thence. All the produce--wheat, barley, oats, hay, cattle, and sheep--is
sent into the capital to the various markets held there. The very ideas
held in the villages by the inhabitants come from Fleeceborough; the local
papers published there are sold all round, and supply them with news,
arguments, and the politics of the little kingdom. The farmers look to
Fleeceborough just as much or more. It is a religious duty to be seen
there on market days. Not a man misses being there; if he is not visible,
his circle note it, and guess at various explanations.

Each man has his own particular hostelry, where his father, and his
grandfather, put up before him, and where he is expected to dine in the
same old room, with the pictures of famous rams, that have fetched
fabulous prices, framed against the walls, and ram's horns of exceptional
size and peculiar curve fixed up above the mantelpiece. Men come in in
groups of two or three, as dinner time approaches, and chat about sheep
and wool, and wool and sheep; but no one finally settles himself at the
table till the chairman arrives. He is a stout, substantial farmer, who
has dined there every market day for the last thirty or forty years.

Everybody has his own particular seat, which he is certain to find kept
for him. The dinner itself is simple enough, the waiters perhaps still
more simple, but the quality of the viands is beyond praise. The mutton is
juicy and delicious, as it should be where the sheep is the very idol of
all men's thoughts; the beef is short and tender of grain; the vegetables,
nothing can equal them, and they are all here, asparagus and all, in
profusion. The landlord grows his own vegetables--every householder in
Fleeceborough has an ample garden--and produces the fruit from his own
orchards for the tarts. Ever and anon a waiter walks round with a can of
ale and fills the glasses, whether asked or not. Beef and mutton,
vegetables and fruit tarts, and ale are simple and plain fare, but when