In those antediluvian days, and in that sequestered hundred, farm-horses were the ruling fauna and set the pace; the average of which Methusalem, with his “jub” or cross between a lazy trot and a funeral procession, did little to elevate. It was not till the pride of life brought a giddier motion that the Flood—but we anticipate both moral and story. Let us go rather at the Arcadian amble of the days before the Deluge, when the bicycle—even of the early giant order—had not yet arisen to terrorize the countryside with its rotiferous mobility, still less the motor-mammoth swirling through the leafy lanes in a dust-fog and smelling like a super-skunk, or the air-monster out-soaring and out-Sataning the broomsticked witch. It is true that Bundock, Her Majesty’s postman, had once brought word of a big-bellied creature, like a bloated Easter-egg, hovering over the old maypole as if meditating to impale itself thereon, like a bladder on a stick. But normally not even the mail or a post-chaise divided the road with Master Bundock; while, as for the snorting steam-horse that bore off the young Bradmarshians, once they had ventured as far as roaring railhead, it touched the postman’s imagination no more than the thousand-ton sea-monsters with flapping membranes or cloud-spitting gullets that rapt them to the lands of barbarism and gold. Blessèd Bundock, genial Mercury of those days before the Flood, if the rubbered wheel of the postdiluvian age might have better winged thy feet, yet thy susceptible eye—that rested all-embracingly on female gleaners—was never darkened by the sight of the soulless steel reaper, cropping close like a giant goose, and thou wast equally spared that mechanic flail-of-all-work that drones through the dog-days like a Brobdingnagian bumble-bee. For thine happier ear the cottages yet hummed with the last faint strains of the folk-song: unknown in thy sylvan perambulations that queer metallic parrot, hoarser even than the raucous reality, which now wakens and disenchants every sleepy hollow with echoes of the London music-hall.