But where was the cheerfulness that once made it more than a palace to me?  The remittances that I had made from London were already conspiring against my quiet.  I could scarcely get a kiss from either of my girls, they were in such merciless haste to make their dinner “toilet.”  My kind and comely wife was actually not to be seen; and her apology, delivered by a coxcomb in silver lace to the full as deep as any in (my rival) the sugar-baker’s service, was, that “his lady would have the honour of waiting on me as soon as she was dressed.”  This was of course the puppy’s own version of the message; but its meaning was clear, and it was ominous.

Dinner came at last:  the table was loaded with awkward profusion; but it was as close an imitation as we could yet contrive of our opulent neighbour’s display.  No less than four footmen, discharged as splendid superfluities from the household of a duke, waited behind our four chairs, to make their remarks on our style of eating in contrast with the polished performances at their late master’s.  But Mrs. Molasses had exactly four.  The argument was unanswerable.  Silence and sullenness reigned through the banquet; but on the retreat of the four gentlemen who did us the honour of attending, the whole tale of evil burst forth.  What is the popularity of man?  The whole family had already dropped from the highest favouritism into the most angry disrepute.  A kind of little rebellion raged against us in the village:  we were hated, scorned, and libelled on all sides.  My unlucky remittances had done the deed.

The village milliner, a cankered old carle, who had made caps and bonnets for the vicinage during the last forty years, led the battle.  The wife and daughters of a man of East Indian wealth were not to be clothed like meaner souls; and the sight of three London bonnets in my pew had set the old sempstress in a blaze.  The flame was easily propagated.  The builder of my chaise-cart was irritated at the handsome barouche in which my family now moved above the heads of mankind.  The rumour that champagne had appeared at the cottage roused the indignation of the honest vintner who had so long supplied me with port:  and professional insinuations of the modified nature of this London luxury were employed to set the sneerers of the village against me and mine.  Our four footmen had been instantly discovered by the eye of an opulent neighbour; and the competition was at once laughed at as folly, and resented as an insult.  Every hour saw some of my old friends falling away from me.  An unlucky cold, which seized one of my daughters a week before my return, had cut away my twenty years’ acquaintance, the village-doctor, from my cause; for the illness of an “heiress” was not to be cured by less than the first medical authority of the province.  The supreme Aesculapius was accordingly called in; and his humbler brother swore, in the bitterness of his soul, that he would never forget the affront on this side of death’s door.  The inevitable increase of dignity which communicated itself to the manners of my whole household did the rest; and if my wife held her head high, never was pride more peevishly retorted.  Like the performers in a pillory, we seemed to have been elevated only for the benefit of a general pelting.