But the bagman asserted he was right, and so, to end the dispute, the whole party rode up, and one wished “Mr. Mayor” good morning. It was indeed that worthy man, and although he again, instead of making answer, drew something from his pocket, it produced no alarm among his fellow-burgesses, for _they_ at least knew him for a very deaf man, and had often seen him reach for that ear-trumpet which he now drew forth, clapped to his ear, and asked them what it was they said. Swift, who, travelling between London, Chester, Holyhead and Dublin, remarked upon the many nations and strange peoples he passed on the way, serves to emphasise these notes upon the fading individuality of places and people. The dialect of “Zummerzet” has not wholly decayed, but it has become so modified that when old references to its Bœotian nature are found, the reader who knows modern Somerset, and does not consider these changes, concludes that its grotesque speech was greatly exaggerated; just as he cannot be made to implicitly believe the remarkable and oft-repeated story told by William Hutton of the visit of himself and a friend to Bosworth in 1770, when the people set the dogs at them, for the only reason that they were strangers; or that other tale of the savagery of the Lancashire and Yorkshire villagers, who, when a person unknown to them appeared, conversed as follow:-- “Dost knaw ’im?” “Naya.” “Is’t a straunger?” “Ay, for sewer.” “Then pause ’im; ’eave a stone at ’un; fettle ’im.” No inoffensive stranger in country districts is likely to meet with that reception nowadays. The stranger in those times was regarded, as he generally is in savage countries, as necessarily an enemy; but travel has changed all that, and it has been reserved for the London “hooligan,” who has been taught better, to perpetrate, in the very centre of civilisation, the barbarous methods of the uninstructed peasantry of generations ago.