books, his stooping form rose erect, his eye flashed, and you saw that
he had not been originally formed and wholly meant for the obscure
seclusion in which his harmless days now wore contentedly away.




CHAPTER IV.

"Egad, sir, the county is going to the dogs! Our sentiments are not
represented in parliament or out of it. The 'County Mercury' has
ratted, and be hanged to it! and now we have not one newspaper in the
whole shire to express the sentiments of the respectable part of the
community!"

This speech was made on the occasion of one of the rare dinners given by
Mr. and Mrs. Caxton to the grandees of the neighborhood, and uttered by
no less a person than Squire Rollick, of Rollick Hall, chairman of the
quarter-sessions.

I confess that I (for I was permitted on that first occasion not only to
dine with the guests, but to outstay the ladies, in virtue of my growing
years and my promise to abstain from the decanters),--I confess, I say,
that I, poor innocent, was puzzled to conjecture what sudden interest in
the county newspaper could cause Uncle Jack to prick up his ears like a
warhorse at the sound of the drum and rush so incontinently across the
interval between Squire Rollick and himself. But the mind of that deep
and truly knowing man was not to be plumbed by a chit of my age. You
could not fish for the shy salmon in that pool with a crooked pin and a
bobbin, as you would for minnows; or, to indulge in a more worthy