lived for twelve long years without the occurrence of any event so
great as that which was now impending. Poor child! it is true that she
had lost her mother, which was a jar to the whole tenour of her life;
but that was hardly an event in the sense referred to; and besides, she
had been too young to be conscious of it at the time. The pleasure she
was looking forward to to-day was her first share in a kind of annual
festival in Hollingford.

The little straggling town faded away into country on one side close to
the entrance-lodge of a great park, where lived my Lord and Lady Cumnor
'the earl' and 'the countess', as they were always called by the
inhabitants of the town; where a very pretty amount of feudal feeling
still lingered, and showed itself in a number of simple ways, droll
enough to look back upon, but serious matters of importance at the
time. It was before the passing of the Reform Bill, but a good deal of
liberal talk took place occasionally between two or three of the more
enlightened freeholders living in Hollingford; and there was a great
Tory family in the county who, from time to time, came forward and
contested the election with the rival Whig family of Cumnor. One would
have thought that the above-mentioned liberal-talking inhabitants would
have, at least, admitted the possibility of their voting for the Hely-
Harrison, and thus trying to vindicate their independence But no such
thing. 'The earl' was lord of the manor, and owner of much of the land
on which Hollingford was built; he and his household were fed, and
doctored, and, to a certain measure, clothed by the good people of the
town; their fathers' grandfathers had always voted for the eldest son
of Cumnor Towers, and following in the ancestral track every man-jack
in the place gave his vote to the liege lord, totally irrespective of
such chimeras as political opinion.