The Leycesters of Toft, of which house Oswald Leycester was a younger son, were an offshoot of the Leycesters of Tabley, now represented by Lord de Tabley. The family held high rank among the Cheshire squirearchy, and between them and the Stanleys a friendship had long existed, the intimacy being increased by near neighbourship, for Toft, their ancestral home--a charmingly situated manor-house, where, before his removal to Stoke, Oswald Leycester resided with his widowed mother--was only a few miles distant, and a continuous intercourse was kept up between the two families. "My great delight," wrote Maria Leycester, "was to go to Alderley Park and play with the 'Miss Stanleys;' and it was a joy when, standing by the breakfast table, I heard it settled that the carriage was to be ordered to go to Alderley, and that I was to be of the party." The Leycesters could boast a lineage as ancient as that of the Stanleys, and through the Tofts, whose estates they had acquired by marriage with a heiress of that family in the reign of Richard II., were able to trace their descent from Gunnora, Duchess of Normandy, the grandmother of William the Conqueror. Edward Stanley was approaching his thirty-second year at the time of his marriage--his wife had then just passed her nineteenth birthday. But, young as she was, she had, owing to the delicate health of her mother, been taught, almost from the time of leaving school, to think and act for herself, and had had moreover the responsibility cast upon her of educating her younger sister, Maria Leycester. "Hers was a porcelain understanding," said Sydney Smith; her journal and the letters written in her earlier life give a true reflex of her mind, and justify the remark of her son that "there was a quiet wisdom, a rare usefulness, a calm discrimination, a firm decision, which made her judgment and her influence felt through the whole circle in which she lived." To the old rectory house at Alderley, Edward Stanley took his bride, and in that happy home five children were brought up. Of the every-day life in that household we get many pleasant glimpses in the journal of Maria Leycester, to which reference has already been made. She writes upon one occasion:--