[Illustration: IN THE CURATE’S PARLOUR] “I know nothing so pleasant as to sit there on a summer afternoon, with the western sun flickering through a great elder tree, and lighting up one gay parterre, where flowers and flowering shrubs are set as thick as grass in a field ... where we may guess that there is such a thing as mould but never see it. I know nothing so pleasant as to sit in the shade of that dark bower ... now catching a glimpse of the little birds as they fly rapidly in and out of their nests ... now tracing the gay gambles of the common butterflies as they sport around the dahlias; now watching that rarer moth which the country people, fertile in pretty names, call the bee-bird.... “What a contrast from the quiet garden to the lively street! Saturday night is always a time of stir and bustle in our village, and this is Whitsun Eve, the pleasantest Saturday of all the year, when London journeymen and servant lads and lasses snatch a short holiday to visit their families.... This village of ours is swarming to-night like a hive of bees.... I must try to give some notion of the various figures. “First there is a group suited to Teniers, a cluster of out-of-door customers of the ‘Rose,’ old benchers of the inn, who sit round a table smoking and drinking in high solemnity to the sound of Timothy’s fiddle. Next a mass of eager boys, the combatants of Monday, who are surrounding the shoemaker’s shop where an invisible hole in their [cricket] ball is mending by Master Kemp himself.... Farther down the street is the pretty black-eyed girl, Sally Wheeler, come home for a day’s holiday from B——, escorted by a tall footman in a dashing livery, whom she is trying to curtsy off before her deaf grandmother sees him. I wonder whether she will succeed?” In another early sketch of _Our Village_ called “Dr. Tubb,” Mary Mitford writes:— “On taking possession of our present abode about four years ago we found our garden and all the gardens of the straggling village street in which it is situated filled, peopled, infested by a beautiful flower which grew in such profusion and was so difficult to keep under that (poor pretty thing!) instead of being admired and cherished ... it was cut down, pulled up and hoed out like a weed. I do not know the name of this elegant plant, nor have I met with anyone who does; we call it the Spicer, after an old naval officer who once inhabited the white house just above, and, according to tradition, first brought the seed from foreign parts.... I never saw anything prettier than a whole bed of these spicers which had clothed the top of a large heap of earth belonging to our little mason by the roadside; [they] grew as thick and close as grass in a meadow, covered with delicate red and white blossoms like a fairy orchard.”