ed his horse and said, 'Keep on your way,
Sir, for it is my business rather to wait on my lady Donna Casilda.' My
husband persisted, cap in hand, in his intention to wait upon the Judge,
which my lady perceiving, full of choler and indignation, she pulled out
a great pin and stuck it into his back; whereupon my husband bawled out,
and, writhing his body, down he came with his lady to the ground. My
mistress was forced to walk home on foot, and my husband went to a
barber-surgeon's, telling him he was run quite through and through the
bowels. But because of this, and also because he was a little
short-sighted, my lady turned him away; the grief whereof, I believe,
verily was the death of him."

{56} One of the most affecting of Wordsworth's pictures of rural manners
is his sketch of the Old Cumberland Beggar. The opening lines of this
excellent poem mark the usual station of the mendicant:--

"I saw an aged Beggar in my walk;
And he was seated by the highway side,
On a low structure of rude masonry
Built at the foot of a huge hill, that they
Who lead their horses down the steep rough road
May thence remount at ease."

{72} The practice of complimenting distinguished personages by
suspending their portraits over ale-house doors sometimes indeed led to
ludicrous consequences. We all remember the conversion of Sir Roger de
Coverley's good-humoured visage into a frowning Saracen's Head. Soon
after Dr. Watson had been installed at Llandaff, a rural Boniface
exchanged for his original sign of the Cock an effigy of his new
Diocesan. But somehow the ale was not so well relished by his customers
as formerly. The head of the Bishop proved less inviting to the thirsty
than the comb and spurs of the original Chanticleer. So to win back
again the golden opinions of the public, mine host adopted an ingenious
device. From reverence to the Church he retained the portrait of Dr.
Watson, but as a concession to popular preferences he caused to be
written under it the following inscription:--

"This is the old Cock."

{82} The splendour and costliness of English signboards seem to have
struck foreigners very forcibly. Moritz, from whom we have already
quoted, says that "the amazing large signs which, at the entrance of
villages, hang in the middle of the street, being fastened to large
beams, which are extended across the street from one house to another
opposite to it, particularly struck me