ever so beautiful.

In giving the details of her history, I do not know that I need go
back beyond her grandfather and grandmother, who were thoroughly
respectable people in the hardware line; I speak of those relatives
by the father's side. Her own parents had risen in the world,--had
risen from retail to wholesale, and considered themselves for a
long period of years to be good representatives of the commercial
energy and prosperity of Great Britain. But a fall had come upon
them,--as a fall does come very often to our excellent commercial
representatives--and Mr. Johnson was in the "Gazette." It would be
long to tell how old Sir Joseph Mason was concerned in these affairs,
how he acted as the principal assignee, and how ultimately he took
to his bosom as his portion of the assets of the estate, young Mary
Johnson, and made her his wife and mistress of Orley Farm. Of the
family of the Johnsons there were but three others, the father, the
mother, and a brother. The father did not survive the disgrace of his
bankruptcy, and the mother in process of time settled herself with
her son in one of the Lancashire manufacturing towns, where John
Johnson raised his head in business to some moderate altitude, Sir
Joseph having afforded much valuable assistance. There for the
present we will leave them.

I do not think that Sir Joseph ever repented of the perilous deed he
did in marrying that young wife. His home for many years had been
desolate and solitary; his children had gone from him, and did not
come to visit him very frequently in his poor home at the farm. They
had become grander people than him, had been gifted with aspiring
minds, and in every turn and twist which they took, looked to do
something towards washing themselves clean from the dirt of the
counting-house. This was specially the case with Sir Joseph's son, to
whom the father had made over lands and money sufficient to enable
him to come before the world as a country gentleman with a coat of
arms on his coach-panel. It would be inconvenient for us to run off
to Groby Park at the present moment, and I will therefore say no more
just now as to Joseph junior, but will explain that Joseph senior was
not made angry by this neglect. He was a grave, quiet, rational man,
not however devoid of some folly; as indeed what rational man is so
devoid? He was burdened with an ambition to establish a family as the
result of his success in life; and having put forth his son i