Winter at Hazelbarn. 155 



This laudation is not so much out of bounds as may be 

 supposed, for as the Green Vernons live not more than one 

 plough field, a rape patch, and half a paddock from Hazel- 

 barn, we pass a good deal of our time in company. The 

 worthy pair always spend their summer by the sea-side ; 

 therefore to me they are part a very essential and distinct 

 part of winter. 



The little woman receives the fortnightly boxes of books 

 from Smith's, opens them, and reads their contents for the 

 husband's benefit, and mine. There is at the parsonage a 

 fine billiard-table over the harness-room, and the curate and 

 the exile, while the north-easter performs a series of rattling 

 cannons with hail-stones on the window-panes without, work 

 the red with considerable frankness on the green cloth 

 within. Mrs. Green Vernon, tuning her voice to the click 

 of the balls, and making astonishingly clever use of the 

 pauses, thus reveals to us the literature of the day, partly 

 by analysis shrewdly made, partly by extracts beautifully 

 read. 



Brave little woman ! I have seen that curate's wife, on 

 a December day, sitting on the stump of a fallen tree from 

 which we had brushed the snow, and reading the leaders 

 of the previous day's papers while her husband and the 

 exile, by the river's brink, looked ruefully at the floats which 

 would not go down. 



And it is really astonishing how deeply one may, at a 

 retreat like Hazelbarn, become absorbed in matters, espe- 

 cially matters literary, which in the old days would pass by 

 as the things which you respect not. Your mental respira- 

 tion, as it were, is more greedy. But, more I think than 

 by the books, the happiness of Hazelbarn and its inmates 

 is fed by the more or less regular arrivals per post of the 

 periodical literature. Thanks to the universal diffusion of 



