We here find ourselves thrown back on a period when each district or village had its common mill; and all the racy stories about the jolly miller and his golden thumb, and his tricksome toll-dish, and his amours with the fair sex, come into our heads. How dull and pithless some of our earliest books of facetiæ would have been without the miller and his brother-rogue, the priest! The drollest anecdotes are of one or the other of these two. How many homes must have been rendered wretched by the visits of the goodwives to Dusty-poll and their intrigues with the sly rascal; and if the husband went in lieu of his spouse, the priest was at hand, in the grey of the morning even, to take his place. It was Scylla or Charybdis--between the devil and the deep sea. The nursery epic of _Jack the Giant-killer_, of which we do not possess any archaic text or form, displays in a sort of allegory the protest of the people against the oppression of their feudal lords. This tyranny survived perhaps longest in such regions as Cornwall and Wales, or the Cornish and Welsh were unusually intolerant of it. The two-headed giant, whom Jack exterminates in Wales, may be taken to be a landlord or seigneur of a more than commonly malignant type. Here is a final sample of a relic ostensibly recent in origin, yet on closer examination with the crust of antiquity collected upon it:-- “A cow and a calf, An ox and a half, Forty good shillings and three; Is that not enough tocher For a shoemaker’s daughter, A bonny lass with a black e’e?” Agricultural statistics would shew one, no doubt, how long ago--how many kings’ and queens’ reigns ago--it was that a cow and a calf could be had for £2 3_s._ That is the key to the date of the rhyme, in fact; for the difference in the value of money merely goes to establish that the personage who espoused the shoemaker’s daughter had no reason to complain of the fortune given with her. But the pecuniary equivalent has ceased to be quoted these two centuries or so; and the lines thus carry within themselves a proof of their appurtenance by birthright to a prior era. There is another class of tale, comprised in the Nursery Series, which resembles a new dwelling built out of old materials. It is the one beginning,-- “There was an old man, who lived in a wood, As you may plainly see; He said he would do as much work in a day As his wife could do in three.” The idea was used by the author of a farce called _Domestic Economy_, in which that eminent comedian, Mr. Edward Wright, formerly signalised his genius; but the true original, both germ and substance, is a jocular invention of at least the fifteenth century, and what we see before us is an elaborate amplification, reminding us of the difference between a country and the map of it drawn to scale, or between a tragedy in five acts and the slender plot.