were perfection. She was one of those admirable women who always give you something to eat when you call upon them, and if you are neither hungered nor athirst, insist on your carrying away a pot of preserves or a slice of bride-cake with you. It was in the golden age, and England was merry England indeed, when those fat matrons who had been fat girls flourished. They used to entertain you at "meat teas"-bounteous repasts, where there were sausages and pressed beef, soused mackerel, and potato-cakes. The fat young lady need not have been a fat child. Some are of the lean kind in early girlhood, and fall into fatness as others fall into love. The Germans are the most prolific in fat young ladies. Their names are Ermengarde, Hilda, Dorothea. Their eyes are blue, but not doll-like, for they are full of sentiment. They call each other "Du," and continuously embroider cigar-cases, tobacco-pouches, nay, carpet-bags even, for officers in the Grand-Duke's army, or students of the university of Katzelstein. They sit and sigh, and carve Ludolf or Heinrich's names on the bark of linden-trees. They write pretty little sonnets to the sky and the birds in fat albums bound in blue watered silk. They make little sketches in coloured crayons, representing Körner going to the wars, the Fahnenwacht keeping his lonely watch and not daring to name the lady of his love. They wish they were not quite so fat; but they are above drinking vinegar to make themselves thin. Perhaps they eat a little too much. They, too, marry, and have prodigious families; but they don't become jolly. They go through life with a meek smile of placid resignation, eating plentifully, and reading many novels. "Elle a peaucoup zouffert, Matame la Paronne, tans le temps," tawny-moustached Captain Kalbsfleich whispers to you at the table-d'hôte. You look at "Matame la Paronne," and see that she has got very well through two courses, and is making a vigorous onslaught on the third,-let us say of stewed trout and macaroons, hot roast veal and raspberry-jam, or some equally anomalous German plat,— and find it difficult to persuade yourself that the Baroness has ever suffered from any thing more serious than indigestion. The lady who sat in the great arm-chair opposite Magdalen Hill by no means belonged to the sentimental or to the doll-like category of stout young ladies. Far more probable that ten years before she had belonged to the order of tomboys; indeed, it may be as well to make a clean breast of it at once, and avow that, at fourteen years of age, there had never been a franker, merrier, noisier hoyden than the Honourable Letitia Salusbury. She was an only child; that may have had something to do with it. The lady her mother-a meek woman, who was frightened at mice, and firmly believed in the Apparition of Mrs. Veal, as related by Daniel Defoe-had died during her infancy, which may have had more to do with it. At all events, Letitia grew up through childhood petted, caressed, and humoured in every caprice, and if she was not spoiled herself, she spoiled, at least, innumerable frocks, pinafores, pairs of socks, and garden-hats. To enumerate the panes of glass fractured by this young lady, the lustres, china monsters, rare tea-cups, irrevocably smashed; the dolls she dismembered; the injuries she did to marqueterie tables and costly carpets; and the immense benefit she conferred on the bookselling trade by destroying every book that came within her reach, and so increasing the consumption of juvenile literature,-would be a task as wearisome as to learn the annual speeches on the Army and Navy Estimates by heart, throwing in the Chancellor of the Exchequer's financial statement by way of epilogue. She condescended to learn very little, but what she did learn she learned very well. She was the bane, terror, and despair of eight successive governesses, native and foreign; but she took a fancy to the Swordsley curate who stammered, and actually went through the Latin Accidence with him. Her indulgent papa, after vainly explaining to her that it was necessary for a young lady of her high station to attain some proficiency in the Continental languages, in music, and in drawing, despatched her to a Parisian pensionnat. After an enforced sojourn of three years, equally irksome to parent and child, Letitia returned to Swordsley a very fair French scholar. Of her drawing, it may be sufficient to say that she had a particular aptitude for sketching horses and dogs; but as to music, I am afraid that her progress had not extended farther than enabled her to whistle sundry lively airs familiar to the youth of Paris, and to join in the chorus of numerous convivial melodies, of which the wonder was to know where she had picked them up. It is certain, however, that she had publicly diswigged the dancing-master at the establishment of Madame Givry de la Roncière in the Champs Elysées; that she had organised numerous hot suppers in the dormitory, the preparation of one of which surreptitious banquets had nearly set the school on fire; and that she had blown up the bust of the sainted M. de Fénélon, Archbishop of Cambrai, which stood in the garden, with gunpowder. She was the delight of her schoolfellows; but the diswigged dancing-master called her "une belle Mégère." Madame Givry de la Roncière bore with her eccentricities, for the quarterly bills sent to her papa, and so punctually settled by his solicitor at St. Becketsbury, were very large, and made her a valuable pupil; but after the departure of the Honourable Miss Salusbury, the much-suffering schoolmistress spoke of her privately, only as "cette petite diablesse," and in public, warned her flock against the example of "la conduite inconcevablement dévergondée d'une demoiselle que la convenance m'empêche de nommer." The Honourable Letitia had, as a child, always had her own way; and she was not likely to abandon it on coming to woman's estate. Her papa was very old, and adored her. She returned all his love with interest, but that did not hinder her from tyrannising over him in a manner quite as good-natured as it was arbitrary. She had been, at school, and with the exception of her brief probation under the curate who stammered, a very close imitation of a dunce; but on her return to England she began to read with much avidity. The bent of her literary studies was peculiar. She had a healthy scorn for French romances, and esteemed them all, from beginning to end, as so much vicious humbug. The historians, essayists, and moralists, whose bulky tomes graced the morocco-valanced shelves of her father's library, she classed, generically, as "old fogies," and she kept fishhooks in a very splendidly bound copy of Elegant Extracts. Nor did our English three-volume novels, mainly relating to the cultivation of the affections among the upper classes of society, please her any more than the little brochures, full of paper poison, which are so plentiful in Paris. "Trash," "rubbish," and "rigmarole" the Honourable Letitia Salusbury called the staple products of the circulating library at St. Becketsbury. But, for the enlivening works of Captain Marryat and the other nautical novelists, and for the Ingoldsby Legends, Miss Salusbury took an immense liking. She had the dreadful heresy to declare all poetry-except it was "funny"-a bore; but she luxuriated in the perusal of Nimrod's sporting sketches. She yawned over Sir Walter Scott, and intimated her opinion that Diana Vernon was a designing minx, who only put on a riding-habit to hook Frank Osbaldistone; but I much fear that she had heard of a work written by the late Mr. Pierce Egan, and called Boxiana. It is terrible to tell, but the Honourable Letitia Salusbury was an assiduous student of Ruff's Guide to the Turf and the Racing Calendar. You see that I wish to extenuate nothing of her faults; but, in order that nothing may be set down in malice concerning her, I must, while admitting that she did shoot, fish, hunt, drive,―tandem occasionally, and bet, deny in the most unqualified manner what has been averred by the malevolent, viz. that the Honourable Letitia Salusbury smoked cigars and drank brandy-and-water. As to her conversation, you will be enabled to judge of its tenor; and as to another accusation which has been brought against her, of swearing, you may be sure that, if Miss Salusbury did now and then rap out an ugly word, I shall always, for good manners' sake, suppress it. I say that she was not beautiful, but was still comely to look upon. She had great flashing brown eyes and a quantity of vagrant brown hair, which was ordinarily thrust into a net, or tumbled off her forehead anyhow. She had a great deal too much colour-at least, of that colour which is not sold by the perfumers, and that won't rub off. Her mouth would have been handsome had it been a little smaller. Her teeth were very white, but they were large and square. Her nose wavered between the mild retroussé and the decided snub. But her whole face beamed with candour, happiness, and good-nature, and these amply redeemed the irregularity of her features. Her figure, for all its plumpness, was graceful and supple, and she was as agile as a squirrel. Nobody could precisely say that Miss Salusbury was masculine, although she delighted and excelled in most of the pursuits and the exercises of men. No; she was not masculine, and yet she had, it must be confessed, something of the Amazon of the Cirque about her, with a more considerable admixture of a good-looking milkmaid. It is very improper to say so. No doubt it is unpardonable to unveil a heroine who, albeit she was a peer's daughter, frequently spoke of money as "tin," of a carriage as a "trap," of a gentleman as a "fellow." She could not help it, she said, when remonstrated with by Magdalen. It was her way. There was no harm in it, and she hated humbug. So, as it was her way, there was but one course open, and that was to let her have it. I have hinted that the papa of this young lady, who knew quite as much about horses, dogs, rats, and badgers as one of her own grooms, was a peer of the realm. You may take down your peerage and look for Chalkstonehengist (Viscount). Jehan de Salusbury did good service at Agincourt. Sir Mulciber Salusbury, of Chalkstonehengist, was summoned as a baron to Henry the Eighth's first parliament. The Salusburys fought on the King's side during the civil wars, and the possessor of the title was made a Viscount at the Restoration. "Le roy, la foy, la loy," was the Salusbury motto. The Lord Chalkstonehengist regnant was a very old gentleman, born while the American War was at its hottest. He was the most consistent, but the mildest and most benevolent, of Tories of the old school. He spoke of the Reform Bill as "that grievous error in legislation," and of the Reformers as "gentlemen who hold the pernicious doctrines of Mr. Hunt and Mr. Cobbett." A bitter Tory lord held his proxy, for Lord Chalkstonehengist seldom made his appearance in the senate-house. He wore a blue coat and brass buttons, a low-crowned white hat and top-boots. He had not forgotten his scholarship, and the composition of Latin verses sometimes served to while away an odd hour. It was even said that he had been engaged for years in writing a history of the American War, in which the Stamp Act was incontrovertibly defended, and Mr. Washington very hardly dealt by. Until years and infirmities had overtaken him, he had been an enthusiast in the sports of the field; and it was with an irrepressible pleasure, mingled with an odd sensation that the thing wasn't exactly proper, that he heard of the daring deeds of his daughter, in riding 'cross country, leaping gates and clearing ditches. For Miss Salusbury was in all respects a worthy descendant of the old monastic huntress, Dame Juliana Berners; and, from her own practical experience, could have capped the sporting wisdom of the noble lady who wrote "Wheresoever ye fare by fryth or by fell My dere chylde take heede how Trystram do you tell Four maner bestys of venerie there are, The fyrst of them the harte, the second is the hare; only, Dame Letitia Salusbury would have taken away the "boore" and the "wulfe," and added the fox. Father and daughter lived pleasantly and comfortably enough in their old house on the older estate of Chalkstonehengist, about a mile and a quarter from The Casements. Lord Chalkstonehengist was not very rich, but he had enough and to spare. His high Tory predilections did not prevent him from being kind, hospitable, and benevolent to his neighbours, to his tenants, and to the poor. As a landlord he was of the most liberal, and, although he preserved his game in moderation, never refused a farmer a day's shooting. As a magistrate he was of the most merciful. They used to tell a story of one Giles Conybeare, an incorrigible poacher, who was brought before his lordship sitting in petty sessions. It was about the twenty-fifth time that Giles had so fallen into trouble for wilful contravention of the Game Laws. His lordship put on his sternest expression of countenance, which at the worst was but dove-like. "Here again, Giles Conybeare," he thundered, or at least tried to thunder. "Were I your lordship, I should make an example of him," whispered the clerk. "Yes," answered the noble magistrate, "an example, certainly, an example must be made of Giles Conybeare." “For the sake of the public," whispered the clerk. "For the sake of the public," his lordship repeated. The wretched Giles began to blubber. He could not deny that he had been taken red-handed, with one pocket full of hares and the other full of springes; but he pleaded his grandmother bedridden with the "rheumatiz," his own want of employment, his large family. For Giles was a philoprogenitive poacher, and had no less than eleven children. "It makes his offence worse," murmured the clerk sotto voce. "All this only aggravates your offence, prisoner," said his lordship aloud; and he went on to tell the captive that he ought to be hanged, that he ought to be transported; that he was a disgrace to the village, to the estate, to the country, and so forth. Wurzel, the steward, inclined his head towards the bench, and delivered a pitiable character of Giles from behind his hand. The prisoner could only continue to blubber, to wring his handcuffed hands, and to talk about his bedridden grandmother and his eleven children. "This must be put a stop to," continued his lordship, glancing with benign severity at the culprit. "I'll-no, I won't. How many children did he say he had? Eleven! Ah, dear me! And his grandmother bedridden, too. And no work. Ah! poor fellow. I-I'll give him a pig. Wurzel, give him a pig," quoth Lord Chalkstonehengist, throwing himself back in his arm-chair. You may understand from this that his lordship was not unlikely to be a somewhat indulgent parent. “And what answer did you return to this lovelorn swain?" said Miss Salusbury, breaking a somewhat irksome silence which had ensued. "I told him," Magdalen replied, "that I should feel it my duty to acquaint my brother-I mean Ernest with his conduct, if he presumed to repeat it." "Well, that wasn't very encouraging; but it's an answer that may cut both ways. Appeals to one's brother may mean any thing. Don't you remember the story of the young lady in Australia-I should like to go to Australia-who wrote just this in a book, and left it, quite by VOL. II. |