f up in time, and solemnly said, "I seed you, ma'am."

Had all Miss Froude's dependents been of an equally communicative
disposition, there would indeed in the confessions of two of them have
been matter of a less peaceful character. It had for some time been
whispered among her indoor servants--this is before I can remember--that
horses, after days of idleness so far as carriage work was concerned,
would on certain mornings be found covered with sweat, and other signs
of mysteriously hard usage. It was ultimately found out that an
enterprising coachman and groom had been riding them periodically to
Teignmouth, and playing a nocturnal part in the landing of smuggled
cargoes, these being stowed in the cellars of a decaying villa, which
for years had remained tenantless owing to persistent rumors that it was
haunted by a regiment of exceedingly savage ghosts. The only other
approach to anything like rural violence which reached our ears through
the channel of oral tradition was an event which must have occurred
about the year 1830, and was reported to the Archdeacon by George
Diggins, his old factotum. This was the plunder of a vessel which had
been wrecked the night before somewhere between Plymouth and Salcombe.
The Archdeacon asked if no authorities had interfered. "I heard, sir,"
said George Diggins, "that a revenue officer did what he could to stop
'un, but they hadn't a sarved he very genteel." This statement meant
that they had pushed him over the cliffs.

Otherwise the stories of rural life that reached me, though relating to
times which have in popular oratory been associated with the
rick-burnings and kindred outrages "by which the wronged peasant righted
himself," were pictures of a general content, broken only by individual
vicissitudes, which were accepted and bewailed as part of the common
order of nature. Of such individual afflictions the larger part were
medical. The women, even the most robust, would rarely confess to the
enjoyment of anything so uninteresting as a condition of rude health.
The usual reply made by them to the inquiries of any lady visitant was,
"Thankee, ma'am, I be torrable" (tolerable); but, if conscious of any
definite malady, their diagnosis of their own cases would, though
simple, be more precise. One of them told my mother that for days she'd
been terrible bad. "My inside," she said, "be always a-coming up, though
I've swallowed a pint of shot by this time merely to keep my liver