patronage, and the active exertions of all the young ladies in the
neighbourhood, dwindled away, and died at the end of two winters:
then it became a club-room for the hunt; but the hunt quarrelled with
Joseph's cookery: then a market-room for the farmers; but the farmers
(it was in the high-price time) quarrelled with Joseph's wine: then it
was converted into the magistrate's room--the bench; but the bench and
the market went away together, and there was an end of justicing: then
Joseph tried the novel attraction (to borrow a theatrical phrase) of a
billiard-table; but, alas! that novelty succeeded as ill as if it had
been theatrical; there were not customers enough to pay the marker: at
last, it has merged finally in that unconscious receptacle of pleasure
and pain, a post-office; although Hazelby has so little to do with
traffic of any sort--even the traffic of correspondence--that a saucy
mail-coach will often carry on its small bag, and as often forget to
call for the London bag in return.

In short, Hazelby is an insignificant place;--my readers will look
for it in vain in the map of Dorsetshire;--it is omitted, poor dear
town!--left out by the map-maker with as little remorse as a dropped
letter!--and it is also an old-fashioned place. It has not even a cheap
shop for female gear. Every thing in the one store which it boasts,
kept by Martha Deane, linen-draper and haberdasher, is dear and good,
as things were wont to be. You may actually get there thread made of
flax, from the gouty, uneven, clumsy, shiny fabric, ycleped whited-brown,
to the delicate commodity of Lisle, used for darning muslin. I think
I was never more astonished, from the mere force of habit, than when,
on asking for thread, I was presented, instead of the pretty lattice-wound
balls, or snowy reels of cotton, with which that demand is usually
answered, with a whole drawerful of skeins peeping from their blue papers
--such skeins as in my youth a thrifty maiden would draw into the