Mr. Newbery himself could hardly have drawn better pictures of country life, or spoken better dialect than the Farmer in one of these “trials”. In another (which suggests the ordeal of the Knave of Hearts) the evidence is not unworthy of Defoe,—the Prosecution putting in a plan of the kitchen where the stolen plum-cake was baked; and a third,—the case of Miss Stirling _versus_ Miss Delia, “for raising Strife and Contention among her Schoolfellows”—is wholly “conveyed” from Sarah Fielding’s _Governess_,[62] a source that may explain many unexpected features in the book.