and scores of other matters scarce worth naming find their way over that threshold.  Perhaps the man is genial, his manners enticing, his stories amusing, his jokes witty?  Not at all.  He is a silent fellow, scarce opening his mouth except to curse the poor scrub of a maid servant, or to abuse a man who has not paid his score.  He slinks in and lights his pipe, smokes it silently, and slinks out again.  He is the octopus of the hamlet, fastening on the cottage homes and sucking the life-blood from them.  He misses nothing, and nothing comes amiss to him.

His wife, perhaps, then, may be the centre of attraction?  She is a short, stout woman, whose cheeks as she walks wobble with fat, whose face is ever dirty, and dress (at home) slatternly.  But mayhap her heart is in the right place, and when Hodge is missed from his accustomed seat by the fire of an evening, when it is bruited abroad that he is down with illness, hurriedly slips on her bonnet, and saying nothing, carries a basket of good things to cheer the inner man?  Or, when his wife is confined, perhaps she brings some little delicacies, a breast of pheasant, a bottle of port wine, and strengthens her with motherly counsel in the hour of her travail.  Is this so?  Hodge’s wife could tell you that the cottage door has never been darkened by her presence:  that she indeed would not acknowledge her if passed by chance on the road.  For the landlady sails forth to the adjacent town in all the glory of those fine feathers that proverbially make the fine bird.

It is a goodly spectacle to see her in rustling ample silk, in costly sealskin, in a bonnet ‘loud’ but rich, shading a countenance that glows ruddy red as a furnace.  A gold chain encircles her portly neck, with a gold watch thereto attached; gold rings upon her fingers, in one of which sparkles a brilliant diamond; gold earrings, gold brooch, kid gloves bursting from the fatness of the fingers they encase.  The dingy trap and limping rawboned hack which carry her to the outskirts of the town scarcely harmonise with so much glory.  But at the outskirts she alights, and enters the street in full dignity.  By some potent alchemy the sweat of Hodge’s brow has become condensed into that sparkling diamond, which is disclosed when the glove is drawn off in the shops, to the admiration of all beholders.

Or, if not the wife, perhaps it may be the daughter who is the magnet that draws the very timber across the parish?  She is not ill-looking, and might pass muster in her best dress were it not for a squareness of build, like the set of a man rather than the full curves associated with woman.  She is rarely seen in the house at all, and neither talks to the men nor the women who enter.  She sallies forth at night, and her friends are the scampish among the sons of the lower class of tenant-farmers.