“But, Loo,” said Etonian Charley, next morning, when Aunt Tansey and all her belongings had left Fontanel, and everything had fallen under the restless sway of the Miss Summerhayes, “I’m not going to put up with all this. You said we were to stand up for mamma; you mean we are only to pretend to stand up for mamma, you little humbug. Now that’s not my meaning,” said the heir of Fontanel. “I’m not going to make-believe that I think she’s done right, when I don’t. I am going to swallow cousin Tom right out,” cried the boy, not without a little flush on his face. “It’s a little awkward, to be sure, to know what to call him—but look here, Loo—I mean to stand by my mother without any humbug. I mean to think she’s done the very best for us all, and for herself too; and if she don’t think the same when she comes back, I’ll try to make her; and if you look black, as you’re looking, you are not the little brick I took you for, and I won’t have anything more to do with you, Loo.” “Oh, Charley, I am not half so good as you are,” cried the admiring little sister, looking up to him with tearful eyes. Charley’s resolution acted like a charm upon the house in general; and so, with a gradually improving temper, though much pressed and fretted by Miss Laura and Miss Lydia, the nursery and the servants’ hall, and all the dependencies of Fontanel, waited for the advent of the new master and the return of Mrs Summerhayes. AN ENGLISH VILLAGE—IN FRENCH.[1] The old pictures of village life in England will hardly suit for these modern times. The pleasant little social circle which either existed, or more often was imagined to exist, as in Miss Austen’s charming fictions, in the large well-to-do country village, is to be found there no longer. No one condescends in these days to live in the country, unless he can either do so, or affect to do so, more or less _en grand seigneur_. A change has passed over ‘Our Village,’ even since Mary Russell Mitford so admirably sketched it. The half-pay naval lieutenant or army captain (if any such survive) has retired into the back street of a cheap watering-place, not to the improvement either of his position or his happiness. The village surgeon is no longer an oracle; railways have brought “the first advice” (at any rate, in the county town) within the reach of almost all his patients; and he has either disappeared altogether, or, if he still exists as the “Union Doctor,” badly paid and little respected, he is seldom now a gentleman. Village lawyers—happily or unhappily—are become things unknown: and as for any gentleman’s family of independent but moderate means condescending to that kind of rural seclusion, it is unheard of. If there is any educated resident in any country village not fixed there by some local interest or occupation, he is apt to have something suspicious about his character or antecedents—to be a refugee from his lawful creditors, or his lawful wife, or something of that sort.