How sleepy the dear old country town is on all days of the week save market-day. The shopkeepers do not think it necessary to remain behind their counters, but run across the street or the square to have a chat with each other, and should a purchaser appear, it interrupts a gossip where two or three tradesmen are together; or if the purchaser goes into a deserted shop, he has to wait whilst the owner is fetched from some neighbour's, whither he has gone to discuss the new scheme for water supply, or the bad quality of the gas. Every squire's carriage, every parson's trap of the neighbourhood is known to every one in the town; and should one come in on a day that is not market-day, the reason of its appearance is a subject of much conjecture and discussion.
But how the town wakes up on market-day; how all the tradesmen recover from somnolence, and are nimble on their feet, and full of promises to get this bit of ironmongery attended to at once, such lamp-chimneys fitted, to write to London to order such a lace or such a silk matched—out of stock only yesterday, and to get this watch cleaned, or to reset a stone in that ring, or to alter the stuffing of such a lady's saddle that galls, or to provide so many pounds of cake for a school-treat; and the milliner is hard at work all day fitting gowns, or trying on hats; and the hairdresser's fingers are never resting from snip, snip, snip, and the boy from working the treadmill that sets the rotary-brush in motion; and the ostler is engaged in taking his shillings; and the fishmonger in serving up his baskets of soles and mackerel; and the nursery-gardener in making up bouquets; and the oil-man in filling cans with benzoline, which have to go back under the coachman's feet, as has also a crate with plates from the crockery-shop—that tiresome kitchen-maid does bang the plates about so that she has not left one unsnipped; and the photographer is occupied the whole day setting heads into an apparatus for holding them steady, and pulling down or drawing up blinds; and the dentist is also engaged in relieving persons with swollen cheeks; and in the workhouse congregate the Board of Guardians, and talk over the merits of such and such a case, and the allowance to be made per week.
There are notices about on all the walls that amateur theatricals will be given in the new Town Hall in behalf of the local Hunt; and the neighbours are bringing in their fox's brushes and masks wherewith to decorate the proscenium and the walls of the hall. The poor old Assembly Room, something like a Grecian temple, but copied—and badly copied—in stucco, is now given up to a dealer in antiquities, second-hand furniture, and old china. That Assembly Room in which our grandmothers danced is now piled up with beds, large oil-paintings, chiffoniers, fire-irons and fenders, staircase clocks, and an endless amount of rubbish for which no one, one would suppose, could be found to be purchaser. The assembly balls, the hunt balls, the bachelors' balls, the concerts, and, as we have seen, the dramatical entertainments, now take place in the new Town Hall.
The old county town is thriving. It is a place to which all the neighbourhood gravitates. There is now a setting of the tide into towns, and ebb in the country places. Servants will not go to the country. Meat, dairy produce, fowls, are as dear in the country as in the towns. In the towns it is not necessary to keep a pony carriage; in the towns there is escape from those village parasites who fall on and eat up those who settle in the country; and in the towns there is more going on. In the towns educational advantages are to be had which are lacking in the country. So, not only do old ladies go to towns, but also families fairly well off; and the country is becoming deserted. Small, pretty houses do not let well there; great houses not at all. So the country towns are eating up the country.
"Clean, airy, and affluent; well paved, well lighted, well watched; abounding in wide and spacious streets, filled with excellent shops and handsome houses;—such is the outward appearance, the bodily form, of our market town," says Miss Mitford concerning Belford; and the description applies to every other county town in England. As for the vital-spark, the life-blood that glows and circulates through the dead mass of mortar and masonry, that I have neither space to describe, nor would one description apply to every other.
December, 1889.
MESSRS. METHUEN'S LIST.