times of sheep-shearing and Christmas; having a certain kind of sober
pleasure in amassing money, which occasionally made them miserable
(as they call miserly people up in the north) in their old age;
reading no light or ephemeral literature, but the grave, solid books
brought round by the pedlars (such as the "Paradise Lost" and
"Regained,'" "The Death of Abel," "The Spiritual Quixote," and "The
Pilgrim's Progress"), were to be found in nearly every house: the
men occasionally going off laking, i.e. playing, i.e. drinking for
days together, and having to be hunted up by anxious wives, who dared
not leave their husbands to the chances of the wild precipitous
roads, but walked miles and miles, lantern in hand, in the dead of
night, to discover and guide the solemnly-drunken husband home; who
had a dreadful headache the next day, and the day after that came
forth as grave, and sober, and virtuous looking as if there were no
such thing as malt and spirituous liquors in the world; and who were
seldom reminded of their misdoings by their wives, to whom such
occasional outbreaks were as things of course, when once the
immediate anxiety produced by them was over. Such were--such are--
the characteristics of a class now passing away from the face of the
land, as their compeers, the yeomen, have done before them. Of such
was William Dixon. He was a shrewd clever farmer, in his day and
generation, when shrewdness was rather shown in the breeding and
rearing of sheep and cattle than in the cultivation of land. Owing
to this character of his, statesmen from a distance from beyond
Kendal, or from Borrowdale, of greater wealth than he, would send
their sons to be farm-servants for a year or two with him, in order
to learn some of his methods before setting up on land of their own.
When Susan, his daughter, was about seventeen, one Michael Hurst was
farm-servant at Yew Nook. He worked with the master, and lived with
the family, and was in all respects treated as an equal, except in