r absentee landlords would come and hunt the neighbourhood,
though it appeared that one of these gentlemen was a Bishop. But the
labouring folk were not exacting as to the sort of person--lunatics,
fox-hunters, Bishops--anybody would be welcome who would spend riches in
a way to "make work." And so here. This village looks up to those who
control wealth as if they were the sources of it; and if there is a
little dislike of some of them personally, there has so far appeared but
little bitterness of feeling against them as a class.

I do not say that there has never been any grumbling. One day, years
ago, an old friend of mine broke out, in his most contemptuous manner,
"What d'ye think Master Dash Blank bin up to now?" He named the owner of
a large estate near the town. "Bin an' promised all his men a blanket
an' a quarter of a ton o' coal at Christmas. A _blanket_, and a _quarter
of a ton o' coal_! Pity as somebody hadn't shoved a brick down his
throat, when he _had_ got 'n open, so's to _keep_ 'n open!" The
sentiment sounds envious, but in fact it was scornful. It was directed,
not against the great man's riches, but against the well-known meanness
he displayed anew in his contemptible gifts.

A faint trace of traditional class animosity sounds in one or two
customary phrases of the village, for instance in the saying that there
is one law for the rich and another for the poor. Yet this has become
such a by-word as to be usually stated with a smile; for is it not an
old acquaintance amongst opinions? The older people even have a humorous
development of it. According to their improved version, there are not
two only, but three kinds of law: one kind for the rich, one for the
poor, and one "the law that nobody can't make." What is this last? Why,
the law "to make a feller pay what en't got nothink." By such witticisms
the edge of bitterness is turned; the sting is taken out of that sense
of inequality which, as the labourer probably knows, would poison his
present comfort and lead him into dangerous courses if he let it rankle.
With one exception, the angriest recognition of class differences which
I have come across amongst the villagers was when I passed two women on
their way home from the town, where, I surmised, they, or some friend of
theirs, had just been fined at the County Court or the Petty Sessions.
"Ah!" one was saying, with spiteful emphasis, "_there'll_ come a great
day for they to have _their_ Judge, same