"Ay, it ben't for none of us to set ourselves up i' thatn's!" meditatively remarked old Cicely, in her turn to the teapot. "Mrs. Henrietta, there's a poor old man at the yard-door, my dear, and I can't tell where to look for Madam; maybe you'd see to him, poor soul?" Henrietta, the eldest sister, answered by quitting the room. Cicely arranged the tea-cups--large shallow cups of delicate china--on a small round table in the window. "The tea is ready, Mrs. Bell," she said; "will you please to pour it?" The decorated young lady who sat at the tapestry-frame rose languidly, and began to pour out the tea, while Cicely set four chairs round the little table; having done which, the latter calmly took one of them herself, and producing a large colored handkerchief from her pocket, carefully spread it over her black woollen dress. "Well, truly," said she, for she was in a talkative mood this evening, "there is no end to the good in a dish of tea. I am sorry I ever said what I have done against it, my dears, and I wish Madam would drink it. 'Tis so heartening like! It is a new-fangled sort of drink, there's no denying; but surely, I wonder how we ever got on without it!" "Cicely," said Henrietta, coming in, "I have told Dolly to give the poor man some meat and dry straw in the shed for to-night." "Very good, Mrs. Henrietta," answered Cicely; "I'll see as he gets it. Mrs. Bell, I'll be obliged to you of another dish of tea." There were only four tea-drinkers in this family, and, until a few months previous, there had been only three. The gentlemen despised what they considered a washy and exclusively feminine beverage, and the mistress of the house could by no means be induced to taste it. It was a new-fangled drink, she said, and new-fangled things, of whatever description, she abhorred. People never drank tea when she was a child, and why should they want it now? This was Madam Passmore's logic, and under its influence she drank no tea. Still she did not forbid her daughters' indulging in it. Young people, she allowed, were given to new-fangled things; and could be expected to be wiser only as they grew older. She was a little annoyed when the logic of the young people, adverse to her own, made a tea-convert of Cicely Aggett, who was about twenty-five years her senior; but Madam Passmore was a quiet, passive sort of woman, who never kept anger long, and was in her heart a fatalist. "What must be must be," she used to say; and many a time had she consoled herself with this comforting adage under troubles of various kinds. She said so when her son Harry went into the army; she said so when her husband broke his leg in fox-hunting; and she said so, but with tears, when her little daughter Margaret died. She had no political opinions but those of her husband, who was a fervent Whig; but deep down in her heart she was a profound Tory in all domestic matters, for she disliked change and novelty beyond everything. She never put down a