In more ancient times ovens were constructed with enormous labour out of granite blocks, which were scooped out in the middle, but the disadvantage attendant on granite was that it became in time resolved into sand by heat, and crumbled away like sugar.[1] These were rapidly got rid of when the earthenware oven was introduced, and hardly a specimen remains. Not so, however, with the stone frying-pan, which is only just, and not altogether, superseded. Housewives contend that the iron pan is not so good at frying as the scooped-out pan of stone, and that rashers of bacon done in the latter are incomparably superior to those burnt in iron. Thus, it will be seen that in the West we are only recently, in some particulars emerging from the Stone-Age, but it is with a leap over that of Bronze into the era of Iron.[2] The walls of the "mug-house" of the Hare and Hounds were well white-washed and ornamented with a quantity of broadside ballads, the illustrations very generally bearing no intelligible relation to the letterpress. A single rush-candle burning on the table, served to light the room. The servant-wench was expected to act as snuffer, and she regularly at intervals of ten minutes left the work on which she was engaged, cooking, washing, drawing ale, and like the comet that sweeps up to and about the sun, and then dashes back into obscurity, so did she rush up to the candle, snuff the wick between the forefinger and thumb, and plunge back to the work on which she was engaged, at the fire, in the back-kitchen, or in the cellar. At the fire and about the table were seated Anthony Cleverdon, Fox Crymes, the host of the Hare and Hounds. Mr. Solomon Gibbs, also a quaint old grey-haired man in sorry garb, and a couple of miners from the moor. At the time of the tale, and, indeed for a century after, it was customary for men of all classes to meet at the alehouse, parson and Squire, surgeon, farmer, and peasant, comrades all in merry-making--and at that period there was no social-democracy, no class-hatreds--how could there be, when all classes met, and gossiped, and smoked, and boozed together? No good thing comes without bringing a shadow after it. Perhaps it is well that parson and Squire do not now go to the tavern to take pipe and glass with yeoman and ploughboy, but--the misfortune is that there has come class-alienation, along with this social amelioration of the better sort.