Two figures among them are still, after nearly sixty years, present to my mental vision. One was a large, loosely-made, middle-aged man, who always wore a long grey serge dressing-gown. He was accompanied by nobody belonging to him, and I never had the least idea what grade or department of life he could have belonged to. His language, though horrible, as regards the ideas conveyed by it, was grammatically far superior to that of most of those around him; and he was very clever with his hands, executing various little arrangements for his own comfort with the skill of a carpenter, and almost with that of an upholsterer. His face was thoroughly bad, with loose, baggy, flaccid, pale cheeks, and a great coarse hanging under lip. He always looked exceedingly dirty, but nevertheless was always clean shaved. He was always talking, always haranguing those who would listen to him; always extolling the country for which we were bound, and its institutions, and expressing the most venomous hatred of England and all things English. I used to listen to him during my hours of attendance on my father with an excess of loathing, which I doubt not I failed to conceal from him, and which, acting like a strong brine, has preserved his memory in my mind all these years. The other was much less objectionable. He was a younger man, and called himself a farmer, but his farming had evidently run much to horse-dealing, and he dressed in a horsey style. He had a miserable sickly wife with him, who had once upon a time been pretty. She wore the remains of dresses that had once been smart, and was by far the most slatternly woman I ever saw. Her husband, so far as I could observe, did not ill-treat her, but he was constantly saying unkind things in language which should have made her blush, if she had not left all blushes far behind her, and at which the other worse brute used to laugh with obstreperous approbation. He could sing too, as I thought at that time very well, and used to sing a song telling how “The farm I now hold on your honour’s estate, is the same that my grandfather held,” &c. &c. The tune of it runs in my head to this day; and I remember thinking that if the song related the singer’s own fortunes, “his honour” must have gained by the change of tenant, however many generations of ancestors may have held it before him.