1828. ] Hannah Bint. 675 
some comfort to learn, that in this great grazing district, however the 
calves and the farmers may be the better for cows, nobody else is, that 
farmer’s wives have ceased to keep poultry, and that we unlucky 
villagers sit down often to our first meal in a state of destitution, which 
may well make him content with his thin milk, and his Cambridge 
butter, when compared to our imputed pastoralities. 
Hannah’s Alderney restored us to one rural privilege. Never was so 
cleanly a little milk-maid. She changed away some of the cottage 
finery, which, in his prosperous days, poor Jack had pleased himself with 
bringing home ; the China tea-service, the gilded mugs, and the painted 
‘waiters, for the more useful utensils of the dairy, and speedily esta- 
blished a regular and gainful trade in milk, eggs, butter, honey, and 
poultry—for poultry they had always kept. 
Her domestic management prospered equally. Her father, who re- 
tained the perfect use of his hands, began a manufacture of mats and 
baskets, which he constructed with great nicety and adroitness ; the 
eldest boy, a sharp and clever lad, cut for him his rushes and oziers ; 
erected, under his sister’s directions, a shed for the cow, and enlarged 
and cultivated the garden (always with the good leave of her kind 
patron, the lord of the manor) until it became so ample, that the pro- 
duce not only kept the pig, and half-kept the family, but afforded ano- 
ther branch of merchandize to the indefatigable directress of the esta- 
blishment. For the younger boy, less quick and active, Hannah 
contrived to obtain an admission to the charity-school, where he made 
great progress—retaining him at home, however, in the haymaking, 
reaping, and leasing season, or whenever his services could be made 
available, to the great annoyance of the schoolmaster, whose favourite he 
is, and who piques himself so much on George's scholarship (your heavy 
sluggish boy at country work often turns out clever at his book), that it 
-is the general opinion of the village, that this much-vaunted pupil will, 
in process of time, be promoted to the post of assistant, and may, pos- 
‘sibly, in course of years, rise to the dignity of a parish pedagogue in his 
own person ; so that his sister, although still making him useful at odd 
‘times, now considers George as pretty well off her hands, whilst his 
elder brother, Tom, could take an under-gardener’s place directly, if he 
were not too important at home to be spared even for a day. 
In short, during the five years that she has ruled at the Shaw cottage, 
‘the world has gone well with Hannah Bint. Her cow, her calves, her 
pigs, her bees, her poultry, have each, in their several ways, thriven and 
prospered. She has even brought Watch to like buttermilk, as well as 
strong beer, and has nearly persuaded her father (to whose wants and 
. wishes she is most anxiously attentive) to accept of milk as a substitute 
; for gin. Not but Hannah hath had her enemies as well as her betters. 
Why should she not? The old woman at the lodge, who always piqued 
herself on being spiteful, and crying down new ways, foretold, from the 
first, that she would come to no good, and could not forgive her for falsify- 
ing her prediction ; and Betty Barnes, the flattering widow of a tippling 
farmer, who rented a field, and set up a cow herself, and was universally 
discarded for insufferable dirt, said all that the wit of an envious woman 
could devise against Hannah and her Alderney ; nay, even Ned Miles, 
the keeper, her next neighbour, who had, whilom held entire sway 
over the Shaw common, as well as its coppices, grumbled as much as so 
