of office, and endeavoured to express his sense of the honour
conferred upon him by an unmitigated activity in the discharge of
his duty. New brooms, it is said, sweep clean; and I myself can
bear witness that, on the arrival of a new housemaid, the ancient,
hereditary, and domestic spiders who have spun their webs over the
lower division of my bookshelves (consisting chiefly of law and
divinity) during the peaceful reign of her predecessor, fly at
full speed before the probationary inroads of the new mercenary.
Even so the Laird of Ellangowan ruthlessly commenced his
magisterial reform, at the expense of various established and
superannuated pickers and stealers who had been his neighbours for
half a century. He wrought his miracles like a second Duke
Humphrey; and by the influence of the beadle's rod caused the lame
to walk, the blind to see, and the palsied to labour. He detected
poachers, black-fishers, orchard-breakers, and pigeon-shooters;
had the applause of the bench for his reward, and the public
credit of an active magistrate.

All this good had its rateable proportion of evil. Even an
admitted nuisance of ancient standing should not be abated without
some caution. The zeal of our worthy friend now involved in great
distress sundry personages whose idle and mendicant habits his own
lachesse had contributed to foster, until these habits had become
irreclaimable, or whose real incapacity for exertion rendered them
fit objects, in their own phrase, for the charity of all well-
disposed Christians. The 'long-remembered beggar,' who for twenty
years had made his regular rounds within the neighbourhood,
received rather as an humble friend than as an object of charity,
was sent to the neighbouring workhouse. The decrepit dame, who
travelled round the parish upon a hand-barrow, circulating from