poor Mrs. Sally had the misfortune to find rent rising and prices
sinking both at the same moment--a terrible solecism in political
economy. Even this, however, I believe she would have endured,
rather than have quitted the house where she was born, and to which
all her ways and notions were adapted, had not a priggish steward,
as much addicted to improvement and reform as she was to precedent
and established usages, insisted on binding her by lease to spread a
certain number of loads of chalk on every field. This tremendous
innovation, for never had that novelty in manure whitened the crofts
and pightles of Court Farm, decided her at once. She threw the
proposals into the fire, and left the place in a week.

Her choice of a habitation occasioned some wonder, and much
amusement in our village world. To be sure, upon the verge of
seventy, an old maid may be permitted to dispense with the more
rigid punctilio of her class, but Mrs. Sally had always been so
tenacious on the score of character, so very a prude, so determined
an avoider of the 'men folk' (as she was wont contemptuously to call
them), that we all were conscious of something like astonishment, on
finding that she and her little handmaid had taken up their abode in
one end of a spacious farmhouse belonging to the bluff old bachelor,
George Robinson, of the Lea. Now Farmer Robinson was quite as
notorious for his aversion to petticoated things, as Mrs. Sally for
her hatred to the unfeathered bipeds who wear doublet and hose, so
that there was a little astonishment in that quarter too, and plenty
of jests, which the honest farmer speedily silenced, by telling all
who joked on the subject that he had given his lodger fair warning,
that, let people say what they would, he was quite determined not to
marry her: so that if she had any views that way, it would be
better for her to go elsewhere. This declaration, which must be