ed
the farm he occupied; whereas Squire Cass had a tenant or two, who
complained of the game to him quite as if he had been a lord.

It was still that glorious war-time which was felt to be a peculiar
favour of Providence towards the landed interest, and the fall of
prices had not yet come to carry the race of small squires and yeomen
down that road to ruin for which extravagant habits and bad husbandry
were plentifully anointing their wheels. I am speaking now in relation
to Raveloe and the parishes that resembled it; for our old-fashioned
country life had many different aspects, as all life must have when it
is spread over a various surface, and breathed on variously by
multitudinous currents, from the winds of heaven to the thoughts of
men, which are for ever moving and crossing each other with
incalculable results. Raveloe lay low among the bushy trees and the
rutted lanes, aloof from the currents of industrial energy and Puritan
earnestness: the rich ate and drank freely, accepting gout and apoplexy
as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families, and the poor
thought that the rich were entirely in the right of it to lead a jolly
life; besides, their feasting caused a multiplication of orts, which
were the heirlooms of the poor. Betty Jay scented the boiling of
Squire Cass's hams, but her longing was arrested by the unctuous liquor
in which they were boiled; and when the seasons brought round the great
merry-makings, they were regarded on all hands as a fine thing for the
poor. For the Raveloe feasts were like the rounds of beef and the
barrels of ale--they were on a large scale, and lasted a good while,
especially in the winter-time. After ladies had packed up their best
gowns and top-knots in bandboxes, and had incurred the risk of fording
streams on pillions with the precious burden in rainy or snowy weather,
when there was no knowing how high the water would rise, it was not to
be supposed that they looked forward to a brief pleasure. On this
ground it was always contrived in the dark seasons, when there was
little work to be done, and the hours were long, that several
neighbours should keep open house in succession. So soon as Squire
Cass's standing dishes diminished in plenty and freshness, his guests
had nothing to do but to walk a little higher up the village to Mr.
Osgood's, at the Orchards, and they found hams and chines uncut,
pork-pies with the scent of the fire in them, spun butter in all