The annual reappearance of the early stage-coaches was a much greater event to the villagers and townsfolk of the more remote shires than we moderns might suppose, or feel inclined to believe, without inquiry. But we must consider the winter isolation of such places in those remote times, and then some faint glimmering sense of their aloofness from the world will give us an understanding of the relief with which they again saw real strangers from the outer world. In the long winter months, when days were short and roads only to be travelled by the most daring horsemen, spurred to the rash deed only by the most urgent necessity, the passing stranger was rare, and excited remark, and the company in the inn parlour or by the ingle-nook discussed him, both because of his rarity and by reason of their own raw material for the making of conversation being run very low indeed. We should be more thankful than we generally are that our lot was not cast in a seventeenth-century village, for winter in such surroundings was dulness incarnate. Because they could not obtain fodder to keep the sheep and cattle in good condition through the winter, the farmers and graziers of that time killed them before that season set in, and the villagers lived upon salted meat. Every house had its salt-beef tub and its bacon-cratch under the kitchen ceiling, well stocked with hams and sides; but vegetables were so scarce as to be practically unobtainable. Every household brewed its own beer and kept a stock of cider, and most housewives were cunning in the preparation of metheglin, a sickly-sweet and heavy drink that revolts the modern palate, but was then greatly appreciated. Evenings were not long, even though it grew dark before four o’clock, for folks went to bed by seven or eight. There was little inducement to sit up late, because only the feeblest illumination was possible to any but the very rich, and the yeomen, the farmers and the cottagers had to rest content with the dim sputtering glimmer of the tallow dips that every eight or ten minutes required the attentions of the snuffers. “When the night cometh,” we read in the Bible, “no man can work”; but that is a statement which, literally true at the time when the Bible was done into English, can now only be read and understood figuratively. No one could work by the artificial illumination then possible.