She had a quick way of speaking, running her words and sentences into one another, so that they resembled one of those compound, Dutch jaw-breaking words that occupy several lines in extent, and almost fill up a paragraph. Her temper was not a sweet one. It might suit "namby pamby," milk-and-water, bread-and-butter girls--"hussies," she would have called them--to mince their words and moderate their utterances; but she, "thank God, was none of those!" She said what she meant, sharp and straight to the point, and did not care what any one thought about it. Her voice, mode of speech, and general manner, resembled the barking of a wiry little Scotch terrier, and terrified most with whom she had any dealings. "Good Lord!" as old Doctor Jolly, the most hearty, jovial, loud and cheery-voiced of country surgeons--the only visitor who had entrance within her gates, and who used at fixed intervals to beard the lioness in her den--used to say; "but she has a temper. I would not be her husband, or her son, or her daughter for something! God bless my soul! sir, but she could hold a candle to the devil himself." And so she could, and hold her own, too! Old Roger Hartshorne--the "squire"--had married her late in life some twenty-five years ago, and brought her home to the Poplars in all state and ceremony as befitted the lady of so great a landowner. The old squire was a very good-natured, liberal sort of man, whose only amusement was in following the harriers--there were no hounds and scarlet-coated foxhunters in those parts--and he was generally liked throughout the county, for he kept a sort of open house, and was hail-fellow-well-met with everyone; but when he married--and no one knew where he picked up his wife, people said that _she_ married him--all this was changed. A new _regime_ was instituted, and the sporting breakfasts, and hunting dinners, and open-house festivities at the Poplars became as a thing of the past. Mrs Hartshorne said she would not have any such "scandalous goings on" in her house: she wasn't going to be "eaten out of house and home." Every expense of the _menage_ was cut down. Instead of some seven or eight grooms and gardeners and domestic servants, only three were retained--an old woman to mind the house, an old butler, whom the squire insisted on keeping, and a groom and gardener, who combined both situations in one. When the children came--a girl and a boy--the squire thought things would be altered; but they were not. Mrs Hartshorne said they must save, and pinch and pinch more now for them--although goodness knows the estate was rich enough; and shortly after the birth of Tom, the old squire died, worn out it was said by the temper and treatment of his wife. It was, perhaps, a happy release to Roger of that Ilk, for the poor old gentleman had been sadly changed since his marriage, and used to look a piteous spectacle when he took his solitary rides around the village lanes on his old cob, the