(at least in his wife’s presence) that Cissy could not hold a candle to what her mother had been in her best days. That matron, though somewhat voluminous in person and too highly coloured, is by no means bad-looking even now. As she sits at the window, shaping a little child’s shirt for a poor parishioner (Mrs. Dove is a managing, bustling person—prejudiced, it may be, and deaf to argument, as what woman is not? but overflowing with the milk of human kindness), a judicious artist might tone her down into a very picturesque study of “A lady in the prime of life.” She looks up from her work, and casts her eye across the trim garden over many a mile of undulating prairie, to where a dim smoke in the far distance denotes the locality of Harborough. “Cissy,” observes the matron, “wasn’t that Papa going round to the stables?” Cissy raises those killing eyelashes from her crochet, and dutifully replies—“Yes, Mamma. He’s only going to smoke his cigar as usual. I’m glad it’s not a hunting-day: we shall have him all to ourselves till luncheon.” Miss Dove pets her papa immensely; and it is needless to remark that, although on occasion he runs rusty with his wife, his daughter can wind him round her little finger at will. “That reminds me,” continues Mrs. D., in the inconsequent manner in which ladies follow out the thread of their reflections—“that reminds me we haven’t had any visitors lately from over there,” nodding with her head in the direction of Market Harborough. Cissy looks very innocent in reply, and observes that “Gentlemen seem to make hunting the one great business of life.” Mamma, whose rest for the last five-and-twenty years has been broken every winter whenever the nights have been symptomatic of frost, and who can scarcely be expected to share the anxiety which drives the Reverend at short intervals from the connubial couch to open the window and look out, is unable to controvert so self-evident a proposition; so she tries back on their Harborough friends. “Mr. Crasher _never_ comes except on Sundays, or when there is a hard frost; and the rest of the gang I would just as soon be without, for they _will_ light their cigars in the hall—a thing I’ve quite broke your papa of doing, till the whole place smells like a public-house. But I do think that Mr. Sawbridge, or whatever his name is, might have called in common civility, if it was only to ask how you were after your long day.” Cissy was of the same opinion; but she adhered steadily to the crochet, and said nothing: perhaps she thought the more. She had confided to her mamma certain passages of the nocturnal ride into Market Harborough, and Mr. Sawyer’s categorical answers to her very pertinent queries. I do not think, however, she had quite made what is called “a clean breast of it.”