and the Nunnery on the right, the T has now something of the air of the italic capital T, turned up at one end and down at the other.  The latest improvements are the bow-window in the market-place, commanding the pavement both ways, which the late brewer, Andrews, threw out in his snug parlour some twenty years back, and where he used to sit smoking, with the sash up, in summer afternoons, enjoying himself, good man; and the great room, at the Swan, originally built by the speculative publican, Joseph Allwright, for an assembly-room.  That speculation did not answer.  The assembly, in spite of canvassing and patronage, and the active exertions of all the young ladies in the neighbourhood, dwindled away, and died at the end of two winters:  then it became a club-room for the hunt; but the hunt quarrelled with Joseph’s cookery:  then a market-room for the farmers; but the farmers (it was in the high-price time) quarrelled with Joseph’s wine:  then it was converted into the magistrate’s room—­the bench; but the bench and the market went away together, and there was an end of justicing:  then Joseph tried the novel attraction (to borrow a theatrical phrase) of a billiard-table; but, alas! that novelty succeeded as ill as if it had been theatrical; there were not customers enough to pay the marker:  at last, it has merged finally in that unconscious receptacle of pleasure and pain, a post-office; although Hazelby has so little to do with traffic of any sort—­even the traffic of correspondence—­that a saucy mail-coach will often carry on its small bag, and as often forget to call for the London bag in return.

In short, Hazelby is an insignificant place;—­my readers will look for it in vain in the map of Dorsetshire;—­it is omitted, poor dear town!—­left out by the map-maker with as little remorse as a dropped letter!—­and it is also an old-fashioned place.  It has not even a cheap shop for female gear.  Every thing in the one store which it boasts, kept by Martha Deane, linen-draper and haberdasher, is dear and good, as things were wont to be.  You may actually get there thread made of flax, from the gouty, uneven, clumsy, shiny fabric, ycleped whited-brown, to the delicate commodity of Lisle, used for darning muslin.  I think I was never more astonished, from the mere force of habit, than when, on asking for thread, I was presented, instead of the pretty lattice-wound balls, or snowy reels of cotton, with which that demand is usually answered, with a whole drawerful of skeins peeping from their blue papers —­such skeins as in my youth a thrifty maiden would draw into the nicely-stitched compartments of that silken repository, a housewife, or fold into a congeries of graduated thread-papers, “fine by degrees, and beautifully less.”  The very literature of Hazelby is doled out at the pastry cook’s, in a little one-windowed shop kept by Matthew Wise.  Tarts occupy one end of the counter, and reviews the other; whilst the shelves are parcelled out between books, and dolls, and ginger, bread.  It is a question, by which of his trades poor Matthew gains least; he is so shabby, so threadbare, and so starved.