when Squire Carraways threw open the Hall to his London friends. All Marigolds glowed with satisfaction, for the Hall was as the heart of the village; its influence felt, acknowledged at the farthest extremity. In fact, Squire Carraways was the feudal sovereign (he had, without knowing it, so crowned himself) of the people of Marigolds. He lorded it over every fireside; with the like power, if not with the like means, of the good old blade-and-buckler generations.

Conceive Jogtrot Hall to be the awful castle of the domain; though, to say the truth, there was not a frown to be got from it, see it as you would. For the architects, in their various tasks undertaken from time to time, had made the Hall a sort of brick-and-mortar joke; a violation and a burlesque of all building. The Hall was a huge jumble; here adorned with large beauty spots of lichen; there with ivy; here with jasmine and roses; and, to be short, with a very numerous family of flowering parasites, sticking and clinging, and creeping everywhere about it. The Hall seemed to have been built bit by bit as its owners got the wherewithal: as though, only when fortune had made a good venture, the owner permitted himself to send out for additional bricks and mortar. The Hall covered, or to speak better, sprawled over half an acre of ground. And as it lay tumbled on the greensward, dressed with all coloured plants and flowers;[Pg 50] as its fifty windows stared, and peeped, and looked archly at you, it puzzled you which room to choose wherein to set your easy chair, and, with the fitting accessaries, therein to take a long, deep pull of blessed leisure.

[Pg 50]

And the lord of the Hall—Gilbert Carraways, merchant—had a high and dignified sense of his station. He had, perhaps, his own notions of feudality; but such as they were, he vindicated and worked them out with a truly Saxon energy. In the first place, he hated a beggar: he had, it would almost seem, an inborn horror of a destitute man: therefore, he never permitted any misery soever—we mean the misery of want—to find harbourage in Marigolds. If, in his walks, he met with a strange starving vagrant, crawling his way to hungry death, he would immediately take up the offender, and giving strictest orders that the vagabond should be well looked after, that is fed—and with amended covering, and a shilling in his pocket, be sent forth rebuked upon his journey. As for the vassals, or villagers, the Lord of the Hall knew every man, woman, and child; and at certain times, would call them to strict account. He would so carry it even in their homes, that he knew—as winter came—how many blankets were 

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