1826. ] Village Sketches. 585 
none of our village belles ashamed and shy. It was a most animating 
puzzle ; and regardless of the weather, half the gossips of the street—in 
other words, half the inhabitants—gathered together in knots and clusters, 
to discuss flirtations and calculate possibilities. +. 
Still the peals rang merrily on, and still the pleasant game of guessing 
continued, until the appearance of a well-known, but most unsuspected 
equipage, descending the hill from the church, and shewing dimly 
through the fog the most unequivocal signs of bridal finery, supplied 
exactly the solution which all riddles ought to have, adding a grand 
climax of amazement to’ the previous suspense—the new-married couple 
being precisely the two most unlikely persons to commit matrimony in 
the whole neighbourhood ; the only two whose names had never come in 
question during the discussion, both bride and bridegroom having been 
long considered the most confirmed and resolute old maid and old 
bachelor to be found in the country side. 
Master Jacob Frost is an itinerant chapman, somewhere on the wrong 
side of sixty, who traverses the counties of Hants, Berks, and Oxon, 
with a noisy lumbering cart full of panniers, containing the heterogeneous 
commodities of fruit and fish, driving during the summer a regular and 
profitable barter between the coast on one side of us and the cherry 
country on the other. We who live about midway between these two 
extreme points of his peregrination, have the benefit of both kinds of 
merchandize going and coming ; and there is not a man, woman, or ehild, 
in the parish who does not know Master Frost’s heavy cart and old grey 
mare half a mile off, as well as the stentorian cry of ‘ Cherries, crabs, 
and salmon,” sometimes pickled and sometimes fresh, with which he 
makes the common and village re-echo; for, with an indefatigable 
perseverance, he cries his goods along the whole line of road, picking up 
customers where a man of less experience would despair, and so used to 
utter those sounds whilst marching beside his rumbling equipage, that it 
would not be at all surprising if he were to cry “ Cherzies—salmon! 
salmon—cherries!” in his sleep. As to fatigue, that is entirely out of 
the question. Jacob is a man of iron; a tall lean gaunt figure, all bone 
and sinew, constantly clad in a light brown jacket with breeches to 
match, long leather gaiters, and a leather cap ; his face and hair tanned 
constant exposure to the weather into a tint so nearly resembling his 
vestments that he looks all of a colour, like the statue ghost in Don 
Giovanni, although the hue be different from that renowned spectre— 
Jacob being a brown man. Perhaps Master Peter in Don Quixote, him 
of the ape and the shamoy doublet, were the apter comparison ; or, with 
all’ reverence be it spoken, the ape himself. His visage is spare, and lean, 
and saturnine, enlivened by a slight cast in the dexter eye, and diversified 
bya partial lossof his teeth, all those on the left hand having been 
knocked ‘out by a cricket ball, which, aided by the before-mentioned 
obliquity-of vision, gives a peculiar one-sided expression to his phy- 
si lye 
iuowapis is well hung and oily, as suits his vocation. No better 
manvat/a bargain than Master Frost: he would persuade you that brill 
was turbot;:and that black chérries were Maydukes; and yet, to be an 
itinerant vender of fish, the rogite hath a conscience. Try to bate him 
downy and he cheats you without scruple or mercy; but put him on‘ his 
honour; and he shall deal as fairly with you as the honestest man in 
Billingsgate. Neither doth he ever, imypoae on childrev, with whom, im 
M.M. New Series.—Vou..I1. No.2, 4F 
