When the tenant is stationary, the labourer is also.  He stays in the same cottage on the same farm all his life, his descendants remain and work for the same tenant family.  He can trace his descent in the locality for a hundred years.  From time immemorial both Hodge and his immediate employers have looked towards Fleeceborough as their capital.  Hodge goes in to the market in charge of his master’s sheep, his wife trudges in for household necessaries.  All the hamlet goes in to the annual fairs.  Every cottager in the hamlet knows somebody in the town; the girls go there to service, the boys to get employment.  The little village shops obtain their goods from thence.  All the produce—­wheat, barley, oats, hay, cattle, and sheep—­is sent into the capital to the various markets held there.  The very ideas held in the villages by the inhabitants come from Fleeceborough; the local papers published there are sold all round, and supply them with news, arguments, and the politics of the little kingdom.  The farmers look to Fleeceborough just as much or more.  It is a religious duty to be seen there on market days.  Not a man misses being there; if he is not visible, his circle note it, and guess at various explanations.

Each man has his own particular hostelry, where his father, and his grandfather, put up before him, and where he is expected to dine in the same old room, with the pictures of famous rams, that have fetched fabulous prices, framed against the walls, and ram’s horns of exceptional size and peculiar curve fixed up above the mantelpiece.  Men come in in groups of two or three, as dinner time approaches, and chat about sheep and wool, and wool and sheep; but no one finally settles himself at the table till the chairman arrives.  He is a stout, substantial farmer, who has dined there every market day for the last thirty or forty years.

Everybody has his own particular seat, which he is certain to find kept for him.  The dinner itself is simple enough, the waiters perhaps still more simple, but the quality of the viands is beyond praise.  The mutton is juicy and delicious, as it should be where the sheep is the very idol of all men’s thoughts; the beef is short and tender of grain; the vegetables, nothing can equal them, and they are all here, asparagus and all, in profusion.  The landlord grows his own vegetables—­every householder in Fleeceborough has an ample garden—­and produces the fruit from his own orchards for the tarts.  Ever and anon a waiter walks round with a can of ale and fills the glasses, whether asked or not.  Beef and mutton, vegetables and fruit tarts, and ale are simple and plain fare, but when they are served in the best form, how will you surpass them?  The real English cheese, the fresh salads, the exquisite butter—­everything on the table is genuine, juicy, succulent, and rich.  Could such a dinner be found in London, how the folk would crowd thither!  Finally, comes the waiter with his two clean plates, the upper one to receive the money, the lower to retain what is his.  If you are a stranger, and remember what you have been charged elsewhere in smoky cities for tough beef, stringy mutton, waxy potatoes, and the very bread black with smuts, you select half a sovereign and drop it on the upper plate.  In the twinkling of an eye eight shillings are returned to you; the charge is a florin only.