to have been taken after numerous critical cases and eventful
consultations. Our own case was hopeless, our progress was arrested,
an execution was in the house, servants met with their deserts and were
turned off, goods were seized, my master was knocked up, and I was
knocked down for one hundred and twenty pounds.

Again my beauties blushed for a while unseen; but I was new painted,
and, like some other painted personages, looked, at a distance, almost
as good as new. Fortunately for me, an elderly country curate, just at
this period, was presented with a living, and the new incumbent thought
it incumbent upon him to present his fat lady and his thin daughter with
a leathern convenience. My life was now a rural one, and for ten long
years nothing worth recording happened to me. Slowly and surely did I
creep along green lanes, carried the respectable trio to snug, early,
neighbourly dinners, and was always under lock and key before twelve
o'clock. It must be owned I began to have rather an old-fashioned look;
my body was ridiculously small, and the rector's thin daughter, the
bodkin, or rather packing-needle of the party, sat more forward, and on
a smaller space than bodkins do now-a-days. I was perched up three feet
higher than more modern vehicles, and my two lamps began to look like
little dark lanterns. But my obsoleteness rendered me only more suited
to the service in which I was enlisted. Honest Roger, the red-haired
coachman, would have looked like a clown in a pantomime, in front of a
fashionable equipage; and Simon the footboy, who slouched at my back,
would have been mistaken for an idle urchin surreptitiously enjoying a
ride. But on my unsophisticated dickey and footboard no one could doubt
but that Roger and Simon were in their proper places. The rector died;
of course he had nothing more to do with the _living_, it passed into
other hands; and a clerical income being (alas, that it should be so!)
no inheritance, his relict suddenly plunged in widowhood and poverty,