My parents were stricken with grief, and Marie, with the soul of a heroine, started with Palachka and the faithful Savéliitch for St. Petersburg. She heard that the Court was at the summer palace of Tzarskoïé-Selo; and, with the assistance of the wife of a tradesman who served the Empress, gained access to the Palace gardens. Here she met a very agreeable lady, to whom she told her story, mentioning how I suffered because I would not even divulge her own name to exculpate myself. This lady listened attentively, and then promised to take care that the petition on my behalf should be presented to the Empress. A few hours afterwards, Marie was summoned before the Empress herself, in whom she recognised the lady she had met in the garden, and I received my pardon; the Empress being convinced that I was innocent. Shortly afterwards, we were married.[C] [C] This story forms the substance of the most popular prose fiction of the Russian poet Pouschkin, who died in eighteen hundred and thirty-nine. He was historiographer to the Emperor Nicholas. P.N.C.C. The thing which drove me from my late purchase of Longfield Hall in Cumberland--after nine months’ trial,--back to town, has been a dead secret, until this present writing. My friends have found a mine of reasons to explain the circumstance: either the county families refused to visit us; or our income was not more than enough to maintain our lodge-keeper; or my eldest daughter had made love to the surgeon’s young man at Nettleton; or I could not get on without my billiards and my five to two at whist; or I had been horse-whipped by Lord Wapshaw for riding over his hounds. There was more behind the curtain than people thought; and a thousand other good-natured explanations. The actual facts are these: We arrived in Cumberland at the close of last autumn, and were as happy for some months as the days were long--and the days were very long indeed; everybody was kind and hospitable to us, and, on our parts, my port became a proverb and my daughters a toast. It was “Blathers, come and take pot-luck,” from almost any neighbour I fell in with on my walks; or, “Mr. Blathers, we see nothing of your good wife and family,” from the archdeacon’s lady, though we had been dining at the Cloisters three times within the fortnight; or “Lord and Lady Wapshaw have the----” but, no; the forms of familiarity, through which the high nobility communicate with their intimates, should not be lightly quoted. In a word, then, I was a popular man and “an accession to the county.”