"No, I would not, ma'am," said the parson, stoutly. "What on earth would
you do, then?" quoth the squire. "Just let 'em alone," said the parson.
"Master Frank, there's a Latin maxim which was often put in the mouth of
Sir Robert Walpole, and which they ought to put into the Eton grammar,
'Quieta non movere.' If things are quiet, let them be quiet! I would
not destroy the stocks, because that might seem to the ill-disposed like
a license to offend; and I would not repair the stocks, because that puts
it into people's heads to get into them."

The squire was a stanch politician of the old school, and be did not like
to think that, in repairing the stocks, he had perhaps been conniving at
revolutionary principles.

"This constant desire of innovation," said Miss Jemima, suddenly mounting
the more funereal of her two favourite hobbies, "is one of the great
symptoms of the approaching crash. We are altering and mending and
reforming, when in twenty years at the utmost the world itself may be
destroyed!" The fair speaker paused, and Captain Barnabas said
thoughtfully, "Twenty years!--the insurance officers rarely compute the
best life at more than fourteen." He struck his hand on the stocks as he
spoke, and added, with his usual consolatory conclusion, "The odds are
that it will last our time, Squire."

But whether Captain Barnabas meant the stocks or the world he did not
clearly explain, and no one took the trouble to inquire.

"Sir," said Master Frank to his father, with that furtive spirit of
quizzing, which he had acquired amongst other polite accomplishments at
Eton,--"sir, it is no use now considering whether the stocks should or
should not have been repaired. The only question is, whom you will get