Stirn, indeed, recommended much more stringent proceedings than all these indications of a change of policy, which, he averred, would soon bring the parish to its senses,--such as discontinuing many little jobs of unprofitable work that employed the surplus labour of the village.

But there the squire, falling into the department and under the benigner influence of his Harry, was as yet not properly hardened.

When it came to a question that affected the absolute quantity of loaves to be consumed by the graceless mouths that fed upon him, the milk of human kindness--with which Providence has so bountifully supplied that class of the mammalia called the "Bucolic," and of which our squire had an extra "yield"-- burst forth, and washed away all the indignation of the harsher Adam.
Still your policy of half-measures, which irritates without crushing its victims, which flaps an exasperated wasp-nest with a silk pocket-handkerchief, instead of blowing it up with a match and train, is rarely successful; and after three or four other and much guiltier victims than Lenny had been incarcerated in the stocks, the parish of Hazeldean was ripe for any enormity.

Pestilent Jacobinical tracts, conceived and composed in the sinks of manufacturing towns, found their way into the popular beer-house,--Heaven knows how, though the tinker was suspected of being the disseminator by all but Stirn, who still, in a whisper, accused the Papishers.

And, finally, there appeared amongst the other graphic embellishments which the poor stocks had received, the rude gravure of a gentleman in a broad-brimmed hat and top-boots, suspended from a gibbet, with the inscription beneath, "A warnin to hall tirans--mind your hi!--sighnde Captin sTraw." It was upon this significant and emblematic portraiture that the squire was gazing when the parson joined him.