courser, over the fathomless depths of the sea, while the mind that
controls her motions again assumes his reverie on the quarter-deck.





CHAPTER IV.

BRAMBLE PARK.




CHANGING the field of our story from the blue waves to that of land, we
must ask the reader to go back with us for a period of years from that
wherein our story has opened, to the fertile country and
highly-cultivated lands in the neighborhood of Manchester, England. Sir
Robert Bramble's estate was some eight miles from the large
manufacturing town just named, and embraced within its grounds some of
the most delightfully situated spots within a day's ride in any
direction. Parks, gardens, ponds, groves, stables and fine animals; in
short, every accompaniment to a fine English estate. Sir Robert was a
man of not much force of character, had inherited his estates, and had
partly exhausted his income so far as to render a degree of economy
imperatively necessary, a fact which was not calculated to render any
more amiable a naturally irritable disposition.

The family at Bramble Park, as the estate was called, consisted of Sir
Robert and his lady, a weak-minded, but once beautiful woman, and two