The Best Fourteen- Hander in England. 203 



which came out on every Tuesday, under the domestic title of the 

 Bee. What resemblance it bore to this industrious little animal I 

 was ever at a loss to imagine, for in a country district, the moderate 

 circulation of a little weekly newspaper could bring, I should 

 fancy, very little honey to the editorial hive ; and though I will do 

 it justice to say that in its attacks it displayed quite as much rage 

 and venom as its little namesake, still its stings were so coarse and 

 rude, that they bore far more resemblance to a prog from a pitch- 

 fork than the neat sting of a bee. It nevertheless had a wide cir- 

 culation among the farmers, who look for little in a newspaper save 

 the meets of the hounds and the market intelligence. Now it can 

 be easily believed that when local news was scarce, such an adven- 

 ture as the one I have described would be regarded as a kind of 

 godsend by the editor of the Bee, who had seldom anything more 

 interesting with which to treat his readers than that " our enter- 

 prising and spirited townsman, the Landlord of the Red Lion," had 

 started an omnibus to run daily to the neighbouring railway station j 

 or that Squire So-and-So, with his usual splendid munificence, had 

 presented the inhabitants of the town with a new pump ; or that 

 Hannah Smith, the wife of a labourer, had, with an equal munifi- 

 cence, presented her husband with twins for the fourth occasion, 

 making the extraordinary number of sixteen children in the space 

 of so many years, all of which are living and doing well ; and such 

 other scraps of local news which could not fail to be highly edifying 

 to any one who had at heart the welfare of the " parterre " over 

 whose flowers this provincial little Bee was wont to buzz. Now 

 the editor of the Bee had taken a great prejudice against me, for 

 what reason I could never make out (for I was not a "writing 

 chap " then, so no slip of my pen could have offended him). And 

 although I had made up my mind to see my ride noticed in his 

 columns, and doubtless with some little embellishments, I hardly 

 expected that it would form a leading article in the next Tuesday's 

 Bee. However, great was my surprise on opening the paper of 

 that day to see a leader of a column and a half in length, headed, 



