Page:Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.djvu/251

 of winding up, and then going on again. Which he did; and the dogs made their Hoo! in the wrong place.

To return to this Scottish village. I obtained tolerably good lodgings at a house of two stories belonging to one of the principal shopkeepers in the village, whose wife, a good cook, and remarkably intelligent woman, attended to the lodgings. One of the first things that attracted my attention was the badness of the bread procured from the village baker—the bread being sour from an unpleasant combination of bad flour and bad yeast.

I therefore ate chiefly bread made by my landlady in the shape of flat cakes of moderate thickness. These cakes were, I think, called scones, the name given also in Scotland to barley cakes—but never to oat cakes, which are called bannocks. The reason given for the badness of the baker's bread was this: A combination or company of persons in the village enriched themselves by selling to the villagers damaged flour; against which grievance and villany [sic] there was no redress, because, though the "great man" most probably did not know of this villanous proceeding, the poor people dared not complain for fear of these scoundrels' influence with him being used to ruin them, by getting