"O sir, I be so bad! My inside be that comical I don't know what to do
with he; he be all on the ebb and flow."

The same clergyman knew an old Cotswold labourer who wished to get rid
of the evil influence of the devil. So Hodge wrote a polite, though
firm, epistle, telling his Satanic Majesty he would have no more to do
with him. On being asked where he posted his letter, he replied: "A' dug
a hole i' the ground, and popped un in there. He got it right enough,
for he's left me alone from that day to this."

The Cotswold people are, like their country, healthy, bright, clean, and
old-fashioned; and the more educated and refined a man may happen to be,
the more in touch he will be with them--not because the peasants are
educated and refined, so much as because they are not _half_-educated
and _half_-refined, but simple, honest, god-fearing folk, who mind their
own business and have not sought out many inventions. I am referring now
to the labourers, because the farmers are a totally different class of
men. The latter are on the whole an excellent type of what John Bull
ought to be. The labouring class, however, still maintain the old
characteristics. A primitive people, as often as not they are "nature's
gentlemen."

In the simple matter of dress there is a striking resemblance between
the garb of these country people and that of the highly educated and
refined. It is an acknowledged principle, or rather, I should say, an
unwritten law, in these days--at all events as far as men are
concerned--that to be well dressed all that is required of us is _not to
be badly dressed_. Simplicity is a _sine quâ non_; and we are further
required to abstain from showing bad taste in the choice of shades and