Old Country Life by Sabine Baring-Gould — Read

Does the reader know one of the most fascinating books of a most fascinating of our old writers, _Belford Regis_, by Miss Mary Russell Mitford? If not, and he or she desires to be carried back on the broad, sweeping, somewhat sad-coloured wings of fancy to the past, to a time before railways, then let _Belford Regis_ be procured, and read, and smiled, and perhaps a little sighed over. As in _Our Village_ the authoress sketched the country, so in _Belford Regis_ did she sketch the little county town at the beginning of the present century.

"About three miles to the north of our village stands the good town of Belford Regis. The approach to it, straight as a dart, runs along a wide and populous turnpike road, all alive with carts and coaches, waggons and phaetons, horse-people and foot-people, sweeping rapidly or creeping lazily up and down the gentle undulations with which the surface of the country is varied; and the borders, checkered by patches of common, rich with hedgerow timber, and sprinkled with cottages, and, I grieve to say, with that cottage pest, the beer-house, -- and here and there enlivened by dwellings of more pretension and gentility, -- become more thickly inhabited as we draw nearer the metropolis of the county, to say nothing of the three cottages all in a row, with two small houses attached, which a board affixed to one of them informs the passer-by is Two-mile Cross; or of these opposite neighbours, the wheelwrights and the blacksmiths, about half a mile further; or the little farm close by the pound; or the series of buildings called the Long Row, terminating at the end next the road with an old-fashioned and most picturesque public-house, with painted roofs, and benches at the door and round the large elm before it -- benches which are generally filled by thirsty wayfarers and waggoners watering their horses, and partaking of a more generous liquor themselves.