such sublime and happy views of themselves
and their belongings, the sisters could not
fail to be reasonably amiable; apart from
a stolid obstinacy in the elder, and a craving
selfishness in the younger, they were amiable.
They were very peaceable wives in a house,
but then they ruled, and their husbands
obeyed. This was the conjugal arrangement
from the beginning—the wisest arrangement
under the circumstances.

When Cecily married Mr. Percival she was
seven and twenty; a woman without romance,
without tenderness, without geniality,
sympathy, or any of the little loveable traits
which are the vital breath of domestic life.
A man might almost as well take a stone
into his bosom as such a piece of animated
clay for a wife. Mr. Percival Monke was not
a great character, but he had enough of the
leaven of humanity in him to experience
very considerable annoyance from Cecily's
coldness. He had been rather taken by her
orderliness and system, by her care of her
father, and her pride of station, and, though
not in love, he thought she would make him
a suitable partner. He was disappointed; but
a few failures convinced him of the fruitlessness
of attempting to work any change in
her, so he betook himself to field-pursuits,
and went often from home, while she droned
on her placid, self-concentrated way, buried
alive at Hardington, neither receiving nor
paying visits when they could be avoided.

Mr. and Mrs. Cholmondeley Monke's life
was not unlike that led by Cecily and her
husband, at first; but afterwards, perhaps
under pressure of boredom, perhaps from more
vivacity of temper and less principle, Mr.
Cholmondeley broke out into certain excesses
which speedily cramped the revenues of
Frogholmes. Cecily, indignant that Eliza
had not governed her spouse better, declined
to receive either of them at Hardington, and
was as glad as her temperament permitted
her to be when they forsook the Fens and
went to live abroad.

For several years neither sister bore children;
but, at last, Eliza wrote to announce a
daughter, and in reply Cecily sent word that
three months before she had blessed
Hardington with a son and heir.

II.

THE Heir of Hardington. Lord of the
Manor of Hardington. Francis George
Percival Monke, Lord of the Manor of
Hardington.

Such was his mother's view of the
wizened, monkey-faced boy she had brought
into the world. Never "my baby," " my
poor little weakling baby," never "joy, or
love, or pet, or pride, or delight," but always
Heir of Hardington, Lord of the Manor of
Hardington, representative of so many acres
and so much money, and so many neglected
responsibilities.

Poor little Francis George Percival Monke!
How he was doctored, and iron-framed, and
mother-tutored, and private-tutored, and
padded and bolstered, and be-praised! No
baby of any sagacity but would have made
haste to die under such an ordeal, even had
it been preparatory to the inheritance of the
united kingdom of Great Britain and
Ireland. But Francis George, being a dull
boy, lived through it, and, at twelve years
old, was about as foolish, as conceited and as
helpless a lad as the race of Monke ever
produced. By that time he had out-grown the
iron frame, and could walk straight on his feeble
limbs; he could also repeat every particular
of the estate he was to inherit; tell you its
value under the old leases, and what it might
be made to produce when the said leases fell in;
and also he could exact reverence to himself
from tenant and servant as their master in
embryo. His father said he was a fool.

There was a grain of good in him, of course,
as there is in every heart, God-planted, until
the devil-sown tares of the world spring up
to choke it. He would not inflict pain,
and was sorry to see pain; he was kind to
animals; he was not ungenerous, and he
worshipped his mother. She never caressed
him— never indulged him. "You ought to
do this," "you must learn to do that,"
"such and such honour is your due and
your right" were speeches constantly on
her lips, though never accompanied with an
incitement to any high or noble rule of life.
If she had lost him she would have grieved
for him as the lost heir of Hardington—not
as her one child whose birth-pangs had
almost cost her life.

She taught him her notion of the duties of
property practically; and, as her notion was
how to get most money out of it, and how to
put the least into it, his views did not become
very liberal or extended. For him there was
a sermon in each stone of the village of
Hardington—a village not pretty by any
means, nor well-ordered, nor well-moralled,
nor well-mannered, but still quite good enough
for Mrs. Percival Monke so long as the
cottagers were punctual with their rent.

When the honest folk rhapsodise of rural
innocence and peace and comfort, they don't
picture to themselves villages of the
Hardington type. They dream of bowery dwellings
redolent of sweet flowers; of bees and
honey, and clotted cream, and dainty rashers,
and fresh eggs, and delicious cakes. They
dream of rosy-cheeked Phyllis with her
milking-pail at the style, and some handsome
swain courting her. They dream of a poet's
Utopia, or a new broom-swept hamlet, or a
dependency of a rich and generous feudal
lord; but there are many Hardingtons in
the world that cannot be made to answer to
their happy delusion at all —Hardingtons,
where fathers and mothers bring up
indiscriminate tribes of children in two-roomed
tumble-downdwellings; where they get coarse
bread, and not enough of that, the week in