Parts that are full of suctive power
get no chance of sucking; other parts have a flood of juice bubbling at
them, but are waterproof. This is the only excuse--except one--for
the shameful neglect of the family of Blocks, in any little treatise
pretending to give the dullest of glimpses at Springhaven.
The other excuse--if self-accusation does not poke a finger through
it--is that the Blockses were mainly of the dry land, and never went to
sea when they could help it. If they had lived beyond the two trees and
the stile that marked the parish boundary upon the hill towards London,
they might have been spotless, and grand, and even honest, yet must
have been the depth of the hills below contempt. But they dwelt in the
village for more generations than would go upon any woman's fingers,
and they did a little business with the fish caught by the others, which
enabled it to look after three days' journey as if it swam into town
upon its own fins. The inventions for wronging mankind pay a great deal
better than those for righting them.
Now the news came from John Prater's first, that a gentleman of great
renown was coming down from London city to live on fish fresh out of
the sea. His doctors had ordered him to leave off butcher's meat, and
baker's bread, and tea-grocer's tea, and almost every kind of inland
victuals, because of the state of his--something big, which even
Springhaven could not pronounce.
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