ere dwelt the unknown friend whose voice we seem to hear
at last, and whose face we seem to recognise, her bright eyes and brown
curly hair, her quick and graceful figure. One can picture the children
who are playing at the door of the old parsonage, and calling for Aunt
Jane. One can imagine her pretty ways with them, her sympathy for the
active, their games and imaginations. There is Cassandra. She is older
than her sister, more critical, more beautiful, more reserved. There is
the mother of the family, with her keen wit and clear mind; the handsome
father--'the handsome proctor,' as he was called; the five brothers,
driving up the lane. Tranquil summer passes by, the winter days go by;
the young lady still sits writing at the old mahogany desk, and smiling,
perhaps, at her own fancies, and hiding them away with her papers at the
sound of coming steps. Now, the modest papers, printed and reprinted,
lie in every hand, the fancies disport themselves at their will in the
wisest brains and the most foolish.

It must have been at Steventon--Jane Austen's earliest home--that Mr.
Collins first made his appearance (Lady Catherine not objecting, as we
know, to his occasional absence on a Sunday, provided another clergyman
was engaged to do the duty of the day), and here, conversing with Miss
Jane, that he must have made many of his profoundest observations upon
human nature; remarking, among other things, that resignation is never
so perfect as when the blessing denied begins to lose somewhat of its
value in our estimation, and propounding his celebrated theory about the
usual practice of elegant females. It must have been here, too, that poor
Mrs. Bennet declared, with some justice, that once estates are entailed,
one can never tell how they will go; here, too, that Mrs. Allen's sprigged
muslin and John Thorpe's rodomontades were woven; that his gig was built,
'curricle-hung lamps, seat, trunk, sword-case, splashboard, silver
moulding, all, you see, complete. The ironwork as good as new, or
better. He asked fifty guineas.... I closed with him directly, threw
down the money, and the carriage was mine.'

'And I am sure,' said Catherine, 'I know so little of such things, that
I cannot judge whether it was cheap or dear.'

'Neither the one nor the other,' says John Thorpe.

Mrs. Palmer was also born at Steventon--that good-humoured lady in
'Sense and Sensibility,' who thinks it so ridiculous that her husband
never hears her wh