rosewood inlaid with brass, which had been a wedding-present, and was a
costly thing originally, but in that peculiar taste which is vulgarly
called "Brummagem," stood at hand: the brass had started in several
places, and occasionally made great havoc in the children's fingers and
in Mrs. Leslie's gown; in fact it was the liveliest piece of furniture in
the house, thanks to the petulant brasswork, and could not have been more
mischievous if it had been a monkey. Upon the work-table lay a housewife
and thimble, and scissors, and skeins of worsted and thread, and little
scraps of linen and cloth for patches. But Mrs. Leslie was not actually
working,--she was preparing to work; she had been preparing to work for
the last hour and a half. Upon her lap she supported a novel, by a lady
who wrote much for a former generation, under the name of "Mrs. Bridget
Blue Mantle." She had a small needle in her left hand, and a very thick
piece of thread in her right; occasionally she applied the end of the
said thread to her lips, and then--her eyes fixed on the novel--made a
blind, vacillating attack at the eye of the needle. But a camel would
have gone through it with quite as much ease. Nor did the novel alone
engage Mrs. Leslie's attention, for ever and anon she interrupted herself
to scold the children, to inquire "what o'clock it was;" to observe that
"Sarah would never suit;" and to wonder "why Mr. Leslie would not see
that the work-table was mended." Mrs. Leslie has been rather a pretty
woman. In spite of a dress at once slatternly and economical, she has
still the air of a lady,--rather too much so, the hard duties of her
situation considered. She is proud of the antiquity of her family on
both sides; her mother was of the venerable stock of the Daudlers of
Daudle Place, a race that existed before the Conquest. Indeed, one has
only to read our earliest chronicles, and to glance over some of those
long-winded moralizing poems which delighted the thanes and ealdermen of
old, in order to see that the Daudles must have been a very influential
family before William the First turned the country topsy-turvy. While