Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices | Page 4

as themselves. Harvest still lying out and much
rained upon; here and there, harvest still unreaped. Well-cultivated
gardens attached to the cottages, with plenty of produce forced out of
their hard soil. Lonely nooks, and wild; but people can be born, and
married, and buried in such nooks, and can live and love, and be loved,
there as elsewhere, thank God! (Mr. Goodchild's remark.) By-and-by,
the village. Black, coarse-stoned, rough-windowed houses; some with
outer staircases, like Swiss houses; a sinuous and stony gutter winding
up hill and round the corner, by way of street. All the children running
out directly. Women pausing in washing, to peep from doorways and
very little windows. Such were the observations of Messrs. Idle and
Goodchild, as their conveyance stopped at the village shoemaker's. Old
Carrock gloomed down upon it all in a very ill-tempered state; and rain
was beginning.
The village shoemaker declined to have anything to do with Carrock.
No visitors went up Carrock. No visitors came there at all. Aa' the
world ganged awa' yon. The driver appealed to the Innkeeper. The
Innkeeper had two men working in the fields, and one of them should
be called in, to go up Carrock as guide. Messrs. Idle and Goodchild,

highly approving, entered the Innkeeper's house, to drink whiskey and
eat oatcake.
The Innkeeper was not idle enough--was not idle at all, which was a
great fault in him--but was a fine specimen of a north-country man, or
any kind of man. He had a ruddy cheek, a bright eye, a well- knit frame,
an immense hand, a cheery, outspeaking voice, and a straight, bright,
broad look. He had a drawing-room, too, upstairs, which was worth a
visit to the Cumberland Fells. (This was Mr. Francis Goodchild's
opinion, in which Mr. Thomas Idle did not concur.)
The ceiling of this drawing-room was so crossed and recrossed by
beams of unequal lengths, radiating from a centre, in a corner, that it
looked like a broken star-fish. The room was comfortably and solidly
furnished with good mahogany and horsehair. It had a snug fireside,
and a couple of well-curtained windows, looking out upon the wild
country behind the house. What it most developed was, an unexpected
taste for little ornaments and nick-nacks, of which it contained a most
surprising number. They were not very various, consisting in great part
of waxen babies with their limbs more or less mutilated, appealing on
one leg to the parental affections from under little cupping glasses; but,
Uncle Tom was there, in crockery, receiving theological instructions
from Miss Eva, who grew out of his side like a wen, in an exceedingly
rough state of profile propagandism. Engravings of Mr. Hunt's country
boy, before and after his pie, were on the wall, divided by a
highly-coloured nautical piece, the subject of which had all her colours
(and more) flying, and was making great way through a sea of a regular
pattern, like a lady's collar. A benevolent, elderly gentleman of the last
century, with a powdered head, kept guard, in oil and varnish, over a
most perplexing piece of furniture on a table; in appearance between a
driving seat and an angular knife- box, but, when opened, a musical
instrument of tinkling wires, exactly like David's harp packed for
travelling. Everything became a nick-nack in this curious room. The
copper tea-kettle, burnished up to the highest point of glory, took his
station on a stand of his own at the greatest possible distance from the
fireplace, and said: 'By your leave, not a kettle, but a bijou.' The
Staffordshire-ware butter-dish with the cover on, got upon a little round

occasional table in a window, with a worked top, and announced itself
to the two chairs accidentally placed there, as an aid to polite
conversation, a graceful trifle in china to be chatted over by callers, as
they airily trifled away the visiting moments of a butterfly existence, in
that rugged old village on the Cumberland Fells. The very footstool
could not keep the floor, but got upon a sofa, and there-from
proclaimed itself, in high relief of white and liver-coloured wool, a
favourite spaniel coiled up for repose. Though, truly, in spite of its
bright glass eyes, the spaniel was the least successful assumption in the
collection: being perfectly flat, and dismally suggestive of a recent
mistake in sitting down on the part of some corpulent member of the
family.
There were books, too, in this room; books on the table, books on the
chimney-piece, books in an open press in the corner. Fielding was there,
and Smollett was there, and Steele and Addison were there, in
dispersed volumes; and there were tales of those who go down to the
sea in ships, for windy nights; and there was really a choice of