A Battery Was Practising, And They
Did Not Trouble Themselves About The Highway Road Which Skirted The
Range; And As The Carter Was Coming Home With His Waggon One Of The Balls
Ricocheted And Rolled Along In Front Of His Horses.
He picked it up and
brought it home, and there it has lain many a long year, a silent
witness, like the bricks Jack Cade put in the chimney, to the
extraordinary change of ideas which has taken place.
We are all expected
nowadays to think not only of ourselves but of others, and if a man fires
a gun without due precautions, and injures or even might have injured
another, he is liable. All our legislation and all the drift of public
opinion goes in this direction. Men were the same then as now; the change
in this respect shows the immense value of ideas. They were then quite
strangers to the very idea of taking any thought for those who might
chance to be in the way. That has been inculcated of recent years. Those
were the days when there was an irresponsible tyrant in every village,
who could not indeed hang men at his castle gate by feudal right of
gallows, but who could as effectually silence them by setting in motion
laws made by the rich for the rich. It is on record how a poor carrier,
whose only fortune was a decrepit horse, dared presumptuously, against
the will of the lord of the manor, to water his horse at a roadside pond.
For this offence he was taken before the justices and fined, his goods
seized, -
And the knackers had his silly old horse,
And so John Harris was bowled out!
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