"The steamers from Cork had transferred their ragged, weeping, laughing, fighting cargoes; the last stray groups of English had been collected from the western counties; the Government officers had cleared and passed the ship. With the afternoon tide two hundred helpless, ignorant, destitute souls were to bid farewell to their native land. The delays consequent on miscalculating the emigrating taste of England had retarded until midwinter, a voyage which should have been commenced in autumn. "In one of the shore-boats, sat a portly man—evidently neither an emigrant nor a sailor—wrapped in a great coat and comforters; his broad-brimmed beaver secured from the freezing blast by a coloured bandanna tied under the chin of a fat, whiskerless face. This portly personage was Mr. Joseph Lobbit, proprietor of 'The Shop,' farmer, miller, and chairman of the vestry of the rich rural parish of Duxmoor. "At Duxmoor, the chief estate was in Chancery, the manor-house in ruins, the lord of it an outlaw, and the other landed proprietors absentees, or in debt; a curate preached, buried, married, and baptized, for the health of the rector compelled him to pass the summer in Switzerland, and the winter in Italy; so Mr. Lobbit was almost the greatest, as he was certainly the richest, man in the parish. "Except that he did not care for any one but himself, and did not respect any one who had not plenty of money, he was not a bad sort of man. He had a jolly hearty way of talking and shaking hands, and slapping people on the back; and until you began to count money with him, he seemed a very pleasant, liberal fellow. He was fond of money, but more fond of importance; and therefore worked as zealously at parish-business as he did at his own farm, shop, and mill. He centred the whole powers of the vestry in one person, and would have been beadle, too, if it had been possible. He appointed the master and matron of the workhouse, who were relations of his wife; supplied all the rations and clothing for 'the house,' and fixed the prices in full vestry (viz. himself, and the clerk, his cousin,) assembled. He settled all the questions of out-door relief, and tried hard, more than once, to settle the rate of wages too.