COUNTRY PLACES. 181 



his horses. He picked it up and brought it home, and 

 there it has lain many a long year, a silent witness, like 

 the bricks Jack Cade put in the chimney, to the extra- 

 ordinary change of ideas which has taken place. We 

 are all expected nowadays to think not only of ourselves 

 but of others, and if a man fires a gun without due pre- 

 cautions, and injures or even might have injured another, 

 he is liable, All our legislation and all the drift of public 

 opinion goes in this direction. Men were the same then 

 as now ; the change in this respect shows the immense 

 value of ideas. They were then quite strangers to the 

 very idea of taking any thought for those who might 

 chance to be in the way. That has been inculcated of 

 recent years. Those were the days when there was an 

 irresponsible tyrant in every village, who could not 

 indeed hang men at his castle gate by feudal right of 

 gallows, but who could as effectually silence them by 

 setting in motion laws made by the rich for the rich. It 

 is on record how a poor carrier, whose only fortune was 

 a decrepit horse, dared presumptuously, against the will 

 of the lord of the manor, to water his horse at a roadside 

 pond. For this offence he was taken before the justices 

 and fined, his goods seized, — 



And the knackers had his silly old horse, 

 And so John Harris was bowled out ! 



Then there was a still more terrible offence — a hungry 

 man picked up a rabbit. ' How dared John Bartlett for 

 to venture for to go for to grab it ? ' But they put him 

 in gaol and cured him of * that there villanous habit/ 

 which rhymes, and the tale thereof may be found by the 

 student of old times in the 'Punch' of the day — a good true 

 honest manly Punch, who brought his staff down heavily 

 on the head of abuses and injustice. We do things every 



