In short, Mirk was a pet hamlet, and exhibited a hundred tokens of its patron's favour. It was surely only right and proper, therefore, that all the votes in the village at election-time, except the doctor's, went the same way with the squire's, and that even in social matters he exercised unquestioned sway. Mirk was as respectable as the brotherhood of Quakers, and was rendered so by the same simple machinery; any one in the place who shewed a disposition to be otherwise was immediately turned out. Did a man drink, so as to cause public disturbance, or pick up sticks (to save himself trouble) out of the park-fences--or, worse than all, did he Poach--were it but a pheasant's egg--he received the most peremptory notice to quit the model village. The issuing of these ukases of banishment had been, now and then, a severe trial to the popularity of the Lisgards; but it had overlived all such acts--nay, more, even its favouritism, that seemingly indispensable element of the feudal system, had been forgiven it. Nobody now complained that George Steve, who notoriously never went to bed quite sober, still continued tenant of the _Lisgard Arms_; while Jacob Flail and Joseph Dibble had been condemned, with their families, to banishment for life for a less habitual commission of the same offence. Much less did it strike the villagers that it was inconsistent in a landlord, so careful for the morality of his people, to let so large a portion of the Abbey Farm to a trainer of race-horses, of which there were at present upwards of thirty in Mirk; and in summer, when the Downland above was fit for their exercise, there were often twice as many. But then Mr Chifney was not like an ordinary trainer; nor did his jockey-boys, thanks to his strict supervision, behave like ordinary jockey-boys. They attended divine service on alternate Sundays, and half-a-dozen of them were in the choir. Mr Mosely (who was Anglican) had even taken into consideration the advisability of putting these last into surplices, but Mr Chifney had dissuaded him from that experiment. They had always been accustomed to the most tight-fitting of garments, strait-waistcoats, buck-skin breeches, and gaiters--and perhaps he thought the transition would be too abrupt. Their habits, in some other respects, were loose, and yet they were suffered to breathe the Lisgard air. Mr Chifney's boys were like the servants of ambassadors at foreign courts, who enjoy a separate jurisdiction from that to which the native inhabitants submit. The law itself--at least in the case of petty offences--was not called in to punish these young gentlemen; but I believe they were “colted”--for the whole discipline was “horsey”--by Mr Chifney's head-groom. I do not know the exact manner in which this chastisement was inflicted, but it must have differed from the ordinary method, since they never failed to pursue their daily equestrian duties as usual. Mr Chifney looked after that himself, and exceedingly sharp.