Read Ebook: Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine Vol. 68 No 420 October 1850 by Various

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"No--in my apartments in the Albany. No. 3 A. I have had them ten years, and it was only last Christmas that I bought my Japan cat."

"Dear me," said Miss Jemima; "a Japan cat! that must be very curious! What sort of a creature is it?"

"Don't you know? Bless me, a thing with three legs, and holds toast! I never thought of it, I assure you, till my friend Cosey said to me, one morning when he was breakfasting at my rooms--'Higginbotham, how is it that you, who like to have things comfortable about you, don't have a cat?' 'Upon my life,' said I, 'one can't think of everything at a time;' just like you, Squire."

"Pshaw," said Mr Hazeldean, gruffly--"not at all like me. And I'll thank you another time, Cousin Higginbotham, not to put me out, when I'm speaking on matters of importance; poking your cat into my stocks! They look something like now--don't they, Harry? I declare that the whole village seems more respectable. It is astonishing how much a little improvement adds to the--to the--"

"Charm of a landscape;" put in Miss Jemima sentimentally.

The Squire neither accepted nor rejected the suggested termination; but leaving his sentence uncompleted, broke suddenly off with

"And if I had listened to Parson Dale--"

"You would have done a very wise thing;" said a voice behind, as the Parson presented himself in the rear.

"Wise thing! Why surely, Mr Dale," said Mrs Hazeldean with spirit, for she always resented the least contradiction to her lord and master; perhaps as an interference with her own special right and prerogative! "why, surely if it is necessary to have stocks, it is necessary to repair them."

"That's right, go it, Harry!" cried the Squire, chuckling, and rubbing his hands as if he had been setting his terrier at the Parson: "St--St--at him! Well, Master Dale, what do you say to that?"

"My dear ma'am," said the Parson, replying in preference to the lady, "there are many institutions in the country which are very old, look very decayed, and don't seem of much use; but I would not pull them down for all that."

"You would reform them, then;" said Mrs Hazeldean, doubtfully, and with a look at her husband, as much as to say, "He is on politics now--that's your business."

"No, I would not, ma'am;" said the Parson stoutly.

"What on earth would you do, then?" quoth the Squire.

The Squire was a staunch politician of the old school, and he did not like to think that in repairing the stocks he had perhaps been conniving at revolutionary principles.

"This constant desire of innovation," said Miss Jemima, suddenly mounting the more funereal of her two favourite hobbies, "is one of the great symptoms of the approaching crash. We are altering, and mending, and reforming, when in twenty years at the utmost the world itself may be destroyed!" The fair speaker paused, and--

Captain Barnabas said, thoughtfully--"Twenty years!--the insurance offices rarely compute the best life at more than fourteen." He struck his hand on the stocks as he spoke, and added with his usual consolatory conclusion:--"The odds are, that it will last our time, Squire."

But whether Captain Barnabas meant the stocks or the world, he did not clearly explain, and no one took the trouble to inquire.

"Sir," said Master Frank, to his father, with that furtive spirit of quizzing, which he had acquired amongst other polite accomplishments at Eton.--"Sir, it is no use now considering whether the stocks should or should not have been repaired. The only question is, whom you will get to put into them."

"True," said the Squire, with much gravity.

"Don't spout your Latin at me, Parson!" cried the Squire, angrily; "I can give you as good as you bring any day.

"'Propria quae maribus tri buuntur mascula dicas.-- As in praesenti, perfectum format in avi.'"

"There," added the Squire, turning triumphantly towards his Harry, who looked with great admiration at this unprecedented burst of learning on the part of Mr Hazeldean--"There, two can play at that game! And now that we have all seen the stocks, we may as well go home, and drink tea. Will you come up and play a rubber, Dale? No!--hang it, man, I've not offended you--you know my ways."

"I fear my wife has got one of her bad headaches, but I will give her your kind message, and at all events you may depend upon me."

"That's right," cried the Squire, "in half-an-hour, eh?--How d'ye do, my little man?" as Lenny Fairfield, on his way home from some errand in the village, drew aside and pulled off his hat with both hands. "Stop--you see those stocks--eh? Tell all the bad little boys in the parish to take care how they get into them--a sad disgrace--you'll never be in such a quandary!"

"That at least I will answer for," said the Parson.

"And I too," added Mrs Hazeldean, patting the boy's curly head. "Tell your mother I shall come and have a good chat with her to-morrow evening."

And so the party passed on, and Lenny stood still on the road, staring hard at the stocks, which stared back at him from its four great eyes.

But Lenny did not remain long alone. As soon as the great folks had fairly disappeared, a large number of small folks emerged timorously from the neighbouring cottages, and approached the site of the stocks with much marvel, fear, and curiosity.

"D'ye know what the diggins the Squire did it for, Gaffer Solomons?" asked one many-childed matron, with a baby in arms, an urchin of three years old clinging fast to her petticoat, and her hand maternally holding back a more adventurous hero of six, who had a great desire to thrust his head into one of the grisly apertures. All eyes turned to a sage old man, the oracle of the village, who, leaning both hands on his crutch, shook his head bodingly.

"Maw be," said Gaffer Solomons, "some of the boys ha' been robbing the orchards."

"Orchards"--cried a big lad who seemed to think himself personally appealed to--" why, the bud's scarce off the trees yet!"

"No more it in't!" said the dame with many children, and she breathed more freely.

"Maw be," said Gaffer Solomons, "some o' ye has been sitting snares."

"What for?" said a stout sullen-looking young fellow, whom conscience possibly pricked to reply. "What for, when it beant the season? And if a poor man did find a hear in his pocket i' the hay-time, I should like to know if ever a squire in the world would let un off wi' the stocks--eh?"

That last question seemed a settler, and the wisdom of Gaffer Solomons went down fifty per cent in the public opinion of Hazeldean.

"Maw be," said the Gaffer, this time with a thrilling effect, which restored his reputation--"Maw be some o' ye ha' been getting drunk, and making beestises o' yourselves!"

There was a dead pause, for this suggestion applied too generally to be met with a solitary response. At last one of the women said, with a meaning glance at her husband, "God bless the Squire; he'll make some on us happy women if that's all!"

There then arose an almost unanimous murmur of approbation among the female part of the audience; and the men looked at each other, and then at the Phenomenon, with a very hang-dog expression of countenance.

"Or, maw be," resumed Gaffer Solomons, encouraged to a fourth suggestion by the success of its predecessor--"Maw be some o' the Misseses ha' been making a rumpus, and scolding their goodmen. I heard say in my granfeythir's time, that arter old Mother Bang nigh died o' the ducking-stool, them 'ere stocks were first made for the women, out o' compassion like! And every one knows the Squire is a koind-hearted man, God bless un!"

"God bless un!" cried the men heartily; and they gathered lovingly round the Phenomenon, like heathens of old round a tutelary temple. But then rose one shrill clamour among the females, as they retreated with involuntary steps towards the verge of the green, whence they glared at Solomons and the Phenomenon with eyes so sparkling, and pointed at both with gestures so menacing, that Heaven only knows if a morsel of either would have remained much longer to offend the eyes of the justly enraged matronage of Hazeldean, if fortunately Master Stirn, the Squire's right-hand man, had not come up in the nick of time.

"And what the plague are you all doing here?" said Mr Stirn, as he waved and smacked a great cart-whip which he held in his hand, "making such a hullabaloo, you women, you! that I suspect the Squire will be sending out to know if the village is on fire. Go home, will ye? High time indeed to have the stocks ready, when you get squalling and conspiring under the very nose of a justice of the peace, just as the French Revolutioners did afore they cut off their King's head; my hair stands on end to look at ye." But already, before half this address was delivered, the crowd had dispersed in all directions--the women still keeping together, and the men sneaking off towards the ale-house. Such was the beneficent effect of the fatal stocks on the first day of their resuscitation!

However, in the break up of every crowd there must be always some one who gets off the last; and it so happened that our friend Lenny Fairfield, who had mechanically approached close to the stocks, the better to hear the oracular opinions of Gaffer Solomons, had no less mechanically, on the abrupt appearance of Mr Stirn, crept, as he hoped, out of sight, behind the trunk of the elm tree which partially shaded the stocks; and there now, as if fascinated, he still cowered, not daring to emerge in full view of Mr Stirn, and in immediate reach of the cart-whip,--when the quick eye of the right-hand man detected his retreat.

"Hallo, you sir--what the deuce, laying a mine to blow up the stocks! just like Guy Fox and the Gunpowder Plot, I declares! What ha' you got in your willanous little fist there?"

"Nothing, sir," said Lenny, opening his palm.

"Nothing--um!" said Mr Stirn much dissatisfied; and then, as he gazed more deliberately, recognising the pattern boy of the village, a cloud yet darker gathered over his brow; for Mr Stirn, who valued himself much on his learning--and who, indeed, by dint of more knowledge as well as more wit than his neighbours, had attained his present eminent station in life--was extremely anxious that his only son should also be a scholar; that wish,

"The gods dispersed in empty air."

Master Stirn was a notable dunce at the Parson's school, while Lenny Fairfield was the pride and boast of it; therefore Mr Stirn was naturally, and almost justifiably ill-disposed towards Lenny Fairfield, who had appropriated to himself the praises which Mr Stirn had designed for his son.

"Um!" said the right-hand man, glowering on Lenny malignantly, "you are the pattern boy of the village, are you? Very well, sir--then I put these here stocks under your care--and you'll keep off the other boys from sitting on 'em, and picking off the paint, and playing three holes and chuck farthing, as I declare they've been a-doing, just in front of the elewation. Now you knows your 'sponsibilities, little boy--and a great honour they are too, for the like o' you. If any damage be done, it is to you I shall look; d'ye understand? and that's what the Squire says to me. So you sees what it is to be a pattern boy, Master Lenny!"

'Mixtaque ridenti fundet colocasia acantho!'

But to be sure, the novels, in spite of very inflammatory titles, such as "Fatal Sensibility," "Errors of the Heart," &c., were so harmless that I doubt if the sermons could have had much to say against their next-door neighbours--and that is all that can be expected by the best of us.

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