The Asquiths, though they were so poor, got on very pleasantly at first. Mary had forty-five pounds a year from her thousand, and thought herself a millionaire; and Uncle Hugh gave the curate twenty pounds more in lieu of the lodgings, which were not adapted for a married man. With this twenty pounds they got a very pretty cottage--a little house which Mr. Prescott said was good enough for anybody; where, indeed, the widow of the last rector had lived till her death; and which had a pleasant garden, and was far above the pretensions of people possessing an income which even with these additions only came to a hundred and sixty-five pounds a year. The house was furnished for them, almost entirely by their kind friends--a very large contribution coming from the Hall, where there were many rooms that were never used, and even in the lumber-room many articles that were good to fill up. In this way the new married pair acquired some things that were very good and charming, and some things that were much the reverse. They got some Chippendale chairs, and an old cabinet which was in point of taste enough to make the fortune of any house; but they also got a number of things manufactured in the first half of the present century, of which the least said the better. They did not themselves much mind, and probably, being uninstructed, preferred the style of George IV. to that of Queen Anne. And thus they lived very happily for two or three years. They lived very happy ever after, might indeed have been said of them, as if they had made love and married in a fairy tale. No words could have described their condition better. Mary, delivered from the small talk of the Horton drawing-room, and living in constant companionship with a man of education, whose tastes were more cultivated and developed than those of the race of squires, which was all she had hitherto known, brightened in intelligence as well as in happiness, and with the quick receptivity of her age grew into, without labour, that atmosphere of culture and understanding which is the _fine fleur_ of education. She did not actually know much more, perhaps, than she had known in her former condition; but she began to understand all kinds of allusions, and to know what people meant when they quoted the poets, or referred to those great characters in fiction who are the most living people under the sun. She no longer required to have things explained to her of this kind. And as for the curate, it was astonishing how he brightened and softened, and became reconciled to the facts of existence; and found beauty and sweetness in those common paths which he had been disposed to look upon with hasty contempt. No two people in the world, perhaps, can live so much together, share everything so entirely, become one another, so to speak, in so complete a way as a country clergyman and his wife. Except the writing of his sermons, there was no part of his work into which Mr.