“If you were to stand, Miss St. Clair, as I have often stood, of a dark and wintry night on the ridge of one of our valleys, and looked down upon the great mills, their windows all glowing with light, and heard from within the deep voices of the men, and the sweet, pure, trained notes of the women and the girls, blended in some well-known hymn, or even taking their parts in some familiar and more complex song, you would not think the weaver’s lot a very wretched one. Depend upon it, there’s a lot of poetry in a mill, only we haven’t yet been happy enough to produce a poet. But I profess it is strange to find you commiserating our mill-hands. We in the West Riding have always thought it was the poor hinds of the country who called for commiseration. I don’t know that we regard Huddersfield as an Athens of the North, but we certainly have thought of parts of Lincolnshire as a sort of Baotia. I’m afraid we have been wasting a lot of very genuine sympathy. Perhaps I don’t know much about Hodge. I hope to know more before I leave Lincolnshire. May I hope Miss St. Clair will be my instructress?” “Confound his impudence!” thought the Squire. “Do you hunt, Mr. Beaumont?” “No! our’s is not a hunting district. Besides, I haven’t the time for it.” “You shoot, of course?” “Oh! I’ve knocked over a grouse or a hare or two. But, to tell the truth, I am no sportsman. When I go on the moors I’d rather lie down in the sun and admire the view than blaze away at the birds. And as for sport, rather badger a witness than hunt a fox, any day.” “We can’t all badger a witness,” suggested Eleanor. “Besides, a fox likes the run as much as the hounds do.” “So I’ve heard,” conceded Edward; “but never from the lips of Monsieur Reynard. I never heard of a witness enjoying badgering. But, there, I’m no sportsman, only because I can’t get sport conveniently—I’m no sentimentalist.” “It’s marvellous,” said the Archdeacon, “what a lot of ‘anti-everything’ people there are. You have nothing to do nowadays but declare you like something, and a society is sure to be formed to put it down. There are people who won’t smoke, or drink a glass of good wine, or honest beer, or eat flesh meat, or play a hand at whist, or go near a racecourse, or handle a gun, or touch a cue. It is Puritanism run mad.” “They’re generally a set of low Radical Methodists,” opined the Squire. “You never find such absurd fads among Church people.” “Of course not,” agreed the Archdeacon. “All the same,” demurred Edward, “I don’t see the connection between sound doctrine and roast beef, or between Church polity and a hand at whist.” “It’s a mental habit, my dear sir,” explained the cleric. “A man begins by dissenting from the Church of his fathers, and by a natural process begins to question their diet.” “Depend upon it,” said Wright, with conviction, the battles of Old England were never fought, nor its empire built, on carrots and cold water. Look at your Frenchman.”