better for all parties. Protesting against being required to live
in a trench, and obliged to speculate all day upon what the people
can possibly be doing within a mysterious opposite window, which is
a shop-window to look at, but not a shop-window in respect of its
offering nothing for sale and declining to give any account
whatever of itself, Mr. Goodchild concedes Lancaster to be a
pleasant place. A place dropped in the midst of a charming
landscape, a place with a fine ancient fragment of castle, a place
of lovely walks, a place possessing staid old houses richly fitted
with old Honduras mahogany, which has grown so dark with time that
it seems to have got something of a retrospective mirror-quality
into itself, and to show the visitor, in the depth of its grain,
through all its polish, the hue of the wretched slaves who groaned
long ago under old Lancaster merchants. And Mr. Goodchild adds
that the stones of Lancaster do sometimes whisper, even yet, of
rich men passed away--upon whose great prosperity some of these old
doorways frowned sullen in the brightest weather--that their slave-
gain turned to curses, as the Arabian Wizard's money turned to
leaves, and that no good ever came of it, even unto the third and
fourth generations, until it was wasted and gone.

It was a gallant sight to behold, the Sunday procession of the
Lancaster elders to Church--all in black, and looking fearfully
like a funeral without the Body--under the escort of Three Beadles.

'Think,' said Francis, as he stood at the Inn window, admiring, 'of
being taken to the sacred edifice by three Beadles! I have, in my
early time, been taken out of it by one Beadle; but, to be taken
into it by three, O Thomas, is a distinction I shall never enjoy!'