A pretty sight it was to see the fair mistress of Castlewood, her little daughter at her knee, and her domestics gathered around her, reading the Morning Prayer of the English Church. Esmond long remembered how she looked and spoke, kneeling reverently before the sacred book, the sun shining upon her golden hair until it made a halo round about her, a dozen of the servants of the house kneeling in a line opposite their mistress. For a while Harry Esmond as a good papist kept apart from these mysteries, but Dr. Tusher, showing him that the prayers read were those of the Church of all ages, he came presently to kneel down with the rest of the household in the parlour; and before a couple of years my lady had made a thorough convert. Indeed, the boy loved her so much that he would have subscribed to anything she bade him at that time, and the happiest period of all his life was this: when the young mother, with her daughter and son, and the orphan lad whom she protected, read and worked and played, and were children together. But as Esmond grew, and observed for himself, he found much to read and think of outside that fond circle of kinsfolk. He read more books than they cared to study with him; was alone in the midst of them many a time, and passed nights over labours, useless perhaps, but in which they could not join him. His dear mistress divined his thoughts with her usual jealous watchfulness of affection; began to forebode a time when he would escape from his home nest; and at his eager protestations to the contrary, would only sigh and shake her head, knowing that some day her predictions would come true. Meanwhile evil fortune came upon the inmates of Castlewood Hall; brought thither by no other than Harry himself. In those early days, before Lady Mary Wortley Montague brought home the custom of inoculation from Turkey, smallpox was considered, as indeed it was, the most dreadful scourge of the world. The pestilence would enter a village and destroy half its inhabitants. At its approach not only the beautiful, but the strongest were alarmed, and those fled who could. One day in the year 1694 Dr. Tusher ran into Castlewood House with a face of consternation, saying that the malady had made its appearance in the village, that a child at the Inn was down with the smallpox. Now there was a pretty girl at this Inn, Nancy Sievewright, the blacksmith's daughter, a bouncing, fresh-looking lass, with whom Harry Esmond in his walks and rambles often happened to fall in; or, failing to meet her, he would discover some errand to be done at the blacksmith's, or would go to the Inn to find her.