The reader may remember one Jerry Smethurst whom Isaac Ogden met at Whittlecup when on duty in the militia, and with whom he got drunk for the last time. It is twelve years since then, a long interval in any place, but an especially long interval in Shayton, where _delirium tremens_ carries off the mature males with a rapidity elsewhere unknown. There had been hundreds of deaths from drinking in that township since 1853; and of all the jolly companions who used to meet at the Red Lion, the only one remaining was the proprietor of Twistle Farm. James Hardcastle, the innkeeper, was dead; Seth Schofield was in Shayton churchyard, and so was Jerry Smethurst. A new generation was drinking itself to death in that parlor, served by another landlord. Most of these worthies had ruined themselves in fortune as in health. Men cannot spend their time in public-houses without their business feeling the effects of it; and they cannot fuddle their intellects with beer and brandy and preserve their clearness for arithmetic. So, as the prosperity of a society is the prosperity of the individuals composing it, Shayton was not a very prosperous locality, and, in comparison with Sootythorn, lagged wofully behindhand in the race. A few men, however, managed somehow to reconcile business and the brandy-bottle, and the most successful conciliator of pleasure and affairs had been the notable Jerry Smethurst. He managed it by never drinking any thing before the mill was closed; drink, to him, was the reward of the labors of the day, and not their accompaniment. His constitution had been strong enough to resist this double strain of laborious days and convivial evenings for a much longer time than Dr. Bardly ever expected; and when the end came, which it did by a single attack of _delirium tremens_, succeeded by a fit of apoplexy (the patient had always apprehended apoplexy), Mr. Smethurst's affairs were found to be in admirable order, and his only daughter, then a fine girl of fourteen, became heiress to an extensive mill and a quantity of building land, as well as many shops and tenements in the interior of the town which would infallibly increase in value. In a word, Sarah Smethurst was worth forty thousand now, and would be worth a hundred thousand in twenty years; so that, as the charms of her youth faded, the man fortunate enough to win her might count upon a progressive compensation in the increase of her estate.