genial smile, as much as to say, "There
is no harm in the squire's jests.") The orator resumed, "After they had
thus lain apart for a little time, very silent and sullen, John sneezed.
'God bless you!' says Joan, over the bolster. 'Did you say God bless
me?' cries John, 'then here goes the bolster!'"

Prolonged laughter and tumultuous applause.

"Friends and neighbours," said the squire, when silence was restored,
and lifting the horn of ale, "I have the pleasure to inform you that I
have ordered the stocks to be taken down, and made into a bench for
the chimney-nook of our old friend Gaffer Solomons yonder. But mind me,
lads, if ever you make the parish regret the loss of the stocks, and
the overseers come to me with long faces, and say, 'The stocks must
be rebuilded,' why--" Here from all the youth of the village rose so
deprecating a clamour, that the squire would have been the most burgling
orator in the world, if he said a word further on the subject. He
elevated the horn over his head--"Why, that's my old Hazeldean again!
Health and long life to you all!"

The tinker had sneaked out of the assembly, and did not show his face in
the village for the next six months. And as to those poisonous tracts,
in spite of their salubrious labels, "The Poor Man's Friend," or "The
Rights of Labour," you could no more have found one of them lurking in
the drawers of the kitchen dressers in Hazeldean than you would have
found the deadly nightshade on the flower-stands in the drawing-room of
the Hall. As for the revolutionary beerhouse, there was no need to apply
to the magistrates to shut it up,--it shut itself up before the week was
out.

O young head of the great House of Hapsburg, what a Hazeldean you might
have made of Hungary! What a "Moriamur pro rege nostro!" would have rung
in your infant reign,--if you had made such a speech as the squire's!

BOOK FOURTH.

INITIAL CHAPTER.

COMPRISING MR. CAXTON'S OPINIONS ON THE MATRIMONIAL STATE, SUPPORTED BY
LEARNED AUTHORITIES.

"It was no bad idea of yours, Pisistratus," said my father, graciously,
"to depict the heightened affections and the serious intention of Signor
Riccabocca by a single stroke,--He left of his spectacles! Good."

"Yet," quoth my uncle, "I think Shakspeare represents a lover as falling
into slovenly habits, neglecting his person, and suffering his hose to
be ungartered, rather than paying that attention to his outer man which
induces Signo