and its rural bridge. Here we turn again, past that other white
farmhouse, half hidden by the magnificent elms which stand before
it. Ah! riches dwell not there, but there is found the next best
thing--an industrious and light-hearted poverty. Twenty years ago
Rachel Hilton was the prettiest and merriest lass in the country.
Her father, an old gamekeeper, had retired to a village alehouse,
where his good beer, his social humour, and his black-eyed daughter,
brought much custom. She had lovers by the score; but Joseph White,
the dashing and lively son of an opulent farmer, carried off the
fair Rachel. They married and settled here, and here they live
still, as merrily as ever, with fourteen children of all ages and
sizes, from nineteen years to nineteen months, working harder than
any people in the parish, and enjoying themselves more. I would
match them for labour and laughter against any family in England.
She is a blithe, jolly dame, whose beauty has amplified into
comeliness; he is tall, and thin, and bony, with sinews like
whipcord, a strong lively voice, a sharp weather-beaten face, and
eyes and lips that smile and brighten when he speaks into a most
contagious hilarity. They are very poor, and I often wish them
richer; but I don't know--perhaps it might put them out.

Quite close to Farmer White's is a little ruinous cottage,
white-washed once, and now in a sad state of betweenity, where
dangling stockings and shirts, swelled by the wind, drying in a
neglected garden, give signal of a washerwoman. There dwells, at
present in single blessedness, Betty Adams, the wife of our
sometimes gardener. I never saw any one who so much reminded me in
person of that lady whom everybody knows, Mistress Meg Merrilies;--
as tall, as grizzled, as stately, as dark, as gipsy-looking,
bonneted and gowned like her prototype, and almost as oracular.