hostler and a ploughman, and not of the
talkative breed—only growled out, in answer
to our curious questions, "That's Buckley
Park. I've heard that the grandfather of the
squire drove his coach-and-six, but this un's
a poor creatur'."

We rolled slowly on, and crossed a narrow
high-backed bridge, where a gang of idle
country louts lounged over the parapets,
slanging the bargees as they tided through
the arches.

Riverport had a village of a single street,
with a church, an almshouse, and a dozen
taverns; before whose doors red-cravatted,
flannel-shirted, giant bargees and nondescript
ruffians—a mixture of the pauper labourer,
the poacher and the tramp—with the help of
slattern women, several fiddles and an organ,
fought, shouted, and made a hideous din.
The village, with church tower, and cottages
with quaint chimney-stacks—so
picturesque from a distance—formed a
straggling, filthy lane, of decayed dwellings
of stone, mud, and timber, used at haphazard.
Every window was open; and,
at almost every one, some slattern woman
lolled and screamed to the children playing
in the street.

A man with a fishing-rod is not afraid of a
dirty village. My visit was to my old friend,
Splinters (lately settled in Riverport, in
all the new-flown dignity of the alphabet
granted by the dignitaries of surgery and
drugs), with a behind-thought, as the French
say, of experimenting on certain famous trout
streams. The village doctor knows everything.
Is he not the Confessor of the nineteenth century?
Hence my knowledge of Buckley or
Buckleigh Park.

Where Buckleigh Hall now stands, stood,
so says Domesday Book, at the Conquest, the
dwelling of a Saxon Thane. The Conqueror
gave it to William de Bouclere, one of his
captains, with many thousand acres besides.
From father to son, with scarcely a break
from the direct line, the hall, the park,
and a fair estate, had descended up to the
time of the grandfather of the last owner.
The stone keep and castle built by the first
De Buckleigh, was dismantled in the wars of
the Roses. A Bouclere Buckleigh, in Queen
Elizabeth's time, built a pleasant mansion,
after the fashion of that age. In William the
Third's time, terraces, and clipt yew trees,
and famous gardens were added by a prudent
man, who married a Dutch merchant heiress.
The time of George the Second gave a fantastical,
powdered, patched Dame Agatha Buckler,
anxious, above all things, to be genteel; so she
took advantage of a fire to alter what was
spared into a sash-windowed, pillared, porticoed
hall. Successive alterations in the same
spirit, with the help of stucco and stone
pillars, reduced the once picturesque hall to
a heavy yellow square parallelogram of carpenters'
architecture; as unlike the ancestral
house of the family as the last male heir
was to the knight who won his manor at
Hastings.

In course of time, the Buckleighs were
transformed into Bucklers. The first of the
family was also the last who did anything to
mark his name upon the county history.
The Buckleighs and Bucklers were squires
and justices of the peace; they never aspired
to be knights of the shire. They generally
intermarried with other Bucklers, cousins
more or less removed, and were not prolific,
We don't hear of any Bucklers famous in the
army or the navy, the law or the church.

Some of the Squires Buckler kept hounds;
all hunted and shot; committed poachers to
the county jail; and drank to the king (over
the water) until there was no king there to
drink to: and then, with equal zeal, drank to
King George fifty years ago. The Bucklers
made it a point of honour to drive four
horses, or a set of horses, as it was called,
and not to allow their daughter to marry
any one who could not keep a set for them
too; hence, tradition mentions many withered,
discontented spinsters, and some shocking
runaway marriages by maiden Bucklers,
who were thenceforward chased out of the
county by a union of squires and squiresses.
It need scarcely be said that, with the
important exception of the Dutch heiress who
introduced asparagus-beds and forcing-houses,
but who died early of apoplexy, leaving one son,
the Bucklers encouraged no innovations.
Had ploughing by the horse's tail ever been
the custom in England, it would have survived
last in Buckler Park.

The Bucklers were hospitable to neighbours
of their own rank, after their own heavy
fashion. In the servants' hall, and kitchen,
there was a sort of open house for all comers.
Some lazy fellows or untidy women, beside
the numberless cousins of the army of dependents,
were always in the kitchen having
cold meat, bread and cheese, and strong ale;
of which last huge butts were brewed every
October. They were charitable, too, after their
fashion. On certain days, and especially St.
Thomas's day, consecrated by immemorial custom,
a crowd of the villagers marched up with
basket and wallet, and received fixed allowances
of food, clothes, and firewood, without
distinction or inquiry; so that in course of time
every family able to obtain a footing in Riverport
counted on "Thomassin," the annual dole
from the Hall, as so much income to be added
to their lazily-earned wages. Indeed, during
the last Buckler's time the doles were as good
as cash; for Mr. Joe Brunt, landlord of the
Jolly Boatman, was always prepared to give
gin and ale, bread and meat, for flannel and
faggots, either to clear off an old score or to
commence a new one. So dole days were
always celebrated by a general jollification at
the Jolly Boatman. There were few, either
husbands or wives, who, after partaking of
Mr. Brunt's good cheer, did not leave the
Buckler Hall bundle behind the bar.