The care of their bereaved and hapless parent occupied, it is true, the greater portion of their time, yet they found many leisure hours to devote to visiting the poor, aiding the wants of the needy, consoling the sorrows of those who mourned, and sympathizing with the pleasures of the happy among their humble neighbors. To them this might be truly termed a work of love and pleasure, for it is questionable whether from any other source the lovely girls derived a higher or more satisfactory enjoyment, than from their tours of charity among their village pensioners. Next in the scale of happiness stood, doubtless, the society of the old vicar of that pastoral parish, a man who had been their father’s friend and counsellor in those young days of college friendship, when the fresh heart is uppermost in all, and selfishness a dormant passion; a man old enough almost to have been their grandsire, but with a heart as young and cheery as a boy’s—an intellect accomplished in the deepest lore of the schools, both classical and scientific, and skilled thoroughly in all the niceties and graces of French, and Spanish, and Italian literature. A man who had known courts, and camps too, for a short space in his youth; who had seen much, and suffered much, and yet enjoyed not a little, in his acquaintance with the world; and who, from sights, and sufferings, and enjoyments, had learned that if there is much evil, there is yet more of good even in _this_ world—had learned, while rigid to his own, to be most lenient to his neighbor’s failings—had learned that charity should be the fruit of wisdom!—and had learned all this only to practise it in all his daily walks, to inculcate it in all his weekly lessons. This aged man, and his scarce less aged wife, living scarcely a stone’s throw from the Hall, had grown almost to think themselves a portion of the family; and surely no blood kindred could have created stronger ties of kindness than had the familiarity of long acquaintance, the confidence of old hereditary love. Lower yet in the round of their enjoyments, but still a constant source of blameless satisfaction, were their books, their music, their drawings, the management of their household, the cultivation of their lovely garden, the ministering to the wants of their loved birds and flowers. Thus, all sequestered and secluded from the world, placed in the midst of onerous duties and solicitudes almost innumerable, though they had never danced at a ball, nor blushed at the praises of their own beauty flowing from eloquent lips, nor listened to a lover’s suit, queens might have envied the felicity, the calm, pure, peaceful happiness of Annabel and Marian.