The feeling of clanship was strongly rooted in the people. In the fifties of last century there was still living a delightful old woman, one Bella Harbottle, who with her brother inhabited two, or three rooms, which were all that remained of the seventeenth-century Manor House—just a tower in an old-fashioned garden, which the brother tended, in the beauty of which Bacon himself would have taken delight. The brother and sister were specimens of a grand old type of northern peasantry not yet passed away, thank Heaven! Their beautifully chiselled features, no less than their proud bearing and dignified manners, might have befitted the descendants of crusaders. She was always clad in an old-fashioned lilac print gown, with a square of shepherd’s plaid crossed over the bosom. Her delicate, high-bred face, with blue eyes, still bright and beautiful, was framed in the frills of an immaculate mutch covering her ears and almost hiding the snow-white hair; her small feet were always daintily cased in grey worsted stockings and scrupulously blacked shoes. She must have been nearly eighty years old when I used to sit with her in her kitchen—the aged dame on one side of the hearth, the little boy on the other, listening to her old-world tales of the past glories of Mitford. There were always a few old-fashioned flowers in the kitchen-parlour, and she herself sweetly reminded one of lavender. The good soul was always stout for the rights and honour of the family. A gentleman who had bought a small adjoining estate built himself a house just on the boundary. Every day, almost, old Bella would walk out, leaning on her crutched stick, to see that there was no encroachment. The neighbour, aware of this, and greatly amused, said to her one day, “You see, Bella, it is all right. I am not removing my neighbour’s landmark.” “Ah!” grumbled she, with her sweet Northumbrian burr, “I’m thinking that you’re building your house verra high.” Even the air was sacred to the family of her worship. To the east of the Manor House Tower is the old Norman church. When I first went to Mitford it was a mere wreck, just sufficiently weather-tight for service to be held; but it was beautifully restored some fifty years since by the piety of the last owner but one, Colonel John Philip Mitford. And now it is time for us to leave the north and travel southward with those who are more immediately responsible for us.