and water in his own
proper person. Half-fisherman, half-farmer, he ploughed the seas with
his keel, when upon land his coulter was out of use. He was nigh
sixty, and had long settled down into that quiet nap-like sort of
existence, when the passions are lulled, scarcely visible, as they
creep over the stagnant current of life. He was hale and hard
featured; the lines on his visage betokening, if need were, a stern,
decisive, and obstinate bent in his disposition, that might have
issued in deeds of high and noble daring had its possessor been thrown
into circumstances favourable to the display. As matters stood, George
was master of his own household. Here none questioned his authority;
no profane, irreverent approach ever awakening the dormant energies of
his character, or thwarting the current, visible only by opposition.

His wife was a round, brown, heavy-cheeked, dark-eyed dame, with a cap
white as the whitest goose of the flock that marched every morning
from her barn-doors to the common, where, by some little pool, a
scanty and close-bitten herbage formed their daily subsistence. She
wore a striped apron; the blue lines would have vied with the best
Wigan check for breadth and distinctness. Her good-humoured mouth,
reverse from her husband's, was usually puckered up at the corners
into an expression of kindness, benignity, and mirth--the contrast
greatly aided by proximity; for though George Grimes was benevolent
and kind-hearted at the bottom, yet he was by no means apt to let
these gentler feelings rise to the surface.

An only daughter was now passing within the precincts of womanhood.
Her complexion, red, and--not white, reader--but of that rich,
healthy, and wholesome tinge, perfect as an example of the real
English brunette. Her face exhibited a beautiful modification of her
father's hard and determined expression, blended with her mother's
gentleness and placidity. A smile of thrilling sweetness would
sometimes pass upon her calm and thoughtful countenance, always
beautiful--if such a term can be allowed in speaking of a brown, rosy,
plump, and well-conditioned girl, of good stature, whose form had not
been squeezed into shape, nor her linsey woolsey flourished into
flounce and farthingale. Her hair hung in bright clusters on her brow;
fresh from Nature's toilet, their wild untutored elegance was singular
and bewitching. Indeed, Katherine, or "Kattern," as she was more
generally called, was the cynosure