 now, if he were obliged to raise this three hundred
pounds: it would make him look about him better, and not act so foolishly about
his wool this year as he did the last: in fact, Mr. Tulliver had been too easy
with his brother-in-law, and because he had let the interest run on for two
years, Moss was likely enough to think that he should never be troubled about
the principal. But Mr. Tulliver was determined not to encourage such shuffling
people any longer; and a ride along the Basset lanes was not likely to enervate
a man's resolution by softening his temper. The deep-trodden hoof-marks, made in
the muddiest days of winter, gave him a shake now and then which suggested a
rash but stimulating snarl at the father of lawyers, who, whether by means of
his hoof or otherwise, had doubtless something to do with this state of the
roads; and the abundance of foul land and neglected fences that met his eye,
though they made no part of his brother Moss's farm, strongly contributed to his
dissatisfaction with that unlucky agriculturist. If this wasn't Moss's fallow,
it might have been: Basset was all alike; it was a beggarly parish in Mr.
Tulliver's opinion, and his opinion was certainly not groundless. Basset had a
poor soil, poor roads, a poor non-resident landlord, a poor non-resident vicar,
and rather less than half a curate, also poor. If any one strongly impressed
with the power of the human mind to triumph over circumstances, will contend
that the parishioners of Basset might nevertheless have been a very superior
class of people, I have nothing to urge against that abstract proposition; I
only know that, in point of fact, the Basset mind was in strict keeping with its
circumstances. The muddy lanes, green or clayey, that seemed to the unaccustomed
eye to lead nowhere but into each other, did really lead, with patience, to a
distant high-road; but there were many feet in Basset which they led more
frequently to a centre of dissipation, spoken of formally as the »Markis o'
Granby,« but among intimates as »Dickison's.« A large low room with a sanded
floor, a cold scent of tobacco, modified by undetected beer-dregs, Mr. Dickison
leaning against the doorpost with a melancholy pimpled face, looking as
irrelevant to the daylight as a last night's guttered candle - all this may not
seem a very seductive form of temptation; but the majority
