Country life -- England -- Fiction; Pastoral fiction; Villages -- England -- Fiction
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 will be sure not to find. The
people are civil and thriving, and frugal withal; they have let the
upper part of their house to two young women (one of them is a pretty
blue-eyed girl) 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.
Divided from the shop by a narrow yard, and opposite the shoemaker'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, and 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 full of
geraniums (ah! there is our superb white cat peeping out from among
them); the closets (our landlord has the assurance to call them rooms)
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
exceeding small compass comfort may be packed. Well, I will loiter there
no longer.
The next tenement is a place of importance, the Rose Inn: a white-washed
building, retired from the road behind its fine swinging sign, with a
little bow-window room coming out on one side, and forming, with our
stable on the other, a sort of open square, which is the constant resort
of carts, waggons, and return chaises. There are two carts there now,
and mine host is serving them with beer in his eternal red waistcoat. He
is a thriving man and a portly, as his waistcoat attests, which has been
twice let out within this twelvemonth. Our landlord has a stirring wife,
a hopeful son, and a daughter, the belle of the village; not so pretty
as the fair nymph of the shoe-shop, and far less elegant, but ten times
as fine; all curl-papers in the morning, like a porcupine, all curls in
the afternoon, like a poodle, with more flounces than curl-papers, and
more lovers than curls. Miss Phoebe is fitter for town than country; and
to do her justice, she has a consciousness of that fitness, and turns
her steps townward as often as she can. She is gone to B---- to-day with
her last and principal lover, a recruiting sergeant--a man as tall as
Sergeant Kite, and as impudent. Some day or other he will carry off Miss
Phoebe.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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