is farm that made Lord Erymanth refuse to renew the lease and turn
the family out so harshly, and with as little notice as possible.

The cruelty, as they thought it, was, Miss Woolmer said, most
ill-judged, and precipitated the very thing that was dreaded. The
youths rushed into the marriage with the daughters, and cast in their
lot with all that could overturn the existing order of things, but Miss
Woolmer did not believe they had had anything to do with the
rick-burning or machine-breaking. All that was taken out of their
hands by more brutal, ignorant demagogues. They were mere visionaries
and enthusiasts according to her, and she said the two wives were very
noble-looking, high-spirited young women. She had gone to see them
several times when their husbands were in prison, and had been much
struck with Alice, Ambrose's wife, who held up most bravely; though
Dorothy, poor thing, was prostrated, and indeed her child was born in
the height of the distress, when his father had just been tried for his
life, and sentenced to death.

It was their birth and education that caused them to be treated so
severely; besides, there was no doubt of their having harangued the
people, and stirred them up, and they were seen, as well as Prometesky,
at the fire at what had been Lewthwayte's farm; at least, so it was
declared by men who turned King's evidence, and the proof to the
contrary broke down, because it depended on the wives, whose evidence
was not admissible; indeed that--as the law then stood--was not the
question. Those who had raised the storm were responsible for all that
was done in it, and it was very barely that their lives were spared.

That was the comfort Miss Woolmer gave. No one else could see any at
all, except a few old women in the parish, who spoke tenderly of poor
Mr. Ambrose and Mr. Eustace; but then they had sons or brothers who had
been out with the rioters, and after these twenty-six years no one
remembered the outrages and terrors of the time with anything but
horror; and the coming of the wild lad from the Bush was looked on as
the end of all comfort.

I meant, as soon as I heard he was on the way, to leave Arghouse, make
visits among friends, and decide on my future home, for, alas! there
was no one who wanted me. I was quite alone in the world; my mother's
cousins were not near, and I hardly knew them; and my only relations
were the bushrangers, as Lady Diana Tracy called them.

She was si