“Next to this official dwelling is a spruce little tenement, red, high and narrow, boasting, one above another, three sash windows, the only sash windows in the village. That slender mansion has a fine, genteel look. The little parlour seems made for Hogarth’s old maid and her stunted foot-boy, for tea and card parties ... for the rustle of faded silks and the splendour of old china, for affected gentility and real starvation. This should have been its destiny, but fate has been unpropitious, it belongs to a plump, merry, bustling dame with four fat, rosy, noisy children, the very essence of vulgarity and plenty. “Then comes the village shop, like other village shops, multifarious as a bazaar; a repository for bread, shoes, tea, cheese, tape, ribands and bacon, for everything, in short, except the one particular thing which you happen to want at the moment ... and which ‘they had yesterday and will have again to-morrow.’ ... The people are civil and thriving and frugal withal. They have let the upper part of their house to two young women ... who teach little children their A B C, and make caps and gowns for their mammas—parcel schoolmistress, parcel mantua maker. I believe they find adorning the body a more profitable vocation than adorning the mind.” This little shop still exists, and it still bears above its modest window the identical name of Bromley, which it bore in Miss Mitford’s day. [Illustration: THE VILLAGE SHOP] “Divided from the shop by a narrow yard,” continues Miss Mitford, “and opposite the shoe-maker’s, is a habitation of whose inmates I shall say nothing. A cottage—no—a miniature house, with many additions, little odds and ends of places, pantries, and what not; all angles and of a charming in-and-outness; a little bricked court before one half, a little flower-yard before the other; the walls old and weather-stained, covered with hollyhocks, roses, honeysuckles and a great apricot tree. The casements are full of geraniums (ah, there is our superb white cat peeping out from amongst them!), the closets ... full of contrivances and corner cupboards; and the little garden behind full of common flowers, tulips, pinks, larkspurs, peonies, stocks and carnations, with an arbour of privet, not unlike a sentry-box, where one lives in a delicious green light, and looks out on the gayest of all gay flower-beds. That house was built on purpose to show in what an exceedingly small compass comfort may be packed. Well, I will loiter there no longer.