Loike Hudson’s pig.
“Like Hudson’s pig?”
“Yais. ’Niver hard on ’em, ’a s’pose?”
“No.”
“Whoy, ’a thowt, th’ silly feller, as they wer a-gwine ter kill ’en, and they wuz on’y arfter putten a ring trew ’is noaze.”
JOE STOKES’S PIG
There is a tragical variant of this, in which “Joe Stokes’s” pig is the unfortunate hero—“Ye’re loike Joe Stokes’s pig: ’e thowt as how ’e wer a-gwine ter hev ’is brekfuss, but they wuz a-gwine ter mek poark on ’en.”
The days when Market Harborough was a little market-town, interested in nothing else but agriculture and hunting, are done. It is now, indeed, a busy little place, and, with its various industrial enterprises, not so little as it was. Chief of these is Symington’s corset factory, employing 580 hands; but elsewhere may be noticed manufactories of rubber soles and heels, pea-flour, and numerous other articles of commerce. Its remarkably broad chief street, where the cattle-markets and the October Fair have been held for many centuries, is still, however, on ordinary days singularly empty; and now that a Cattle Market, costing £28,000, has been built, is less characteristic than of old. But it is a magnificent picture, this of Harbro town, that unfolds itself before the traveller as he comes in along the road. There, peaking up grandly, are the exquisite tower and crocketed spire of the ancient church, very lovely and worshipful, with the old timber-framed Grammar School humbly beneath, founded in 1614 by Robert Smyth, an old City of London official, its sides decorated with plaster panels and its stout timbers adorned with pious mottoes: the open space beneath designed for use as the Butter Market.
The church is dedicated to St. Dionysius the Areopagite. No one need be very greatly ashamed of not knowing precisely what that was, by way of a profession. The Oblate Fathers suggest a problem in Euclid, and to be an Areopagite suggests a performer on the flying trapeze; but really St. Dionysius was not so flighty a character. He was the judge of the Areopagus in Athens, before whom St. Paul disputed on the subject of worshipping the Unknown God, and whom he converted. Dionysius became Bishop of Athens, and suffered martyrdom in A.D. 95.
The interior of the great building disappoints expectations aroused by the beauty of the outward view.