affected gentility and real starvation. This should have been its
destiny; but fate has been unpropitious: it belongs to a plump,
merry, bustling dame, with four fat, rosy, noisy children, the very
essence of vulgarity and plenty.

Then comes the village shop, like other village shops, multifarious
as a bazaar; a repository for bread, shoes, tea, cheese, tape,
ribands, and bacon; for everything, in short, except the one
particular thing which you happen to want at the moment, and will be
sure not to find. The people are civil and thriving, and frugal
withal; they have let the upper part of their house to two young
women (one of them is a pretty blue-eyed girl) who teach little
children their A B C, and make caps and gowns for their mammas,--
parcel schoolmistress, parcel mantua-maker. I believe they find
adorning the body a more profitable vocation than adorning the mind.

Divided from the shop by a narrow yard, and opposite the
shoemaker's, is a habitation of whose inmates I shall say nothing.
A cottage--no--a miniature house, with many additions, little odds
and ends of places, pantries, and what not; all angles, and of a
charming in-and-outness; a little bricked court before one half, and
a little flower-yard before the other; the walls, old and
weather-stained, covered with hollyhocks, roses, honeysuckles, and a
great apricot-tree; the casements full of geraniums (ah! there is
our superb white cat peeping out from among them); the closets (our
landlord has the assurance to call them rooms) full of contrivances
and corner-cupboards; and the little garden behind full of common
flowers, tulips, pinks, larkspurs, peonies, stocks, and carnations,
with an arbour of privet, not unlike a sentry-box, where one lives
in a delicious green light, and looks out on the gayest of all gay