e did much of
what ought to be the steward's work; he was not the farm-bailiff,
for the squire called himself his own farm-bailiff; nevertheless, Mr.
Hazeldean sowed and ploughed, cropped and stocked, bought and sold, very
much as Mr. Stirn condescended to advise. He was not the park-keeper,
for he neither shot the deer nor superintended the preserves; but it was
he who always found out who had broken a park pale or snared a rabbit.
In short, what may be called all the harsher duties of a large landed
proprietor devolved, by custom and choice, upon Mr. Stirn. If a labourer
was to be discharged or a rent enforced, and the squire knew that he
should be talked over, and that the steward would be as soft as himself,
Mr. Stirn was sure to be the avenging messenger, to pronounce the words
of fate; so that he appeared to the inhabitants of Hazeldean like the
poet's Saeva Necessitas, a vague incarnation of remorseless power, armed
with whips, nails, and wedges. The very brute creation stood in awe of
Mr. Stirn. The calves knew that it was he who singled out which should
be sold to the butcher, and huddled up into a corner with beating
hearts at his grim footstep; the sow grunted, the duck quacked, the hen
bristled her feathers and called to her chicks when Mr. Stirn drew near.
Nature had set her stamp upon him. Indeed, it may be questioned whether
the great M. de Chambray himself, surnamed the brave, had an aspect so
awe-inspiring as that of Mr. Stirn; albeit the face of that hero was so
terrible, that a man who had been his lackey, seeing his portrait after
he had been dead twenty years, fell a trembling all over like a leaf!

"And what the plague are you doing here?" said Mr. Stirn, as he waved
and smacked a great cart-whip which he held in his hand, "making such
a hullabaloo, you women, you! that I suspect the squire will be sending
out to know if the village is on fire. Go home, will ye? High time
indeed to have the stocks ready, when you get squalling and conspiring
under the very nose of a justice of the peace, just as the French
revolutioners did afore they cut off their king's head! My hair stands
on end to look at ye." But already, before half this address was
delivered, the crowd had dispersed in all directions,--the women still
keeping together, and the men sneaking off towards the ale-house. Such
was the beneficent effect of the fatal stocks on the first day of their
resuscitation. However, in the break up of every c