had been a quarryman, or the other gentleman who owned the other half,
and had been to sea.

The knowledge of the inhabitants was of the same special sort as their
pursuits. The quarrymen in white fustian understood practical geology,
the laws and accidents of dips, faults, and cleavage, far better than the
ways of the world and mammon; the seafaring men in Guernsey frocks had a
clearer notion of Alexandria, Constantinople, the Cape, and the Indies
than of any inland town in their own country. This, for them, consisted
of a busy portion, the Channel, where they lived and laboured, and a dull
portion, the vague unexplored miles of interior at the back of the ports,
which they seldom thought of.

Some wives of the village, it is true, had learned to let lodgings, and
others to keep shops. The doors of these latter places were formed of an
upper hatch, usually kept open, and a lower hatch, with a bell attached,
usually kept shut. Whenever a stranger went in, he would hear a
whispering of astonishment from a back room, after which a woman came
forward, looking suspiciously at him as an intruder, and advancing slowly
enough to allow her mouth to get clear of the meal she was partaking of.
Meanwhile the people in the back room would stop their knives and forks
in absorbed curiosity as to the reason of the stranger's entry, who by
this time feels ashamed of his unwarrantable intrusion into this hermit's
cell, and thinks he must take his hat off. The woman is quite alarmed at
seeing that he is not one of the fifteen native women and children who
patronize her, and nervously puts her hand to the side of her face, which
she carries slanting. The visitor finds himself saying what he wants in
an apologetic tone, when the woman tells him that they did keep that
article once, but do not now; that nobody does, and probably never will
again; and as he turns away she looks relieved that the dilemma of having