Master Stirn was a formidable personage--more formidable than the Squire himself--as, indeed, a squire's right-hand is generally more formidable than the head can pretend to be. He inspired the greater awe, because, like the stocks, of which he was deputed guardian, his powers were undefined and obscure, and he had no particular place in the out-of-door establishment. He was not the steward, yet he did much of what ought to be the steward's work; he was not the farm-bailiff, for the Squire called himself his own farm-bailiff, nevertheless, Mr Hazeldean sowed and ploughed, cropped and stocked, bought and sold, very much as Mr Stirn condescended to advise. He was not the park-keeper, for he neither shot the deer nor superintended the preserves; but it was he who always found out who had broken a park-pale or snared a rabbit. In short, what may be called all the harsher duties of a large landed proprietor devolved by custom and choice upon Mr Stirn. If a labourer was to be discharged, or a rent enforced, and the Squire knew that he should be talked over, and that the steward would be as soft as himself, Mr Stirn was sure to be the avenging ®angelos® or messenger, to pronounce the words of fate; so that he appeared to the inhabitants of Hazeldean like the Poet's _Sæva Necessitas_, a vague incarnation of remorseless power, armed with whips, nails, and wedges. The very brute creation stood in awe of Mr Stirn. The calves knew that it was he who singled out which should be sold to the butcher, and huddled up into a corner with beating hearts at his grim footstep; the sow grunted, the duck quacked, the hen bristled her feathers and called to her chicks when Mr Stirn drew near. Nature had set her stamp upon him. Indeed, it may be questioned whether the great M. de Chambray himself, surnamed the Brave, had an aspect so awe-inspiring as that of Mr Stirn; albeit the face of that hero was so terrible, that a man who had been his lackey, seeing his portrait after he had been dead twenty years, fell a trembling all over like a leaf! "And what the plague are you all doing here?" said Mr Stirn, as he waved and smacked a great cart-whip which he held in his hand, "making such a hullabaloo, you women, you! that I suspect the Squire will be sending out to know if the village is on fire. Go home, will ye? High time indeed to have the stocks ready, when you get squalling and conspiring under the very nose of a justice of the peace, just as the French Revolutioners did afore they cut off their King's head; my hair stands on end to look at ye." But already, before half this address was delivered, the crowd had dispersed in all directions--the women still keeping together, and the men sneaking off towards the ale-house. Such was the beneficent effect of the fatal stocks on the first day of their resuscitation!