People did mark his words; and all set to work to inquire what the suspicious circumstances were, so that what between inquiries and answers, and hints, and inuendoes, and suspicions, and surmises, and gossiping suggestions, and doubtful anecdotes, and pure lies, the little town of Tarningham was kept in a state of most exceeding chatter and bustle for several days and all day long, except at the feeding time, when the streets returned to their silent tranquillity, and not a soul was to be seen but poor little deformed Billy Lamb, first carrying out his tray of foaming tankards, and then plodding up the hill with a packet of letters and newspapers. As it is a fine day, and those large heavy floating clouds give frequently a pleasant shade, I do not see why we should not follow him up to Chandleigh Heath. How quick the little fellow's long, disproportioned legs carry his small round turkey-shaped body. But Billy Lamb must be going to visit his mother after he has fulfilled his errand, or he would not walk so fast this warm noontide. It is a round of six miles, yet he will do it in an hour and a quarter. On my life he is already on the heath. One can hardly keep up with him; and now he is at the cottage garden-gate. What strange things poetical ideas are! and how unlike reality! The poetical idea of a cottage, for instance, is rarely very like truth. We take it and cover it with roses and surround it with flowering shrubs. That may be all very well, for there are such cottages; but then we strip it of all coarse attributes of life; we take away the evils of poverty, and vulgarity, and vice, and leave it nothing but content, and natural refinement, and calm innocence. It is neither the scene of struggles against fortune, cold, fireless, cheerless, often foodless, with want, smoke, and a dozen of children, nor the prim false rosewood, bad pianoforted abode of retired slopsellerism, nor the snug-embowered, back lane residence of the kept mistress. There is no misery and repining there, no bad English and gin-and-water, no quiet cabriolets and small tigers, black eyes, ringlets, flutter, finery, and falsehood. It is all love and roses--quarter of an acre of Paradise with a small house upon it. Such is the poetical idea of a cottage. Such, however, was by no means the sort of cottage, the garden-gate of which was now approached by Billy Lamb. It had been built by a coarse, vulgar man, was inhabited by an arrant scoundrel; and there the arrant scoundrel was walking in his small domain with the lady whom we have more than once mentioned. He looked sharply round when he heard the garden-gate squeak; but was perfectly composed at the sight of the little pot-boy. The letters and papers he took, and looked at the covers, and then, with an indifferent air, asked, "Well, my lad, what news is stirring in your little town?" "Not much, Sir," said Billy Lamb; "only about the marriage of the lord and Miss Slingsby."