they turned out the best of women, the healthiest and strongest, the most
sought after. Now they learn a great deal about Timbuctoo, and will soon,
no doubt, about Cyprus; but the 'servant from the country' is no more.
Nothing less will suit them to begin with than the service of the parish
clergyman, then they aspire to the Grange, get there, and receive a
finishing education, and can never afterwards condescend to go where a
footman is not kept. They become, in short, fine ladies, whose fathers are
still at the plough--ladies who at home have been glad of bread and bacon,
and now cannot possibly survive without hot butcher's meat every day, and
game and fish in their seasons.

But to return. Mrs. ---- and her daughter have also their saddle horses.
They do not often hunt, but frequently go to the meet. They have, it is
true, an acceptable excuse for preferring riding to walking--the fashion
of tying the dress back so tightly makes it extremely difficult for a lady
to get over a country stile. The rigours of winter only enable them to
appear even yet more charming in furs and sealskin. In all this the Grange
people have not laid themselves open to any reproach as to the
extravagance or pretension of their doings. With them it is genuine, real,
unaffected: in brief, they have money, and have a right to what it can
purchase.

Mr. ---- is not a tenant farmer from necessity; personally he is not a
farmer at all, and knows no more of shorthorns than the veriest 'City'
man. He has a certain taste for country life, and this is his way of
enjoying it--and a very acute way, too, when you come to analyse it. The
major portion of his capital is, with his wife's, in the 'firm'; it is
administered and employed for him by men whose family interests and his
are identical, whose knowledge of business is profound, whose own capital
is there too. It is a fortunate state of things, not brought about in a