our village was Benacre Hall, the seat of Sir Thomas Gooch,
one of the county members, and I well remember the boyish awe with which
I heard that a mob had set out from Yarmouth to burn the place down.
Whether the mob thought better of it, or gave up the walk of eighteen
miles as one to which they were not equal, I am not in a position to say.
All I know is, that Benacre Hall, such as it is, remains; but I can never
forget the feeling of terror with which, on those dark and dull winter
nights, I looked out of my bedroom window to watch the lurid light
flaring up into the black clouds around, which told how wicked men were
at their mad work, how fiendish passion had triumphed, how some honest
farmer was reduced to ruin, as he saw the efforts of a life of industry
consumed by the incendiary's fire. It was long before I ceased to
shudder at the name of 'Swing.'

The dialect of the village was, I need not add, East Anglian. The people
said 'I woll' for 'I will'; 'you warn't' for 'you were not,' and so on.
A girl was called a 'mawther,' a pitcher a 'gotch,' a 'clap on the
costard' was a knock on the head, a lad was a 'bor.' Names of places
especially were made free with. Wangford was 'Wangfor,' Covehithe was
'Cothhigh,' Southwold was 'Soul,' Lowestoft was 'Lesteff,' Halesworth was
'Holser,' London was 'Lunun.' People who lived in the midland counties
were spoken of as living in the shires. The 'o,' as in 'bowls,' it is
specially difficult for an East Anglian to pronounce. A learned man was
held to be a 'man of larnin',' a thing of which there was not too much in
Suffolk in my young days. A lady in the village sent her son to school,
and great was the maternal pride as she called in my father to hear how
well her son could read Latin, the reading being reading alone, without
the faintest attempt at translation. Sometimes it was hard to get an
answer to a question, as when a Dissenting minister I knew was sent for
to visit a sick man. 'My good man,' said he, 'what induced you to send
for me?' 'Hey, what?' said the invalid. 'What induced you to send for
me?' Alas! the question was repeated in vain. At length the wife
interfered: 'He wants to know what the deuce you sent for him for.' And
then, and not till then, came an appropriate reply. This story, I
believe, has more than once found its way into _Punch_; but I heard it as
a Suffolk boy years and years before _Punch_ had come into existence.

One of the prayer