(improvements which, as the squire, who preferred productive labour,
justly complained, "would never finish") for little timely jobs of work
to some veteran grandsire, who still liked to earn a penny, or some ruddy
urchin in a family that "came too fast." Nor was Frank, as he walked a
little behind, in the whitest of trousers and the stiffest of
neckcloths,--with a look of suppressed roguery in his bright hazel eye,
that contrasted his assumed stateliness of mien,--without his portion of
the silent blessing. Not that he had done anything yet to deserve it;
but we all give youth so large a credit in the future. As for Miss
Jemima, her trifling foibles only rose from too soft and feminine a
susceptibility, too ivy-like a yearning for some masculine oak whereon to
entwine her tendrils; and so little confined to self was the natural
lovingness of her disposition, that she had helped many a village lass to
find a husband, by the bribe of a marriage gift from her own privy purse;
notwithstanding the assurances with which she accompanied the marriage
gift,--namely, that "the bridegroom would turn out like the rest of his
ungrateful sex; but that it was a comfort to think that it would be all
one in the approaching crash!" So that she had her warm partisans,
especially amongst the young; while the slim captain, on whose arm she
rested her forefinger, was at least a civil-spoken gentleman, who had
never done any harm, and who would doubtless do a deal of good if he
belonged to the parish. Nay, even the fat footman who came last, with
the family Prayer-book, had his due share in the general association of
neighbourly kindness between hall and hamlet. Few were there present to
whom he had not extended the right-hand of fellowship with a full horn of
October in the clasp of it; and he was a Hazeldean man, too, born and
bred, as two-thirds of the squire's household (now letting themselves out
from their large pew under the gallery) were.

On his part, too, you could see that the squire "was moved withal," and a