Tabby looks elated, and Mrs. Huxtable chagrined. Before I can redress the situation, a sound of heavy blows, delivered on some leathery substance, causes a new stir. All recognise the arrival of Her Majesty’s mail, a boy from Martinhoe, who comes upon a donkey twice a week, if there happen to be any letters for the village below. Out rush Mrs. Huxtable and Suke (who once received an epistle), and the children long to go, but know better. The boy, however, has only a letter for me, which is from Mrs. Shelfer (a cousin of Ann Maples), to whom I wrote a few days since, asking whether she had any rooms to let. Mrs. Shelfer replies that "she has apartments, and they are splendid, and the rent quite trifling;" so the mail is bribed with a pint of cider, while I write to secure a new home. My departure being now fixed and inevitable, the women naturally began to remonstrate more than over. It had been settled that Ann Maples should go with me, not to continue as my servant, but to find a place for herself in London. My few arrangements, which cost me far more pain than trouble, were not long in making; and after saying good-bye to all the dear little children and weanies, and kissing their pretty faces in their little beds, amid an agony of tears from Sally, I was surprised, on entering the kitchen, to find there Mr. Beany Dawe. There was little time for talking, and much less for poetry. We were to start at three in the morning, the farmer having promised to drive us to meet the coach in Barnstaple, whence there would be more than thirty miles of hilly road to Tiverton, the nearest railway station. The journey to London could thus be made in a day, though no one in the parish could be brought to believe it. The poet had been suborned, no doubt, by Mrs. Huxtable, and now detained me to listen to an elegy upon the metropolis of England. I cannot stop to repeat it, neither does it deserve the trouble; but it began thus:-- "Fayther was wance to Lonnon town, And a zed, zed he, whan a coom down, ’Don’t e niver goo there, Ebenezer my son, For they mulks a coo, when her ain’t gat none. They kapes up sich a hollerin, naight and day, And a Devonsheer man dunno the impudence they zay. Their heads and their hats wags regular, like the scratchers of a harrow, And they biles their taties peeled, and ates them in a barrow. They raides on a waggon top with their wives squazed up inside her, And they drinks black dose and yesty pops in the place of wholesome zider. They want take back anything they’ve zelled, And the beds can bite, and the cats can speak: And a well-dress’d man be a most compelled To channge his shirt in the middle of the week!’" "Lor," cried Mrs. Huxtable, "however could they do their washing? Thee vayther must a been as big a liar as thee, Beany. Them gifts always runs in the family."