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CUOUNIRY 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, 
heisliable. 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 timesin 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 
