Ah, me! who would not be jolly with a good market this week and the prospect of higher prices next?--with the guarantee of the State that the farmer should not have less than 70s. a quarter, and the certainty of higher prices if the war lasted! But these farmers in the leather breeches and top boots--these self-satisfied men are already in the fading glory of the "Good Old Times"--always applying those words, in so far as they have any meaning at all, chiefly to the farming and land-owning classes. Before the century is much older we shall see the same class harrassed, embarrassed, and eaten up by a rotten and immoral poor law system, about to be mended, and their prospect of high prices growing less and less, as sliding scales and all artificial props are removed out of the way of things finding their own level--down, down, down towards the present unsupportable level of prices when the consumer has as complete a monopoly of advantages as had the producer in the old days! But it was not only of the results, but of the place itself also, that the farmer had a pleasant memory. So much attached were its habitues {110} to the old style of an open corn market that when, in later times, the Corn exchange came, many complained that they could not tell a good sample of corn in a building like that, so well as in the open air. Indeed, so wedded were they to the old custom of open market that when the Corn Exchange was erected by the then Lord Dacre, they showed such an obstinate preference for the open market and the convenience of the inns, that they refused for some time to use the new building provided for them! But they got used to it--those that were left to carry on the business of a market, whose traditions, nay, whose history, speaks to us of a former greatness and reputation for trade, in the centuries that are gone, which we can hardly now understand. CHAPTER XI. ROYSTON IN 1800-25.--ITS SURROUNDINGS, ITS STREETS, AND ITS PEOPLE.