village implies; and many are the sessions of the country courts that
you peep upon with Frank, from the door of the great dining-room.

The defendant always seems to you in these important cases--especially
if his beard is rather long--an extraordinary ruffian, to whom Jack
Sheppard would have been a comparatively innocent boy. You watch
curiously the old gentleman sitting in his big arm-chair, with his
spectacles in their silver case at his elbow, and his snuffbox in hand,
listening attentively to some grievous complaint; you see him ponder
deeply,--with a pinch of snuff to aid his judgment,--and you listen with
intense admiration as he gives a loud preparatory "Ahem!" and clears
away the intricacies of the case with a sweep of that strong practical
sense which distinguishes the New-England farmer,--getting at the very
hinge of the matter, without any consciousness of his own precision, and
satisfying the defendant by the clearness of his talk as much as by the
leniency of his judgment.

His lands lie along those swelling hills, which in southern New England
carry the chain of the White and Green Mountains in gentle undulations
to the borders of the sea. He farms some fifteen hundred
acres,--"suitably divided," as the old-school agriculturists say, into
"woodland, pasture, and tillage." The farm-house--a large,
irregularly-built mansion of wood--stands upon a shelf of the hills
looking southward, and is shaded by century-old oaks. The barns and
out-buildings are grouped in a brown phalanx a little to the northward
of the dwelling. Between them a high timber gate opens upon the
scattered pasture lands of the hills; opposite to this and across the
farmyard, which is the lounging-place of scores of red-necked turkeys
and of matronly hens, clucking to their callow brood, another gate of
similar pretensions opens upon the wide meadow-land, which rolls with a