smoke of a train.  But there are men now, on the Squire’s estate, who have never seen an engine, and there must be a score or so of the population who have never slept one night away from their native place.  While Mr. Pitt was breaking his heart over Austerlitz; while Napoleon was playing his last throw at Waterloo; while the Birmingham men were threatening to march on London, the Squire was riding peacefully day by day, in the lanes and spinneys of his lovely countryside.  He never would allow a stranger to settle on his property, and he was never quite pleased if any of the fisher girls married pitmen.  He did not mind when the hinds and the fishers intermarried, but anything that suggested noise and smoke was an abhorrence to him, and thus he disliked the miners.  A splendid seam of coal ran beneath his land.  This coal could have been easily won; in fact, at the place where the cliffs met the sea, a two-foot seam cropped out, and the people could go with a pickaxe and break off a basketful for themselves whenever they chose; but the Squire would never allow borings to be made.  He did not object to the use of coal on abstract grounds, but he was determined that his property should not be disfigured.  Once, when a smart agent came to make proposals respecting the sinking of a pit, the Squire took him by the shoulders and solemnly pushed him out of his study.  He fancied that a colliery would bring poachers and squalor and drunkenness, and many other bad consequences, so he kept his fields unsullied and his little streams pure.  Without knowing it, the Squire was a bit of a poet.  For example, he had one long dell, which ran through his woods, planted with hyacinths and the wild pink geranium.  These flowers came in bloom together, and the effect of the great sheet of blue and pink was indescribable.  He was very proud of this piece of work, and he always looked happy as he went down the path in the spring time.

The Squire had the most intimate acquaintance with the circumstances of every man, woman, and child on his property.  If he rode out at two in the afternoon and heard that a fisherman was suffering with rheumatism, it was almost certain that the fat man-servant from the Hall would call at the sick man’s house before the day was out with blankets and wine, and whatever else might be needed.  Yet the Squire was by no means lavish.  In making a bargain with a tenant he never showed the least generosity.  On one occasion he set a number of gardeners to work in a very large orchard where the trees were beginning to feel the effects of time.  The men were likely to be employed for at least three years, so each of them was fixed by a formal engagement.  The married men were paid fifteen shillings a week, but on coming to a young man, the Squire said, “Now I am going to give you a shilling a week less than the others because you live with your mother.”  This sounds like the speech of a very stingy person; but in spite of the apparent hardness of the great landlord, poverty was never known on his estate.  The hinds had to eat barley bread, and beef and mutton were not plentiful, for the butcher’s visit only came once in the week.  Yet nevertheless the men were healthy and powerful, and the women and children were neatly and decently dressed.