АH me! for the days of the AH years that are past and gone, those years which I lived in my primeval village! As I use the word primeval I speak in what may be called a subjective or reflexive sense. For the village itself was old enough-as old almost as the hills that surrounded it but I myself was very young in those days, and my recollections of the village and the hills date from early and happy childhood. And to a man of mature age, where the scenes of his youth and manhood are often forgotten, or at the least but dimly remembered, the things that he saw and heard and did as a child keep on recurring to his memory. Yet it seems to me, as my thoughts travel back, that in many ways our village, even for those far-off days, was somewhat more primitive than the neighbouring parishes, and its traditions were almost ultraconservative. Our rustics men, matrons, or maids-were of a sober and stay-at-home type, buying and selling, marrying and giving in marriage for the most part within the confines of their own village, and having comparatively little "truck with that outside world which lay beyond the hills. True it was, on Saturdays the shoemaking portion of the community, man and wife, trudged it along the hilly road to the sleepy market-town some four miles distant, the one carrying his week's work, the other

a substantial basket. It used to puzzle me at the time, as I met them on the road, why custom had ordained that the wife should be expected to undertake this journey with her lord and master. For I can promise you there was very little apparent companionship about the proceeding, when the man, carrying his bag and smoking his pipe, walked four yards ahead at a good round pace, and the woman with her basket panted behind, careful never to fall more than the prescribed distance in the rear of the superior being! Now I know that the woman was taken partly in order to keep her out of mischief, and partly, no doubt, to give her the opportunity of doing a little extraparochial marketing, in the way of providing some extra delicacy for her man's Sunday dinner. As in more refined circles, so too in our primitive village, was recognised the truth of the saying that, if the wife wishes to be happy though married, she must feed the beast. The only difference in the return journey was that the man could walk with his hands in his pockets, and the woman carried the empty bag on the top of her basket.

In addition to the Hall and the Rectory, the two recognised capitals of the community, there were one or two smaller houses in the parish occupied by gentle people; but as the inhabitants of those houses were, compara

tively speaking, strangers or resident aliens, like my own family, they did not count for much when parish politics were concerned. People were civil enough to our class in their own rough way,—the boys pulled their forelocks and the girls dropped their curtseys, and the men and their wives passed the time of day to us if they met us in the street; but we were plainly given to understand that we were only living there on sufferance, and that, like the Uitlanders, we had no political status of any kind soever.

The parish politics always tended the same way, and that a satisfactory, though now, alas! obsolete, way-i.e., that what the squire and the parson thought right was right, and that their joint fiat was law,

"law civil and exekative," as the great Mr Grummer once remarked. And so it came to pass that, as the squire and the parson never did disagree about material points, they twain ruled the roost, and exercised a wholly beneficent authority in our parish. To begin with, they were both county magistrates; and as the power of a county magistrate was rather an unknown quantity in our village, I firmly believe that if the squire had given orders that Tom Barker, the one real black sheep in the parish, should be hanged, drawn, and quartered, the villain Tom would have had a short shrift and a long rope, and his execution would have been taken quite as a matter of course, provided always that the parson lodged no objection.

Then, again, the admiral-it was a big feather in the village cap, that possession of a squire who was a real live admiralowned three-quarters of the houses in the parish, and, having a very proper and sensible view of his position as landed proprietor, made no bones about turning out of the parish any notorious evil-doer or dissenter. Tom Barker unfortunately was not one of the admiral's tenants, or he might have mended his ways. He was a fine specimen of the old school, this admiral of ours, a man who as a middy had seen service under Nelson, and who retained to his dying day that aversion to the French which had been a sign of the times at the beginning of the century. If his disposition was masterful and his language on occasions at least as strong as his will, the old salt's heart was in the right place, and he was dearly loved by all classes in our parish.