either brother nor
sister, and had been brought up in my lord's family till she had
married your grandfather, who was just a curate, son to a shopkeeper in
Carlisle--but a clever, fine gentleman as ever was--and one who was a
right-down hard worker in his parish, which was very wide, and
scattered all abroad over the Westmoreland Fells. When your mother,
little Miss Rosamond, was about four or five years old, both her
parents died in a fortnight--one after the other. Ah! that was a sad
time. My pretty young mistress and me was looking for another baby,
when my master came home from one of his long rides, wet and tired, and
took the fever he died of; and then she never held up her head again,
but just lived to see her dead baby, and have it laid on her breast,
before she sighed away her life. My mistress had asked me, on her
death-bed, never to leave Miss Rosamond; but if she had never spoken a
word, I would have gone with the little child to the end of the world.

The next thing, and before we had well stilled our sobs, the executors
and guardians came to settle the affairs. They were my poor young
mistress's own cousin, Lord Furnivall, and Mr. Esthwaite, my master's
brother, a shopkeeper in Manchester; not so well to do then as he was
afterwards, and with a large family rising about him. Well! I don't
know if it were their settling, or because of a letter my mistress
wrote on her death-bed to her cousin, my lord; but somehow it was
settled that Miss Rosamond and me were to go to Furnivall Manor House,
in Northumberland, and my lord spoke as if it had been her mother's
wish that she should live with his family, and as if he had no
objections, for that one or two more or less could make no difference
in so grand a household. So, though that was not the way in which I
should have wished the coming of my bright and pretty pet to have been
looked at--who was like a sunbeam in any family, be it never so
grand--I was well pleased that all the folks in the Dale should stare
and admire, when they heard I was going to be young lady's maid at my
Lord Furnivall's at Furnivall Manor.

But I made a mistake in thinking we were to go and live where my lord
did. It turned out that the family had left Furnivall Manor House fifty
years or more. I could not hear that my poor young mistress had never
been there, though she had been brought up in the family; and I was
sorry for that, for I should have liked Miss Rosamond's youth to have
p