Berkshire folks haz got ez much grit ez the Hampshire fellers, an don'
ye callate we haz ez much call to hev a grudge agin courts? Ye orter
been daown tew the tavern tew see haow the fellers cut up wen the news
come. T'was like a match dropping intew a powder bar'l. Tuesday's
court day tew Barrington, an ef thar ain't more'n a thousand men on
han with clubs an guns, tew stop that air court, wy, call me a skunk.
An wen that air court's stopped, that air jail's a comin open, or it's
a comin daown, one o' the tew naow."




CHAPTER SIXTH

PEREZ DEFINES HIS POSITION


We who live in these days, when press and telegraph may be said to
have almost rendered the tongue a superfluous member, quite fail to
appreciate the rapidity with which intelligence was formerly
transmitted from mouth to mouth. Virgil's description of hundred
tongued Rumor appeared by no means so poetical an exaggeration to our
ancestors as it does to us. Although the express, bearing the news of
the Northampton uprising did not reach Stockbridge tavern a minute
before half-past seven in the evening, there were very few families in
the village or the outlying farmhouses, which had not heard it ere
bedtime, an hour and a half later. And by the middle of the following
forenoon there was in all Southern Berkshire, only here and there a
family, off on a lonely hillside, or in a hidden valley, in which it
was not the subject of debate.