The lucky residents in these wonderful houses are usually extremely exclusive--if they were not so, goodness only knows what might happen. When a lady of good family finds herself living next door to a grocer and an ironmonger, she is bound to take steps to prevent the possibility of any one fancying that she belongs to that _galère_, and the steps that some of them take with this fact in their mind are sometimes very diverting. They usually assume the form of ignoring the existence, not so much of the grocer and the ironmonger as of the other ladies similarly situated. If you call upon Miss Wheatly at No. 10 High Street and, after praising up her garden, refer to the garden of Miss Keightley at No. 20, Miss Wheatley will express great interest, saying she has often heard that Miss Keightley's garden is quite charming, but she has never seen it for herself. Miss Keightley on her side may go even further, and not merely pretend that she has never heard of Miss Wheatley's garden, but also that she had no idea that any one named Wheatley lived in the town. This is at first, but she occasionally betrays a scrupulous anxiety to be accurate by asking, “What did you say the name was? Wheatley? Oh yes, to be sure I remember hearing the other day that a Miss Wheatley lived at No. 10. And you say she has a nice garden?” And these good ladies may have been living within a few doors of one another for forty odd years, and the father of the one may have been in the butter trade, while the father of the other was in eggs. The social distinctions in a country town such as Mallingham are sometimes very pathetic. It might be thought that the people would find a bond of union in that illiteracy which they enjoy in common, or in that profound ignorance of everything connected, however distantly, with art or science in which they live from one end of the year to the other; but one does not find it so. Mallingham is perhaps the most ill-informed town in England on all matters pertaining to culture, whether literary or artistic. A stranger who was unacquainted with this fact thought he was scoring a point in a speech which he had been called on to make in the absence of the Member for the Division at the annual banquet of the Barham Trust--the most important incident of the winter in Mallingham--when he remarked that he felt that the town must be the centre of the greatest literary activity; for, motoring through the High Street, he found on one of the shop signs the name Swift, on another the name Smollett, a little farther on he came upon an Addison (great applause), and finally he found himself close to the house of Hume. Surely, he said, these names spoke for themselves.