He could have turned his step-mother and her family adrift on the world; but, instead of doing so, he adopted his brothers and sisters and his father’s widow, who, three years after old Squire Dudley’s death, made a second very poor investment of her good looks, and married, greatly to Arthur’s chagrin, a Doctor Marsden, possessed of a very small practice in one of the London suburbs. This gentleman fancied Mrs. Dudley would make him a good managing wife, and was also under the delusion that her family—people known and respected within sound of Bow bells—might prove useful to him and advance his prospects. Those were the days in which the young Squire was spending much time at Copt Hall, wooing his heiress. Those were the days in which he thought “The Hollow” might be converted into a great place; in which he looked at life through rose-tinted glass; in which he believed he could afford to be both proud and generous—for all of which reasons, and also because he did not choose that his father’s children should be beholden for anything to a “trumpery apothecary,” he took upon himself the burden of feeding, boarding, and educating five sturdy and rebellious juvenile Dudleys. For this act of liberality, society generally patted him on the back, and said he was a fine fellow. Had he turned the children of his father’s second marriage out of the gates of Berrie Down Hollow, society, on the other hand, would have remembered that _he_ had got the property, while the younger children were left penniless, and rated him for his inhumanity accordingly; but, as matters stood, everyone in the first blush of the affair forgot this fact, and pronounced Arthur to be the most generous fellow in the universe. And so, theoretically, perhaps he was; just one of those men who will give an old horse the run of his paddock, but refuse to pay five shillings a week for his run in the paddock of any other person. Nevertheless, he shared with his brothers and sisters the produce of his fields, the fat of his pastures, and for two years more they roamed wild about Berrie Down—a troop of hardy young colts, unbroken, untrained, uneducated, uncared-for. The most enthusiastic American could have desired no more complete democracy than the household at “The Hollow,” where, as is usual in all democracies, the classes governed in other communities, were rulers of the place. At their own sweet wills, the servants went and came; by fits and starts the labourers hedged and ditched, and ploughed and sowed. When it pleased them to do so, the younger Dudleys assembled at the presumed meal hours; when the fancy took them to do otherwise, they carried their luncheon and dinner away to remote parts of the farm, or feasted in kitchen and dairy on their return.