Mrs. Piggott had, indeed, if all accounts were to be believed, led her deceased husband such a “devil of a life,” that he was glad, after three years’ patient endurance of her temper, to skulk under ground to get rid of it; but then those days lay very far back in the woman’s life; she had been forced to struggle with the world; she had buried two children; she had “supped sorrow with the spoon of grief,” and there are some natures to whom sorrow taken in any form proves a very wholesome medicine. It had done so in Mrs. Piggott’s case; the years had softened her, tamed her spirit, subdued her temper. She would have made a very good wife to any one wanting an elderly managing woman to cook his dinner and keep his house tidy; a very good wife indeed for Ned, who had worshipped his lost and lamented Polly—a “fine woman,” large, well-developed, and handsome, whose only fault was mildly represented by Ned to have been, that her delicate health obliged her to take more gin than was always good for her. Like Mr. Piggott, Polly had long been slumbering where gin is not procurable; and thus Squire Dudley’s idea concerning a match being got up between the pair was perfectly feasible, and likely, so he thought, to meet the views of all parties interested in the matter. Mrs. Piggott was faithful and trustworthy. So also was Mr. Edward Byrne, a gentleman of Irish extraction on his father’s side—a soft, willing, hardworking fellow, full of odd sayings, and possessed of unfailing spirits, which kept him continually at high pressure, and ready at all times for anything, “from pitch-and-toss to manslaughter.” Byrne could saddle a horse, and ride it afterwards; harness one or a pair, and drive it or them likewise; he could churn and he would pump; he darned his own stockings, and he cobbled his own shoes. He was always up betimes in the morning, and could be depended on to see to the feeding of the sheep and the foddering of the cattle. To Ned was intrusted the key of the oat-bin, and he always presided over the brewing of the ale. It was he who had the mowers at work by four o’clock in the summer’s mornings, whilst the grass was still wet and heavy with dew; he who stacked the oats and went to market for Squire Dudley. And yet, Ned was not proud. Mrs. Piggott objected to young men and boys about the house, so he did not disdain cleaning the knives and polishing the boots, singing to himself all the while like a perfect nightingale, or else talking to Mrs. Piggott or the servants, and recounting to them tales of a far remote period in his life when he was “devil” in a printing-office, and had to “cut about” with proof.