One side of the stable of the village inn, which faces the road, presents a broad surface for the country bill-sticker.  He comes out from the market town, and travels on foot for a whole day together, from hamlet to hamlet. posting up the contents of his bag in the most outlying and lonely districts.  Every villager as he passes by reads the announcements on the wall:  the circus coming to the market town, some jeweller’s marvellous watches, the selling off of spring or summer goods by the drapers at an immense reduction, once now and then a proclamation headed V.R., and the sales of farm stock (the tenants leaving) and of large freehold properties.

These latter are much discussed by the callers at the inn.  A carter comes along perhaps with a loaded waggon from some distance, and as he stays to drink his quart talks of the changes that are proceeding or imminent in his locality.  Thus the fact that changes are contemplated is often widely known before the actual advertisement is issued.  The labourers who hear the carter’s story tell it again to their own employer next time they see him, and the farmer meeting another farmer gossips over it again.

There has grown up a general feeling in the villages and agricultural districts that the landed estates around them are no longer stable and enduring.  A feeling of uncertainty is abroad, and no one is surprised to hear that some other place, or person, is going.  It is rumoured that this great landlord is about to sell as many farms as the family settlements will let him.  Another is only waiting for the majority of his son to accomplish the same object.  Others, it is said, are proceeding abroad to retrench.  Properties are coming into the market in unexpected directions, and others are only kept back because the price of land has fallen, and there is a difficulty in selling a large estate.  If divided into a number of lots, each of small size, land still fetches its value, and can be readily sold; but that is not always convenient, and purchasers hesitate to invest in extensive estates.  But though kept back, efforts are being made to retrench, and, it is said, old mansions that have never been let before can now be hired for the season.  Not only the tenant-farmers, but the landowners are pacing through a period of depression, and their tenure too is uncertain.  Such is the talk of the country side as it comes to the village inn.

Once a week the discordant note of a horn or bugle, loudly blown by a man who does not understand his instrument, is heard at intervals.  It is the newspaper vendor, who, like the bill-sticker, starts from the market town on foot, and goes through the village with a terrible din.  He stops at the garden gate in the palings before the thatched cottage, delivers his print to the old woman or the child sent out with the copper, and starts again with a flourish of his trumpet.  His business is chiefly with the cottagers, and his print is very likely full of abuse of the landed proprietors as a body.  He is a product of modern days, almost the latest, and as he goes from cottage door to cottage door, the discordant uproar of his trumpet is a sign of the times.