“I am giving you,” said George, “a flying sketch of our different neighbours in this direction. See that tall brick house on the right hand there; with this nicely kept carriage-drive, and pair of handsome cast-iron gates and new lodge. That is the farm, or I should rather say now, residence, of Mr. Norton. He has a farm hereof his own, of five hundred acres: and it is called Peafield. Norton only lately married a fine lady from the south somewhere, who has effected all the changes that one sees here. Till her advent, there was no lodge, no carriage-road, and no carriage. Now there is a handsome phaeton and pair of greys. Norton himself—you know him, Thorsby—is a tall, solemn-looking man, who had only the education that Woodburn could give him; and was brought up as plodding a farmer as any of them hereabout. But this marriage has made a great change, if not in him, at least in all around him. Mrs. Norton, who writes notes on beautiful tinted note-paper with the address of Peafield on the top of each sheet, has had much trouble to school her husband—now Squire Norton, of Peafield—into something gentlemanly. He shoots, and courses, and drives like any gentleman, and really, when you meet him in his carriage with Mrs. Norton, you might suppose him some ‘squire of high degree;’ but unfortunately, like St. Peter of old, ‘his speech bewrayeth him,’ and Mrs. Norton has continually to check him and say, ‘Oh, my dear! not so—that is quite rustic—but so and so.’ “Tom Boddily, who has both eye and ear for the ridiculous, tells an anecdote which excites excessive mirth in the evening circle of the Grey Goose public-house. One evening, he says, when he worked there, Norton came into the yard with a lantern to see the horses properly suppered and bedded, and went into the barn to give out the oats for them. Soon after Tom went into the house, Norton came out of the parlour and says, ‘Run, Tom, into the barn; I left the lantern on the disappointment. Fetch it.’ “‘The disappointment?’ says Tom, ‘what might that be?’ “‘Oh!’ said Norton, turning very red, ‘deuce take all these new-fangled words—I mean the balk, man, the balk.’ “Tom comprehended in a moment. Mrs. Norton had heard her husband speaking of being baulked on some occasion, and had corrected him, wishing him to say disappointed. Hence his jump to the idea that a balk or beam was a disappointment in polite language. ‘Well,’ said Tom, ‘was it that he thought of the lantern, for he found the candle burnt down to the socket, the hot tallow and great pieces of red-hot snuff falling through a burnt hole in the lantern on the straw beneath, and in a little time the whole building would have been in a flame.’ Tom, however, was as unlucky as he had been with his captain. Norton thought he was too wide awake to the ridiculous in his schooling by his learned lady, and he has never employed him since.”