Then comes the village shop, like other village shops, multifarious as a bazaar--a repository for bread, shoes, tea, cheese, tape, ribbons, and bacon; for everything, in short, except the one particular thing which you happen to want at the moment, and will be sure not to find.
Divided from the shop by a narrow yard is a habitation of whose inmates I shall say nothing. A cottage--no, a miniature house, all angles, and of a charming in-and-outness; the walls, old and weather-stained, covered with hollyhocks, roses, honeysuckles, and a great apricot-tree; the casements full of geraniums (oh, there is our superb white cat peeping out from among them!); the closets (our landlord has the assurance to call them rooms) full of contrivances and corner-cupboards; and the little garden behind full of common flowers. That house was built on purpose to show in what an exceeding small compass comfort may be packed.
The next tenement is a place of importance, the Rose Inn--a whitewashed building, retired from the road behind its fine swinging sign, with a little bow-window room coming out on one side, and forming, with our stable on the other, a sort of open square, which is the constant resort of carts, waggons, and return chaises.
Next door lives a carpenter, "famed ten miles around, and worthy all his fame," with his excellent wife and their little daughter Lizzy, the plaything and queen of the village--a child three years old according to the register, but six in size and strength and intellect, in power and self-will. She manages everybody in the place; makes the lazy carry her, the silent talk to her, and the grave to romp with her. Her chief attraction lies in her exceeding power of loving, and her firm reliance on the love and the indulgence of others.
How pleasantly the road winds up the hill, with its broad, green borders and hedgerows so thickly timbered! How finely the evening sun falls on that sandy, excavated bank, and touches the farmhouse on the top of the eminence!
II.--Hannah Bint
The shaw leading to Hannah Bint's habitation is a very pretty mixture of wood and coppice. A sudden turn brings us to the boundary of the shaw, and there, across the open space, the white cottage of the keeper peeps from the opposite coppice; and the vine-covered dwelling of Hannah Bint rises from amidst the pretty garden, which lies bathed in the sunshine around it.
My friend Hannah Bint is by no means an ordinary person. Her father, Jack Bint (for in all his life he never arrived at the dignity of being called John), was a drover of high repute in his profession. No man between Salisbury Plain and Smithfield was thought to conduct a flock of sheep so skilfully through all the difficulties of lanes and commons, streets and high-roads, as Jack Bint, aided by Jack Bint's famous dog, Watch.
No man had a more thorough knowledge of the proper night stations, where good feed might be procured for his charge, and good liquor for Watch and himself; Watch, like other sheepdogs, being accustomed to live chiefly on bread and beer, while his master preferred gin.
But when a rheumatic fever came one hard winter, and finally settled in Jack Bint's limbs, reducing the most active and handy man in the parish to the state of a confirmed cripple, poor Jack, a thoughtless but kind creature, looked at his three motherless children with acute misery. Then it was that he found help where he least expected it--in the sense and spirit of his young daughter, a girl of twelve years old.