For be it known, Lady Inskip was a campaigner--one, too, who had fought many a fray on many a field, from the era of her first battle when she had, with an equally adept old mother for an ally, striven for a husband and a title, and an establishment in life, and had won the three combined in the person of her departed spouse, the late Sir John O'Gaunt Inskip, Bart.--down to her last little skirmish in Mayfair, where she had attempted to float off her two remaining daughters--her eldest she had gotten rid of handsomely some time before. She had then and there been routed disastrously, before she could draw up her forces for a regular pitched battle; but it was not her fault, or from lack of perseverance or want of judgment on her part, as she had been unable to fix upon any special young or old gentleman--it did not matter which-- whom she deemed or doomed as eligible for her matrimonial projects. She was not daunted, however: not she! She was too old and experienced a campaigner for that, and had regularly changed her front mapped out her _carte du pays_, and planned out an entirely new disposition of her forces before coming down to Bigton. She contemplated a bold stroke, somewhat like Napoleon's procedure at Austerlitz, or, better still, his invasion of Egypt; and had determined to follow the tactics of other experienced commanders, and "carry the war into Africa." It was not a very colossal adversary against whom she schemed and plotted, and collected such munitions of war--it was only Tom Hartshorne--poor Tom, whom she had met in London, and who seemed inclined for a mild flirtation with her pensive Laura, and lively, not to say "larky," Carry--especially at the last Woolwich Artillery ball, when his attentions had been "really quite marked!" That unfortunate young officer having sauntered through a quadrille with Laura, and told the exuberant Carry, after a waltz, that she was "a stunner to go." He certainly, however, criminated himself to some extent, by calling the next day at their house in town, and playing pretty to, and chaffing both girls. Mr Thomas Hartshorne she had found out--strange what wonderful perspicacity and knowledge of the means, standing, and expectations of wooers and would-be sons-in-law, mothers with marriageable daughters have!--was in a very good position, and was the presumptive heir to the present proprietress of The Poplars. She had made up her mind, therefore, to secure him at all hazards for one of her "dear, darling, girls." He was, consequently, the object of her present visit to Bigton. Tom was the game marked down _in esse_, although goodness knows, with the hopeful ground of a watering place to work upon, and its heterogeneous crowds of visitors, and its romantic opportunities, who and how many, without agitating Mormonism, might not be the victims _in posse_!