The Mitfords’ cottage is still to be seen standing in the long straggling street of low cottages, divided by pretty gardens, with a wayside inn on one side, on the other side a village shop, and right opposite a cobbler’s stall. No railway has come to bring bustle and noise to that quiet spot, so that the village still retains what Miss Mitford has called its “trick of standing still, of remaining stationary, unchanged and unimproved in this most changeable and improving world.” In the opening chapter of the first volume of _Our Village_ the writer says:— “Will you walk with me through our village, courteous reader? The journey is not long. We will begin at the lower end, and proceed up the hill. “The tidy square red cottage[8] on the right hand with the long well-stocked garden by the side of the road belongs to a retired publican from a neighbouring town ... one who piques himself on independence and idleness ... and cries out for reform. He introduced into our peaceful vicinage the rebellious innovation of an illumination on the Queen’s acquittal. Remonstrance and persuasion were in vain; he talked of liberty and broken windows—so we all lighted up. Oh! how he shone that night with candles and laurel and white bows and gold paper, and a transparency with a flaming portrait of Her Majesty, hatted and feathered in red ochre. He had no rival in the village that we all acknowledged; the very bonfire was less splendid.... [Footnote 8: This house, though unaltered in appearance, is now an inn called “The Fox and Horn.”] “Next to his house, though parted from it by another long garden with a yew arbour at the end, is the pretty dwelling of the shoemaker, a pale, sickly-looking, black-haired man, the very model of sober industry. There he sits in his little shop from early morning till late at night. An earthquake would hardly stir him; the illumination did not. He stuck immovably to his last from the first lighting up through the long blaze and the slow decay till his large solitary candle was the only light in the place. One cannot conceive anything more perfect than the contempt which the man of transparencies and the man of shoes must have felt for each other on that evening. Our shoemaker is a man of substance, he employs three journeymen, two lame and one a dwarf, so that his shop looks like a hospital.... He has only one pretty daughter—a light, delicate, fair-haired girl of fourteen, the champion, protectress and playfellow of every brat under three years old.... A very attractive person is that child-loving girl.... “The first house on the opposite side of the way is the blacksmith’s, a gloomy dwelling, where the sun never seems to shine, dark and smoky within and without, like a forge. The blacksmith is a high officer in our little state, nothing less than a constable; but alas! alas! when tumults arise and the constable is called for he will commonly be found in the thickest of the fray....