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THE BELLE OF THE VILLAGE.

RAILROADS are certainly an admirable invention, and forty miles an hour are not to be despised when one is in a hurry; but for a tour of pleasure, when it does not matter much whether you are ten or twenty hours on the road, give me the stagecoach, such as stage-coaches used to be in the days of their prime. You have time to look about you—you pick up little bits of local information, and gain, now and then, an insight into national and individual character. But Washington Irving, in that delightful chapter of his Sketch Book, entitled "The Stage Coach," has painted the subject with a master's hand, and our pen must not attempt the venturous theme. His charming sketch may now serve for the coachman's epitaph. Such were my meditations as I was whirled along the lowest level, boxed up in one of the so-called carriages of the South-Eastern, on my way to the village of Welsdon. I knew every step of the road, for I had often travelled it on foot and by coach, for the last twenty years; but now I had no more enjoyment of the scene than if I were crossing the desert from Cairo to Suez, and I was glad to set my foot once more on terra-firma, at the station.

I had availed myself of a few leisure days to get free from the smoke and bustle of our vast metropolis, to pay a visit to my old friend who lived in a pleasant retirement at Welsdon, as pretty a village as is to be found in all England; and this is a bold word, for England is, par excellence, the land of pretty villages. Other countries may boast of purer skies, of loftier mountains, and broader streams; but in the course of my travels I have never met with anything that could bear comparison with an English village, with its healthy labourers, buxom lasses, and pretty children. A long and straggling village is Welsdon, with its cottages and gardens, and some ten or twelve gentlemen's seats, a bubbling brook, not quite unknown to fame in the annals of trout-fishing, with here and there a rural bridge thrown over it, gives additional freshness to the scene. The inhabitants are probably peacefully inclined, at least it cannot boast of the doubtful advantage of a lawyer's residence; healthy they must be, for the only remedy to the "thousand ills that flesh is heir to," is administered by a country apothecary, who lives two or three miles off, and calls once or twice at the tailor's, who is his factotum in the simple remedies that he employs, unless he thinks it necessary to assume additional importance, by adopting some of the more formidable terms of the pharmacopeia. Father Matthew has not, as far as I have heard, honoured Welsdon with a visit in the course of his meritorious peregrinations; at any rate, the noise of uprorious jollity is still occasionally heard at one or both of the public-houses, whose staring signs still betoken

VOL. II.

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good refreshment for man and horse. The Red Lion is the favourite resort of the village topers, and its rampant figure seems to threaten destruction to its opposite neighbour, the White Horse, which the limner has painted in a meagre style, which need not excite the envy even of Rosinante; and the host with his white apron is standing at the door, and wondering at the bad taste which induces the Welsdoners to throng to his rival's tap-room, while his own bar is so unaccountably deserted. Perhaps his wife's shrill voice, which you can hear in the kitchen scolding the maids, and which induces our Boniface himself to make a rapid retreat, fearing his turn may come next, may have something to do with it, for, I am sorry to say, she is the scold of the village. Just beyond is the blacksmith's shop, with its sooty cyclops in brown-paper cap." A crowd of staring urchins, as usual, has been attracted by the " asthmatic engine," the bellows, and the roaring fire, and the horses. Opposite, projecting from his neat one-storied house, stands the stall of the merry lame cobbler, whose voice may be heard accompanying his hammer from morning to night. Cobbler! I beg his pardon, how could I be so blind, when" John Transom, Shoemaker," in large letters, stares me in the face? I suppose he will tell me, as usual, (for I like to chat a little with the honest, good-humoured old man,) that he has just taken a pair of boots to the vicarage, or to young Mr. Sharpe's, the banker's, and that they assured him they were as good a fit as ever came from the best boot-maker's in London. And there is Betty Transom, the shoemaker's pretty daughter, though somewhat delicate, standing at her window, very busy with her three geraniums, although I suspect that her eye wanders sometimes to her opposite neighbour's, for John Wilson is as fine a specimen of a young blacksmith as you would wish to see; and he has been observed to leave off work, lately, rather sooner than usual, and after he has doffed his paper cap, may be seen occasionally in Master Transom's stall; and when Dick Robson jocularly taxed him with it, at the Red Lion, last Saturday evening, he said it was merely to catch the tune of a new song. Now as John himself is considered one of the best vocalists of the village, and is universally called upon to sing the solos in "God save the Queen," on her Most Gracious Majesty's birth-day, and has been heard, in former times, to speak rather disrespectfully of the shoemaker's voice, (this may have been from rivalry, as village artists have as good a right to this feeling as their professional brethren from foreign parts, who are said not to be quite exempt from it,) I must confess that this circumstance does look a little suspicious, and I should not wonder if there were to be a wedding soon.

Welsdon has its post-office likewise, kept by two sisters, Mrs. Dobbs, a portly widow, and Martha Jinks, a thin old maid, whose sharp features always look as if they wished to pry into the contents of the parcel of letters she is making up for the postboy, who is waiting for them at the door, on his little rusty brown pony, smack

THE BELLE OF THE VILLAGE.

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ing his whip with impatience. But they do not deal only in letters, their shop is a kind of reversed Noah's ark; for every thing, except animal food, may be procured there, unless they happen, unfortunately, to be just out of stock, which, I am sorry to say, is sometimes the case. Pins, needles, tape, thread, silk, cotton, and woollen goods, umbrellas and walking-sticks, lollipops and raspberry tarts, marbles, taws, hats, straw bonnets, bats, balls, and stumps, and doubtless half a thousand things besides, all lie about in such confusion to an inexperienced eye, that it is a wonder how anything can be found when it is wanted. There is also here food for the mind, although not very plentiful, being limited in amount to about three dozen volumes of well-thumbed novels, to which, I hope, will soon be added "Chambers's Journal, or some of Charles Knight's weekly volumes. But foremost among the shops must be reckoned Mr. Beckland's, the butcher's, for he boasts that better meat never came from Leadenhall-market, and I do not think he is far wrong. And there is a seminary for youth, with "Academy" painted in fine gold letters on the portico; and there in his garden, murdering the queen's English, that redoubtable pedagogue, who has a smattering of everything, but who knows nothing in perfection, Mr. Vaucher, a little diminutive Frenchman, standing five feet one in his highheeled boots; and his excellent wife, the Lady Bountiful of the village, as much beloved by the boys, who are just rushing into the play-ground, as her prim maiden sister, Miss Richards, who can spy out a fault at a mile's distance, is detested.

Welsdon likewise boasts its witch, at least there is a poor unfortunate old woman, who lives on a small unenclosed green, in the middle of the village, that goes by that suspicious appellation. Her habitation, if it can deserve the name, is a wretched hovel, open to the rain, and shaken by every blast of wind. I am sure, at every successive visit that I pay to Welsdon I expect to find it vanished; but there it stands, like many a groaning, wheezing valetudinarian, always ailing, and yet contriving to outlive half the parish. Its miserable inhabitant (I have forgotten her name, in fact I never heard of any one who knew it, and yet I have been acquainted with Welsdon for a longer period than I care to communicate to the reader) is the especial object of torment to all the boys in the village, gentle and simple. She was never known to speak kindly to any one, and her only support is derived from the bones and scraps which she receives daily from the kitchens of the gentlemen's houses in the neighbourhood, and which she thrusts, thanklessly and grumblingly, into her ragged wallet. The elder people all pity her miserable condition, and have tried, in vain, to procure for her a more humane treatment. The youths and lasses, I fear, share the superstition of their younger brothers and sisters; but the urchins revenge themselves upon her for the dread which she inspires, by pelting her goat, her only companion. This raises her ire to the highest pitch-she may be heard within, grumbling and shrieking, and when she stands at the door of her hovel, trembling

with impotent rage, and shaking her crutch, her good-for-nothing tormentors will scamper off, out of hearing of her imprecations, which are dreadful. There she goes, poor thing, dragging her feeble frame along; a few short months will, it is to be hoped, put an end to all her sufferings. A bright contrast to this miserable being is Mrs. Derryman, the aged widow of the late village schoolmaster. She has had her sorrows, for her three hopeful sons are all dead, and her only daughter did not survive the first year of her marriage. One little grand-daughter remains, a curly-pated cherub, the pet and plaything of the whole village.

But now we are come to a house, or rather cottage, that we must contemplate a little more attentively. It is the prettiest house in Welsdon, and so it ought to be, for in it lives no less a person than Ellen Ramsay, the Belle of the village. It is low, and has but one story, and the vines and creeping shrubs which reach to the very roof cover it so completely that you can hardly tell whether it is built of wood, or brick, or stone. Indeed they scarcely leave space enough round the windows for pretty Ellen's face to peep out at ; but as she has just come into the porch, which is likewise covered with jessamine, clematis, and passion-flower, that does not much signify. It is not very long since Mrs. Ramsay and her daughter came to live at Welsdon, and their mourning-dress, particularly the mother's widow's-weeds, showed but too plainly that Ellen had lately lost her father. Mrs. Ramsay must have been very beautiful, and is still a comely and very lady-like person, and doubtless possessed of very considerable attainments, as, instead of sending Ellen to a lady's boardingschool, about a mile from the village, she has superintended her education herself.

The figure of Ellen is tall and graceful, her complexion brilliant with the ruddy glow of health, is set off by the profusion of light brown hair; her bright, laughing hazel eyes proclaim the innocent cheerfulness of her mind. Kind, gentle, and goodhumoured, she is beloved by her own sex, as she is the admiration of ours. It was not long before she had turned the heads of half the young men in the village, as well as some of those whose right to this appellation was not so certain. Even Mr. Holford, so serious and sedate, that he went by the name of the philosopher, was observed, about a year ago, to be particularly attentive to the minutiae of the outward man, which he had hitherto treated with true philosophical contempt; the barber's man had been seen with him; the poor (not youth, but) middle-aged gentleman of forty, was evidently in love; but as he has recently resumed his former abstract habits, and has been heard to rail against the follies of the fair-sex, (nay, he even favoured his friends lately with a two hours' disquisition upon the advantages of a single life,) it is to be presumed that his visit to the widow's cottage did not altogether end to his satisfaction. Even George Hill, the vicar's eldest son, who is only four-and-twenty, a handsome young man, with all his Oxford laurels (he was senior wrangler last year) fresh upon him, and who has lately been appointed to a good