at the parish pay-table. Nay, so much was this a matter of course, that
they came at length not even trouble themselves to receive their pay, but
sent their young children for it; and it was duly paid. Did any parish
officer, indeed, turn restive, and decline to pay a Deg, he soon found
himself summoned before a magistrate, and such pleas of sickness, want
of work, and poor earnings brought up, that he most likely got a sharp
rebuke from the benevolent but uninquiring magistrate, and acquired a
character for hard-heartedness that stuck to him.

So parish overseers learnt to let the Degs alone; and their children
regularly brought up to receive the parish money for their parents, were
impatient as they grew up to receive it for themselves. Marriages in the
Deg family were consequently very early, and there were plenty of
instances of married Degs claiming parish relief under the age of twenty,
on the plea of being the parent of two children. One such precocious
individual being asked by a rather verdant officer why he had married
before he was able to maintain a family, replied, in much astonishment,
that he had married in order to maintain himself by parish assistance.
That he never had been able to maintain himself by his labor, nor ever
expected to do it; his only hope, therefore, lay in marrying, and
becoming the father of two children, to which patriarchal rank he had now
attained, and demanded his "pay."

Thus had lived and flourished the Degs on their ancient patrimony, the
parish, for upward of two hundred years. Nay, we have no doubt whatever
that, if it could have been traced, they had enjoyed an ancestry of
paupers as long as the pedigree of Sir Roger Rockville himself. In the
days of the most perfect villenage, they had, doubtless, eaten the bread
of idleness, and claimed it as a right. They were numerous, improvident,
ragged in dress, and fond of an alehouse and of gossip. Like the blood of
Sir Roger, their blood had become peculiar through a long persistence of
the same circumstances. It was become pure pauper blood. The Degs
married, if not entirely among Degs, yet amongst the same class. None but
a pauper would dream of marrying a Deg. The Degs, therefore, were in
constitution, in mind, in habit, and in inclination, paupers. But a pure
and unmixed class of this kind does not die out like an aristocratic
stereotype. It increases and multiplies. The lower the grade, the more
prolific, as is sometimes seen o