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.
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