hungry swine's. Sir
Roger was still oracular on the bench, and after consulting his clerk, a
good lawyer,--and looked up to by the neighboring squires in election
matters, for he was an unswerving tory. You never heard of a rational
thing that he had said in the whole course of his life; but that mattered
little, he was a gentleman of solemn aspect, of stately gait, and of a
very ancient family.

With ten thousand a-year, and his rental rising, he was still, however, a
man of overwhelming cares. What mattered a fine estate if all the world
was against him? And Sir Roger firmly believed that he stood in that
predicament. He had grown up to regard the world as full of little
besides upstarts, radicals, manufacturers, and poachers. All were banded,
in his belief, against the landed interest. It demanded all the energy of
his very small faculties to defend himself and the world against them.

Unfortunately for his peace, a large manufacturing town had sprung up
within a couple of miles of him. He could see its red-brick walls, and
its red-tiled roofs, and its tall smoke-vomiting chimneys, growing and
extending over the slopes beyond the river. It was to him the most
irritating sight in the world; for what were all those swarming weavers
and spinners but arrant radicals, upstarts, sworn foes of ancient
institutions and the landed interests of England? Sir Roger had passed
through many a desperate conflict with them for the return of members to
parliament. They brought forward men that were utter wormwood to all his
feelings, and they paid no more respect to him and his friends on such
occasions than they did to the meanest creature living. Reverence for
ancient blood did not exist in that plebeian and rapidly multiplying
tribe. There were master manufacturers there actually that looked and
talked as big as himself, and _entre nous_, a vast deal more cleverly.
The people talked of rights and franchises, and freedom of speech and of
conscience, in a way that was really frightful. Then they were given most
inveterately to running out in whole and everlasting crowds on Sundays
and holidays into the fields and woods; and as there was no part of the
neighborhood half so pleasant as the groves and river banks of Rockville,
they came swarming up there in crowds that were enough to drive any man
of acres frantic.

Unluckily, there were roads all about Rockville; foot roads, and high
roads and bridle roads. There was a road up the r