The Project Gutenberg eBook, My Lady Ludlow, by Elizabeth Gaskell

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Title: My Lady Ludlow

Author: Elizabeth Gaskell

Release Date: May 17, 2005 [eBook #2524]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MY LADY LUDLOW***

Transcribed from the 1896 Smith Elder and Co. "Lizzie Leigh and Other
Tales" edition by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

MY LADY LUDLOW
by Elizabeth Gaskell

CHAPTER I.

I am an old woman now, and things are very different to what they were in
my youth. Then we, who travelled, travelled in coaches, carrying six
inside, and making a two days' journey out of what people now go over in
a couple of hours with a whizz and a flash, and a screaming whistle,
enough to deafen one. Then letters came in but three times a week:
indeed, in some places in Scotland where I have stayed when I was a girl,
the post came in but once a month;--but letters were letters then; and we
made great prizes of them, and read them and studied them like books. Now
the post comes rattling in twice a day, bringing short jerky notes, some
without beginning or end, but just a little sharp sentence, which well-
bred folks would think too abrupt to be spoken. Well, well! they may all
be improvements,--I dare say they are; but you will never meet with a
Lady Ludlow in these days.

I will try and tell you about her. It is no story: it has, as I said,
neither beginning, middle, nor end.

My father was a poor clergyman with a large family. My mother was always
said to have good blood in her veins; and when she wanted to maintain her
position with the people she was thrown among,--principally rich
democratic manufacturers, all for liberty and the French Revolution,--she
would put on a pair of ruffles, trimmed with real old English point, very
much darned to be sure,--but which could not be bought new for love or
money, as the art of making it was lost years before. These ruffles
showed, as she said, that her ancestors had been Somebodies, when the
grandfathers of the rich folk, who now looked down upon her, had been
Nobodies,--if, indeed, they had any grandfathers at al