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Then, too, is the time for the moonlit boating where the Potomac narrows between steep and romantic banks of a sylvan wildness, and where the long oars of the swift rowers bear you as if on wings; for picnics to Rock Creek, a region of rude beauty, where the woods abound in lupines and pink azaleas, and the great white dogwood boughs stretch away into the darkness of the forest like a press of moonbeams, and where at dark your horses ford the stream and climb the hill, and bring you over the Georgetown Heights, past villas half-guessed by starlight among their gardens and fountains, and in by a market picturesque with a hundred torches flaring over the heads of mules and negroes and venders and higglers piles of game, crisp vegetables and scarlet berries.

It is not to be wondered at, if the town of Cambridge cannot receive, or entertain the numbers of people that come to this fair; not Cambridge only, but all the towns round are full; nay, the very barns and stables are turned into inns, and made as fit as they can to lodge the meaner sort of people: as for the people in the fair, they all universally eat, drink, and sleep in their booths and tents; and the said booths are so intermingled with taverns, coffee-houses, drinking-houses, eating-houses, cook-shops, etc., and all in tents too; and so many butchers and higglers from all the neighbouring counties come into the fair every morning with beef, mutton, fowls, butter, bread, cheese, eggs, and such things, and go with them from tent to tent, from door to door, that there is no want of any provisions of any kind, either dressed or undressed.

The stock upon the farm was not so large nor of so good a character as had been the case. The manner of men visibly changed towards him. The small dealers, even the very carriers along the road, the higglers, and other persons who call at a farm on petty business, gave him clearly to know in their own coarse way that they despised him.

These higglers may have been very honest fellows, in all but pecuniary questions, and possibly continued to be so in the bosom of their own families. But here in Springhaven, by the force of circumstances they were almost compelled to be radicals: even as the sweetest cow's milk turns sour, when she can just reach red clover with her breath, but not her lips.

It makes the law more of a lottery than it is. The worst consequence is yet to be told, its effect upon, professional character. It turns lawyers into higglers with their clients. Of course it is not meant that these are always its actual results; but they are its inevitable tendencies, in many instances its practical working.

Not one of your little consumptive patients with their tortoiseshell eyeglasses would hide himself in a closet for six weeks, like Lauzun, to keep up his mistress's courage while she was lying in of her child. There was more passion in M. de Jaucourt's little finger than in your whole race of higglers that leave a woman to better themselves elsewhere!

Shortly afterwards, numbers who came for recreation and amusement made their appearance, and before ten o'clock, Paul's Walk, as the nave was termed, was thronged, by apprentices, rufflers, porters, water-carriers, higglers, with baskets on their heads, or under their arms, fish-wives, quack-doctors, cutpurses, bonarobas, merchants, lawyers, and serving-men, who came to be hired, and who stationed themselves near an oaken block attached to one of the pillars, and which was denominated, from the use it was put to, the "serving-man's log."

By doing so he caused that road, which had previously been trodden only by peasants and higglers, to be frequented by a higher class of travellers. That which was eminently his own in his system was the end which he proposed to himself. The end being given, the means, as it appears to us, could not well be mistaken.

There are indeed some great men who write twistedly simply because they cannot help it, but their honesty is proved by the mass they turn out. What do you turn out, you higglers and sticklers? Perhaps a bad triolet every six months, and a book of criticism on something thoroughly threadbare once in five years. If I had my way LECTOR. I am sorry to have provoked all this. AUCTOR. Not at all!

From the Higglers too, we would as willingly take Wine, Strong Waters, and Tobacco, in exchange for our fat and lean, as money; for the Currency of the Realm was then most wofully clipped and defaced, and our Brethren had a wholesome avoidance of meddling with Bank Bills.