sold the produce at Southampton, found
the Ribbons eating peaches on a sunshiny morning at the south-wall, and
had his ears boxed when he remonstrated about this attack on his
property. He and his Scotch wife and his Scotch children, the only
respectable inhabitants of Queen's Crawley, were forced to migrate,
with their goods and their chattels, and left the stately comfortable
gardens to go to waste, and the flower-beds to run to seed. Poor Lady
Crawley's rose-garden became the dreariest wilderness. Only two or
three domestics shuddered in the bleak old servants' hall. The stables
and offices were vacant, and shut up, and half ruined. Sir Pitt lived
in private, and boozed nightly with Horrocks, his butler or house-steward
(as he now began to be called), and the abandoned Ribbons. The
times were very much changed since the period when she drove to Mudbury
in the spring-cart and called the small tradesmen "Sir." It may have
been shame, or it may have been dislike of his neighbours, but the old
Cynic of Queen's Crawley hardly issued from his park-gates at all now.
He quarrelled with his agents and screwed his tenants by letter. His
days were passed in conducting his own correspondence; the lawyers and
farm-bailiffs who had to do business with him could not reach him but
through the Ribbons, who received them at the door of the housekeeper's
room, which commanded the back entrance by which they were admitted;
and so the Baronet's daily perplexities increased, and his
embarrassments multiplied round him.

The horror of Pitt Crawley may be imagined, as these reports of his
father's dotage reached the most exemplary and correct of gentlemen. He
trembled daily lest he should hear that the Ribbons was proclaimed his
second legal mother-in-law. After that first and last visit, his
father's name was never mentioned in Pitt's polite and genteel
establishment. It was the skeleton in his house, and all the family
walked by it in terror and silence. The Countess Southdown kept on
dropping per coach at the lodge-gate the most exciting tracts, tracts
which ought to frighten the hair off your head. Mrs. Bute at the
parsonage nightly looked out to see if the sky was red over the elms
behind which the Hall stood, and the mansion was on fire. Sir G.
Wapshot and Sir H. Fuddlestone, old friends of the house, wouldn't sit
on the bench with Sir Pitt at Quarter Sessions, and cut him dead in the
High Street of Southampton, where the