otboy; for tea and card parties,--it would just hold one
table; for the rustle of faded silks, and the splendour of old china;
for the delight of four by honours, and a little snug, quiet scandal
between the deals; for affected gentility and real starvation. This
should have been its destiny; but fate has been unpropitious: it belongs
to a plump, merry, bustling dame, with four fat, rosy, noisy children,
the very essence of vulgarity and plenty.

Then comes the village shop, like other village shops, multifarious as
a bazaar; a repository for bread, shoes, tea, cheese, tape, ribands, and
bacon; for everything, in short, except the one particular thing which
you happen to want at the moment, and will be sure not to find. The
people are civil and thriving, and frugal withal; they have let the
upper part of their house to two young women (one of them is a pretty
blue-eyed girl) who teach little children their A B C, and make caps and
gowns for their mammas,--parcel schoolmistress, parcel mantua-maker.
I believe they find adorning the body a more profitable vocation than
adorning the mind.

Divided from the shop by a narrow yard, and opposite the shoemaker's,
is a habitation of whose inmates I shall say nothing. A cottage--no--a
miniature house, with many additions, little odds and ends of places,
pantries, and what not; all angles, and of a charming in-and-outness;
a little bricked court before one half, and a little flower-yard before
the other; the walls, old and weather-stained, covered with hollyhocks,
roses, honeysuckles, and a great apricot-tree; the casements full of
geraniums (ah! there is our superb white cat peeping out from among
them); the closets (our landlord has the assurance to call them rooms)
full of contrivances and corner-cupboards; and the little garden behind
full of common flowers, tulips, pinks, larkspurs, peonies, stocks, and
carnations, with an arbour of privet, not unlike a sentry-box, where one
lives in a delicious green light, and looks out on the gayest of all
gay flower-beds. That house was built on purpose to show in what an
exceeding small compass comfort may be packed. Well, I will loiter there
no longer.

The next tenement is a place of importance, the Rose Inn: a white-washed
building, retired from the road behind its fine swinging sign, with a
little bow-window room coming out on one side, and forming, with our
stable on the other, a sort of open square, which is the constant resort