Mr and Mrs Glegg at Home

IN order to see Mr and Mrs Glegg at home, we must enter the town of St Oggs - that venerable town with the redfluted roofs and the broad warehouse gables, where the black ships unlade themselves of their burthens from the far north, and carry away, in exchange, the precious inland products, the well-crushed cheese and the soft fleeces, which my refined readers have doubtless become acquainted with through the medium of the best classic pastorals. It is one of those old, old towns, which impress one as a continuation and outgrowth of nature as much as the nests of the bower birds or the winding galleries of the white ants: a town which carries the traces of its long growth and history, like a millennial tree, and has sprung up and developed in the same spot between the river and the low hill from the time when the Roman legions turned their backs on it from the camp on the hill-side, and the longhaired sea-kings camp up the river and looked with fierce, eager eyes at the fatness of the land. It is a town `familiar with forgotten years. The shadow of the Saxon hero-king still walks there fitfully, reviewing the scenes of his youth and lovetime, and is met by the gloomier shadow of the dreadful heathen Dane who was stabbed in the midst of his warriors by the sword of an invisible avenger and who rises on autumn evenings like a white mist from his tumulus on the hill and hovers in the court of the old Hall by the river-side - the spot where he was thus miraculously slain in the days before the old Hall was built. It was the Normans who began to build that fine old Hall, which is like the town - telling of the thoughts and hands of widely-sundered generations; but it is all so old that we look with loving pardon at its inconsistencies, and are well content that they who built the stone oriel and they who built the gothic facade and towers of finest small brick-work with trefoil ornament, and the windows and battlements defined with stone, did not sacrilegiously pull down the ancient half-timbered body with its oak-roofed banqueting-hall.

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