ago Rachel Hilton was the
prettiest and merriest lass in the country. Her father, an old
gamekeeper, had retired to a village alehouse, where his good beer, his
social humour, and his black-eyed daughter, brought much custom. She had
lovers by the score; but Joseph White, the dashing and lively son of an
opulent farmer, carried off the fair Rachel. They married and settled
here, and here they live still, as merrily as ever, with fourteen
children of all ages and sizes, from nineteen years to nineteen months,
working harder than any people in the parish, and enjoying themselves
more. I would match them for labour and laughter against any family in
England. She is a blithe, jolly dame, whose beauty has amplified into
comeliness; he is tall, and thin, and bony, with sinews like whipcord, a
strong lively voice, a sharp weather-beaten face, and eyes and lips that
smile and brighten when he speaks into a most contagious hilarity. They
are very poor, and I often wish them richer; but I don't know--perhaps
it might put them out.

Quite close to Farmer White's is a little ruinous cottage, white-washed
once, and now in a sad state of betweenity, where dangling stockings and
shirts, swelled by the wind, drying in a neglected garden, give signal
of a washerwoman. There dwells, at present in single blessedness, Betty
Adams, the wife of our sometimes gardener. I never saw any one who so
much reminded me in person of that lady whom everybody knows,
Mistress Meg Merrilies;--as tall, as grizzled, as stately, as dark, as
gipsy-looking, bonneted and gowned like her prototype, and almost as
oracular. Here the resemblance ceases. Mrs. Adams is a perfectly honest,
industrious, painstaking person, who earns a good deal of money by
washing and charing, and spends it in other luxuries than tidiness,--in
green tea, and gin, and snuff. Her husband lives in a great family, ten
miles off. He is a capital gardener--or rather he would be so, if he
were not too ambitious. He undertakes all things, and finishes none. But
a smooth tongue, a knowing look, and a great capacity of labour, carry
him through. Let him but like his ale and his master and he will do work
enough for four. Give him his own way, and his full quant