A. K. H. B. has said of men in towns, aware of the value of time, that by long experience they are assured of the uselessness of trying to overreach a neighbour in a bargain, because he is so sharp that they will not succeed. But in agricultural districts such practical essayists in the art of overreaching are declared to be common enough and to spare; and it is one of the Recreations of the Country Parson aforenamed (initially at least) to mark out in detail the course which these bargain-makers are alleged invariably to follow. “If they wish to buy a cow or rent a field, they begin by declaring with frequency and vehemence that they don’t want the thing,—that in fact they would rather not have it,—that it would be inconvenient for them to become possessors of it. They then go on to say that still, if they can get it at a fair price, they may be induced to think of it. They next declare that the cow is the very worst that ever was seen, and that very few men would have such a creature in their possession.” And so on,—till the strenuous haggler, after wasting two hours, telling sixty-five lies, and stamping himself as a cheat, ends the negotiation, without taking anything at all by his petty trickery, so complicated and so clumsy withal in its convolutions. It is in his estimate of the real merits of English horses, that Fuller discreetly observes, in meting out temperate but cordial praise of their good points, “And whilst the seller praiseth them too much, the buyer too little, the indifferent stander-by will give them their due commendation.” What was true of horseflesh and its breeders and purchasers, in old Fuller’s day holds good still. Type of a large class is that manœuvring major in a popular fiction, of whom, and of his, “bargains” in the stable—mostly sedate, elderly animals—we read, that certainly, if the animals could have spoken, they would have expressed their surprise at the difference in the language used by the major when a buyer and when a seller; for while, as a buyer, he made them out to be, like Gil Blas’ mule, all faults, as a seller he suddenly came round to believe in them as paragons of perfection.