estate; but a school of the kind we should call 'industrial', where
girls are taught to sew beautifully, to be capital housemaids, and
pretty fair cooks, and, above all, to dress neatly in a kind of charity
uniform devised by the ladies of Cumnor Towers;--white caps, white
tippets, check aprons, blue gowns, and ready curtseys, and 'please,
ma'ams', being _de rigueur_.

Now, as the countess was absent from the Towers for a considerable part
of the year, she was glad to enlist the sympathy of the Hollingford
ladies in this school, with a view to obtaining their aid as visitors
during the many months that she and her daughters were away. And the
various unoccupied gentlewomen of the town responded to the call of
their liege lady, and gave her their service as required; and along
with it, a great deal of whispered and fussy admiration. 'How good of
the countess! So like the dear countess--always thinking of others!'
and so on; while it was always supposed that no strangers had seen
Hollingford properly, unless they had been taken to the countess's
school, and been duly impressed by the neat little pupils, and the
still neater needlework there to be inspected. In return, there was a
day of honour set apart every summer, when with much gracious and
stately hospitality, Lady Cumnor and her daughters received all the
school visitors at the Towers, the great family mansion standing in
aristocratic seclusion in the centre of the large park, of which one of
the lodges was close to the little town. The order of this annual
festivity was this. About ten o'clock one of the Towers' carriages
rolled through the lodge, and drove to different houses, wherein dwelt
a woman to be honoured; picking them up by ones or twos, till the
loaded carriage drove back again through the ready portals, bowled
along the smooth tree-shaded road, and deposited its covey of smartly-
dressed ladies on the great flight of steps leading to the ponderous