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Updated: October 22, 2025
Let me talk to you with an old man's privilege, as an adviser. You have come to this country-town without suspicion, and you are moving in the midst of perils. There are things which I must not tell you now; but I may warn you. Keep your eyes open and your heart shut. If, through pitying that girl, you ever come to love her, you are lost. If you deal carelessly with her, beware! This is not all.
Annaple's lightness and dexterity rendered her the best of the lady tennis-players, and the less practised Ursula found herself defeated in the match, in spite of a partner whose play was superior to Mark's, and with whom she shyly walked off to eat ices. 'I see, said Annaple, 'it is a country-town edition of May. I shan't blunder between them again.
A fair bridge here, with many arches: vexed at my people's making me lose so much time; reckoning, 13s. 4d. Mighty pleased with the pleasure of the ground all the day. At night to Newport Pagnell; and there a good pleasant country-town, but few people in it.
The labouring sort of folk, the trades-people, and the landowners and county families, each form compact social microcosms. The latter class, in normal circumstances, remains not so much indifferent to as unaware of the existence of such people as myself, as bachelors in country-town lodgings. The other two compact little worlds had nothing to offer me socially.
The second in the line of female owners of the old house, Peggy Paton, was, for the outer world, what George Eliot calls "a charicter" one of those distinguishing features of country-town life which the march of improvement has swept away: a lady by birth, but owing little to schools or teachers, books or travel: a woman of strong natural understanding and some wit, who loved her nightly rubber at whist, could rap out an oath or a strong pleasantry, and whose quick estimates of men and things became proverbs with the younger generation.
Pleasant country to Bedford, where, while they stay, I rode through the town; and a good country-town; and there, drinking, 1s. We on to Newport; and there 'light, and I and W. Hewer to the Church, and there give the boy 1s. So to Buckingham, a good old town. Here I to see the Church, which very good, and the leads, and a school in it: did give the sexton's boy 1s.
You will find them now and again in St. Nicholas, and he is not unknown in this country. With a heart like a lamb for children, he is like a hawk upon the Philistine. I remember an occasion, before he published a volume, when we were together in a tavern in a country-town, a tavern thronged with farmers on market-days. The poet had some prospectuses in his pocket.
The latter place, which though nominally a mere village, has about it the air and general appearance of a first-rate country-town, can boast of a handsome schloss in its principal street, the residence of Count Schaff-Koatch.
Sans doute, he felt it to be altogether true, what I told him, that, in his hands, a hundred million dollars would be worth more to mankind at large than the whole French kingdom. Mais, Monsieur, you cannot own a hundred millions and be good. As well expect to find the same virtue in London that prevails in a quiet country-town.
"Perhaps not so much fun. Some of these country-town hotels up here in the woods are run in a more haphazard way than a lumber camp. And what you get to eat will come out of a can in all probability." The boys groaned in unison at this, and even Betty looked woebegone. "I wish you wouldn't talk about eating, Uncle Dick. Do you suppose we will catch up with that dining car?"
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