This was no unusual instance of the influence of the great landowners
over humbler neighbours in those days before railways, and it was well
for a place where the powerful family, who thus overshadowed it, were
of so respectable a character as the Cumnors. They expected to be
submitted to, and obeyed; the simple worship of the townspeople was
accepted by the earl and countess as a right; and they would have stood
still in amazement, and with a horrid memory of the French sansculottes
who were the bugbears of their youth, had any inhabitant of Hollingford
ventured to set his will or opinions in opposition to those of the
earl. But, yielded all that obeisance, they did a good deal for the
town, and were generally condescending, and often thoughtful and kind
in their treatment of their vassals. Lord Cumnor was a forbearing
landlord; putting his steward a little on one side sometimes, and
taking the reins into his own hands now and then, much to the annoyance
of the agent, who was, in fact, too rich and independent to care
greatly for preserving a post where his decisions might any day be
overturned by my lord's taking a fancy to go 'pottering' (as the agent
irreverently expressed it in the sanctuary of his own home), which,
being interpreted, meant that occasionally the earl asked his own
questions of his own tenants, and used his own eyes and ears in the
management of the smaller details of his property. But his tenants
liked my lord all the better for this habit of his. Lord Cumnor had
certainly a little time for gossip, which he contrived to combine with
the failing of personal intervention between the old land-steward and
the tenantry. But, then, the countess made up by her unapproachable
dignity for this weakness of the earl's. Once a year she was
condescending. She and the ladies, her daughters, had set up a school;
not a school after the manner of schools now-a-days, where far better
intellectual teaching is given to the boys and girls of labourers and
workpeople than often falls to the lot of their betters in worldly