every
morning when he came to call the lads. Its windows were open all
summer round, and birds and bats used oftentimes to fly in, to the
great delight of the youthful inmates.

Another infinite pleasure to the little folk was that for the first
year, the farm-house kitchen was made our dining-room. There, through
the open door, Edwin's pigeons, Muriel's two doves, and sometimes a
stately hen, walked in and out at pleasure. Whether our live stock,
brought up in the law of kindness, were as well-trained and
well-behaved as our children, I cannot tell; but certain it is that we
never found any harm from this system, necessitated by our early
straits at Longfield--this "liberty, fraternity, and equality."

Those words, in themselves true and lovely, but wrested to false
meaning, whose fatal sound was now dying out of Europe, merged in the
equally false and fatal shout of "Gloire! gloire!" remind me of an
event which I believe was the first that broke the delicious monotony
of our new life.

It was one September morning. Mrs. Halifax, the children, and I were
down at the stream, planning a bridge across it, and a sort of stable,
where John's horse might be put up--the mother had steadily resisted
the long-tailed grey ponies. For with all the necessary improvements
at Longfield, with the large settlement that John insisted upon making
on his wife and children, before he would use in his business any
portion of her fortune, we found we were by no means so rich as to make
any great change in our way of life advisable. And, after all, the
mother's best luxuries were to see her children merry and strong, her
husband's face lightened of its care, and to know he was now placed
beyond doubt in the position he had always longed for; for was he not
this very day gone to sign the lease of Enderley Mills?

Mrs. Halifax had just looked at her watch, and she and I were
wondering, with quite a childish pleasure, whether he were not now
signing the important deed, when Guy came running to say a
coach-and-four was trying to enter the White Gate.

"Who can it be?--But they must be stopped, or they'll spoil John's new
gravel road that he takes such pride in. Uncle Phineas, would you mind
going to see?"

Who should I see, but almost the last person I expected--who had not
been beheld, hardly spoken of, in our household these ten years--Lady
Caroline Brithwood, in her travelling-habit of green cloth, her velvet
riding-hat, with i