billows of ages, a whole region of desolation, overgrown with the sea-wheat, and the tall yellow stems and umbels of the wild celery.

Such was the scenery; the people of the cottages were generally fishermen, with their families; and the visiters, farmers and persons of that class, often with their families. At the house opposite us, as I have said, was the merriest crew. My friend the young lawyer was in the habit of running in and out amongst them as he pleased. He proposed that we should go and dine with them, as they had a sort of ordinary table, where you could dine at a fixed and very moderate charge, as all charges indeed were there. Here we found about a dozen people. One, who appeared and proved an old gentleman-farmer, a Mr. Milly, always took the head of the table; and a merrier mortal could not have been there, except he who occupied the other end, a fellow of infinite jest, like Sir John Falstaff, and to the full as corpulent. Who and what he was, I know not, save that he was a most fat and merry fellow, and went by the name of Sir John between the young lawyer, whom I shall call Wilson, and myself. This joyous old gentleman had his wife and son and daughter with him. The son was a young man as fond of a practical joke as his father was of a verbal one; nay, he was not short of a verbal one too, on occasions. He was of a remarkably darkbrown complexion, and on some one asking him how he came to be so dark, when the rest of his family were fair, he at once replied, "Oh, can't you fancy how that was? It happened when I was a child in the cradle. I got turned on my face, and had like to have been smothered. I got so black in the face, I have never recovered my colour again. My mother can tell you all about it can't you mother?" At this repartee all the company laughed heartily, and truly it was a company that could laugh heartily. They had merry hearts. Then there was a good worthy farmer of the real old school. I was near saying that John Farn was old, but, in fact, he was not more than five-andthirty, but his gravity gave him an appearance of something like age. He was dressed in a suit of drab, with an ample coat of the good old farmerly cut, and jack-boots like a trooper. But John Farn had a deal of sober sound sense, and a mind that, had it been called out, would have been found noble. I became very fond of John. The rest were young farmers and tradesmen, full of youth and life. They had brought their horses with them, and some of them gigs, and were fond of all mounting and scouring away on the shore for miles together.

The great business, indeed, was to bathe, and eat and drink, and ride or walk, and play at quoits or bowls. If the tide was up early in the morning, all would be up and out, and have their dip before breakfast. Then they would come back hungry as hunters, and devour their coffee, beef, and broiled ham, and shrimps fresh

from the cauldron, and then out, some to ride over to have a look at the neighbouring farms, or on the shore to see the fishing smacks go out or come in. Others go to quoits or bowls till dinner; and after a hearty meal and a good long ehat, they would slowly saunter up to the hotel, and see what company was there, and take a glass and a pipe with some of them, and see the newspaper, and perhaps have a game at bowls there, and then back to tea; after which they grew very social, and called on the other boarders at the cottages near, and strolled out with the ladies to the bank, which was not far off; and so whiled the time away till supper. Four meals a-day did they regularly sit down to, and enjoy themselves as much as if they had not eaten for a day or two, praising all the while the wonderful property of sea-air for getting an appetite. As sure as shrimps appeared at breakfast, did soles at supper; and after supper one drew out his bottle of wine, and another got his brandy and water, and all grew merry. Those that liked took a pipe, and it annoyed nobody. There was plenty of joking and laughter, that it would have done the most fastidious good to hear, and as much wit, and perhaps a good deal more, than where there does not exist the same freedom. More jovial evenings I never saw. Wilson gave them a tune on his flute, or took his fiddle; they cleared the floor of the largest room, invited some of the neighbouring visiters who had wives or daughters with them, and had a dance. On such evenings Sir John Falstaff sat in the large bay-window of the apartment for coolness, and wiped his brow and sang his merriest songs. His songs were all merry, and he had a host of them; it was a wonder where he had picked them up. His son often joined him, sometimes his wife and daughter too. It was a merry family. Surely never could care have found a way in their house. Not even the young man's brown complexion could give him care; it only furnished him with a joke, and made laughter contagious. Never could the old man have been so fat, had care been able to lay hold on him. The whole of that huge bulk was a mass of rejoicing. How his eyes did shine and twinkle with delight as he sang! what silent laughter played around his mouth, and stole over his ruddy cheeks, like gleams of pleasantest lightning of a summer's night, as he lifted his glass to his head and listened to some one else! But, alas! all his mirth was well-nigh closed one day. He was tempted by the fineness of the weather into the tide, contrary to his wont, and his doctor's order. Some one suddenly missed him; all looked round; at a distance something like a buoy was seen floating; it was Sir John; his fat floated; his head had gone down like a stone; they just pulled him up time enough to save him, but he was blacker in the face than ever his son had been in the cradle, and got a fright that spoiled all his mirth for some days.

But there was a ball at the hotel, and every body was off to it; all except Wilson, who was not well, and myself, who stayed to keep him company. Even grave John Farn, in his drab suit and jack-boots, would go. Who would have thought that there was such a taste for pleasure in John Farn? John Farn was very fond of hearing Wilson and myself talk of books. He would come to our cottage, and sit and listen for hours to our conversation, or take up some of our books himself, and read. I perceived that there was an appetite for knowledge in him that had never been called out, because it had nothing to feed on; but it was clear that it would soon, if it was in the way of aliment and excitement, become fearfully voracious. When he found the name of Dryden in a volume, he declared that he was born in the same parish. He put the book into his pocket, and was missed all that day. Somebody, by chance, saw him issue out of a great reed bed towards evening; he had read the volume. through, and declared that he should think ten times better of his parish now for having produced such a man. Who would have thought that John Farn, the Northamptonshire farmer and grazier, and who had lived all his life amongst bullocks, and whose whole talk was of them, would have fastened thus suddenly on a volume of Dryden's poems? But John used to accompany Wilson and myself, botanising along the shore and the inland dykes; and it was curious to see with what a grave enthusiasm he would climb in his great jack-boots over the roughest fences; how he would leap across those wide dykes; how he would splash through the salt-water pools and streams to tear up a flower or a sea-weed that he wanted; and with what an earnest eye he would look and listen as we mentioned its name, and pointed out its class in the volume, or related its uses! There was an undiscovered world, and a great one, in the soul of that John Farn.

The more I saw of that man, the more I liked him. The stores of yet unstirred life, both of intellect and feeling in his frame, became every day more strongly apparent. He would sit with us on the sea-bank for hours watching the tide come up, or watching its play and the play of light and shadow over it when at flood, and drink down greedily all that was said of this or other countries, all that had in it knowledge of any kind. His whole body seemed full of the joyous excitement of a youth, that in years should have passed over him, but was yet unspent, and was now only found. He rose up one day and said, "Let us hire a ship and sail out to some other country." At the moment we laughed at the idea, but John Farn persisted with the utmost gravity in his proposal, and eventually we did hire a smack and sailed across to Norfolk. We visited Lynn; walked over the grounds of the school where Eugene Aram was an usher when he was taken for the

murder; and nothing but the threatening of the weather would have prevented us crossing over to the Continent. As it was, it was delightful to see the childlike enjoyment with which that grave man saw the breezy expanse of ocean, the fiery colour of its waters as the vessel cut through them in the night, the seals that lay on a mid-sea rock as we sailed along, and the birds of ocean screaming and plunging in its billows.

There was a legion of things in the bosom of John Farn that he knew nothing of all the years that he had been buying and selling cattle, but were now all bursting to the light with a startling vigour. I wonder whether they have since troubled him, like blind giants groping their way to the face of heaven, or whether amid his cattle and his quiet fields, they have collapsed again into dim and unconscious dreams; but the last action which I witnessed in him, made me sure that his moral feeling was as noble as I suspected his intellectual strength to be great.

There was a robbery at Uriah Sparey's. Money and other articles were missed from the packages of the guests. The suspicion fell on a servant girl. Great was the stir, the inquiry, and the indignation. Mrs. Uriah Sparey was vehement in her wrath. She insisted that the affair should not be talked of lest it should bring discredit on her house; but to satisfy her guests she would turn the girl out of it that instant. The girl with tears protested her innocence, but in vain. When she came to open her own box, she declared that she was robbed too. Her wages, and the money given her by visiters, were all gone. Mrs. Sparey exclaimed, that "never did she see such an instance of guilty art as this! The girl to remove from herself the charge of theft, to pretend that she herself was robbed!"

If the girl was guilty, she most admirably affected innocence; if she was of a thievish nature, never did nature so defend vice under the fair shield of virtuous lineaments. All saw and felt this; all had been much pleased with the appearance and behaviour of the girl. Her vows of innocence were now most natural; her tears fell with all the hot vehemence of wronged truth; she earnestly implored that every search and every inquiry should be made, that she might at least regain her character; her money she cared little for. But Mrs. Uriah Sparey only exclaimed, "Minx! get out of my house! I see what you want; you want to fix the theft upon me!" All started at that singular exclamation, and fixed their eyes on Mrs. Sparey; she coloured; but no one spoke. The girl stood weeping by the door. Then said John Farn, "Go home, my girl, go home, and let thy father and mother see into the matter for thee." At these words, the girl, whose tears were before flowing fast but freely, burst into a sudden paroxysm of sobs and cries, and wrung her hands in agony. "What is the matter?" asked John Farn; "has the poor girl no parents?" "Yes, yes!" she

exclaimed, suddenly looking at him, and the tears stopping as if choked in their bed; "but how can I go to them with the name of a thief?" The colour passed from her face, and she laid hold. on a chair to save herself from falling. "Mary!" said John Farn, "I will not say who is the thief; but this I say, I will hire thee for a year and a day, and there is a guinea for earnest, and another to pay thy coach fare down. Be at my house in a fortnight, and till then go and see thy mother. Let them call thee thief that dare!" With that he rose up, gave Mary his address, paid his bill to Mrs. Sparey, and marched out of the house with his little round portmanteau under his arm. We all hurried out after him, gave him by turns a hearty rattling shake of the hand as he was about to mount his horse; and that was the last I saw of John Farn. I know no more of him, yet would I, at a venture, rather take the heart of that man, though compelled to take the long drab coat and the jack-boots with it, than that of many a lord with his robes of state, and all his lands and tenements besides.

Such were a few days and the real incidents passed by me at a Rural Watering-place some years ago.

CHAPTER XI.

SPORTS AND PASTIMES OF THE PEOPLE.

HISTORY OF THEIR CHANGES, AND PRESENT STATE.

A MIGHTY revolution has taken place in the sports and pastimes of the common people. They, indeed, furnish a certain indication of the real character of a people, and change, with the changing spirit of a state. A mighty revolution has taken place in this respect, within the last thirty years, in England, and that entirely produced by the change of feeling, and advance of character. But if we look back through the whole course of English history, we shall find the sports and pastimes of the people taking their form and character from the predominant spirit of the age; in a great measure copied from the amusements and practices of their superiors, and always influenced by them. While the feudal constitution of society prevailed, and chivalry was in vogue, the sports of the common people had a certain chivalric character. They saw jousts and tourneys and feats of archery, and they jousted and tilted, and shot at butts. Tilting at the quintain was,