a gorgeous colouring has spread itself over those parting masses of
clouds in the west,--what a train of rosy light! We shall have a
fine sunshiny day to-morrow,--a blessing not to be undervalued, in
spite of my late vituperation of heat. Shall we go home now? And
shall we take the longest but prettiest road, that by the green
lanes? This way, to the left, round the corner of the common, past
Mr. Welles's cottage, and our path lies straight before us. How
snug and comfortable that cottage looks! Its little yard all alive
with the cow, and the mare, and the colt almost as large as the
mare, and the young foal, and the great yard-dog, all so fat!
Fenced in with hay-rick, and wheat-rick, and bean-stack, and backed
by the long garden, the spacious drying-ground, the fine orchard,
and that large field quartered into four different crops. How
comfortable this cottage looks, and how well the owners earn their
comforts! They are the most prosperous pair in the parish--she a
laundress with twenty times more work than she can do, unrivalled in
flounces and shirt-frills, and such delicacies of the craft; he,
partly a farmer, partly a farmer's man, tilling his own ground, and
then tilling other people's;--affording a proof, even in this
declining age, when the circumstances of so many worthy members of
the community seem to have 'an alacrity in sinking,' that it is
possible to amend them by sheer industry. He, who was born in the
workhouse, and bred up as a parish boy, has now, by mere manual
labour, risen to the rank of a land-owner, pays rates and taxes,
grumbles at the times, and is called Master Welles,--the title next
to Mister--that by which Shakspeare was called;--what would man have
more? His wife, besides being the best laundress in the county, is
a comely woman still. There she stands at the spring, dipping up
water for to-morrow,--the clear, deep, silent spring, which sleeps
so peacefully under its high flowery bank, red with the tall spiral