he snowy flowers of the hawthorn and the wild cherry, the thin wreath
of smoke curling from the tall, old-fashioned chimneys of the pretty
irregular building, with its porch, and its baywindows, and gable-ends
full of light and shadow,--in that month of beauty it would be difficult
to imagine a more beautiful or a more English landscape.

On the other side of the narrow winding road, parted from Mrs. Deborah's
demesne by a long low bridge of many arches, stood a little rustic mill,
and its small low-browed cottage, with its own varied back-ground of
garden and fruit trees and thickly wooded meadows, extending in long
perspective, a smiling verdant valley of many miles.

Now Chalcott mill, reckoned by everybody else the prettiest point in her
prospect, was to Mrs. Deborah not merely an eye-sore, but a heart-sore,
not on its own account; cantankerous as she was, she had no quarrel with
the innocent buildings, but for the sake of its inhabitants.

Honest John Stokes, the miller, was her cousin-german. People did say
that some forty years before there had been question of a marriage
between the parlies; and really they both denied the thing with so much
vehemence and fury, that one should almost be tempted to believe there
was some truth in the report. Certain it is, that if they had been that
wretched thing a mismatched couple, and had gone on snarling together
all their lives, they could not have hated each other more zealously.
One shall not often meet with anything so perfect in its way as that
aversion. It was none of your silent hatreds that never come to words;
nor of your civil hatreds, that veil themselves under smooth phrases
and smiling looks. Their ill-will was frank, open, and above-board. They
could not afford to come to an absolute breach, because it would have
deprived them of the pleasure of quarrelling; and in spite of the
frequent complaints they were wont to make of their near neighbourhood,
I am convinced that they derived no small gratification from the
opportunities which it afforded them of saying disagreeable things to
each other.

And yet Mr. John Stokes was a well-meaning man, and Mrs. Deborah Thornby
was not an ill-meaning woman. But she was, as I have said before, cross
in the grain; and he--why he was one of those plain-dealing personages
who will speak their whole mind, and who pique themselves upon that sort
of sincerity which is comprised in telling to another all the ill
that they have e