Raveloe lay low among the bushy trees and
the rutted lanes, aloof from the currents of industrial energy and
Puritan earnestness: the rich ate and drank freely, and accepted
gout and apoplexy as things that ran mysteriously in respectable
families, and the poor thought that the rich were entirely in the
right of it to lead a jolly life; besides, their feasting caused a
multiplication of orts, which were the heirlooms of the poor. Betty
Jay scented the boiling of Squire Cass's hams, but her longing was
arrested by the unctuous liquor in which they were boiled; and when
the seasons brought round the great merrymakings, they were regarded
on all hands as a fine thing for the poor. For the Raveloe feasts were
like the rounds of beef- and the barrels of ale- they were on a
large scale, and lasted a good while, especially in the winter-time.
When ladies had packed up their best gowns and top-knots in bandboxes,
and had incurred the risk of fording streams on pillions with the
precious burden in rainy or snowy weather, when there was no knowing
how high the water would rise, it was not to be supposed that they
looked forward to a brief pleasure. On this ground it was always
contrived in the dark seasons, when there was little work to be
done, and the hours were long, that several neighbours should keep
open house in succession. When Squire Cass's standing dishes
diminished in plenty and freshness, his guests had nothing to do but
to walk a little higher up the village to Mr Osgood's at the Orchards,
and they found hams and chines uncut, pork-pies with the scent of
the fire in them, spun butter in all its freshness- everything, in
fact, that appetites at leisure could desire, in perhaps greater
perfection, though not in greater abundance, than at Squire Cass's.
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