esome smooth complexion, brown eyes, and hair in great shining
rolls under their bonnet caps, much the same pleasant expression, and
the same neat little feet in crossed sandalled shoes and white stockings
showing out beneath their white tambour-worked gowns.

With the above verdict, the lawyer made his parting bow, and drove off
along a somewhat rough road through two pasture fields. The first gate,
white and ornamental, was held open for him by an old man in a short
white smock and long leathern gaiters, the second his own servant
opened, the third was held by half a dozen shock-headed children, with
their backs against it and hands held out, but in vain; he only smacked
his driving-whip over their heads, and though he did not strike any of
them, they requited it with a prolonged yell, which reached the ears of
the trio in front of the house.

"I'm afraid it is not far from the truth," said the green lady.

"Oh no; I am sure he is a horrid man," said her blue sister. "I would
not believe him for a moment."

"Only with a qualification," rejoined the gentleman.

"But, Edmund, couldn't you be sure that it is just what he would say,
whatever the people were?"

"I am equally sure that the exaction of rents is not the way to see
people at their best."

"Come in, come in! We have all our settling in to do, and no time for
you two to fight."

Edmund, Mary, Dorothea, and Sophia Carbonel were second cousins, who had
always known one another in the house of the girls' father, a clergyman
in a large country town. Edmund had been in the army just in time for
the final battles of the Peninsular war, and had since served with the
army of occupation and in Canada. He had always meant that Mary should
be his wife, but the means were wanting to set up housekeeping, until
the death of an old uncle of his mother's made him heir to Greenhow
Farm, an estate bringing in about 500 pounds a year. Mary and her next
sister Dora had in the meantime lost their parents, and had been living
with some relations in London, where their much younger sister Sophy was
at school, until Edmund, coming home, looked over the farm, decided that
it would be a fit home for the sisters, and retired from the army
forthwith. Thus then, after a brief tour among the Lakes, they had
taken up Dora in London, and here they were; Sophy was to join them when
the holidays began. Disorder reigned indeed within, and hammers
resounded, nor was the passage ea