"Oh dear! I do wish she would not!" said Fanny in a plaintive whisper behind me. "Considering who brought us up, Aunt Kezia," replied impertinent Hatty, "I should have thought they would have had better bargains than that." "Hester, you forget yourself," said my aunt severely. Then, though she had only just finished wiping her spectacles, she took them off, and wiped them again, with more little shakes of her head. "And I did not bring you all up, neither." My cheeks grew hot, for I knew that meant me. My Aunt Kezia did not bring me up, as she did the rest. I was thought sickly in my youth, and as Brocklebank Fells is but a bleak place, I was packed off to Carlisle, where Grandmamma lived, and there I have been with her until six weeks back, when she went to live with Uncle Charles down in the South, and I came home to Brocklebank, being thought to have now outgrown my sickliness. My Aunt Kezia is Father's sister, and has kept house for him since Mamma died, so of course she is no kin to Grandmamma at all. I know it sounds queer to say "Father and Mamma," instead of "Father and Mother," but I cannot help it. Grandmamma would never let me say "Mother;" she said it was old-fashioned and vulgar: and now, when I come back, Father will not hear of my calling him "Papa," which he says is new-fangled finnicking nonsense. I did not get used, either, to saying "Papa," as I did "Mamma," for Grandmamma never seemed to care to hear about him; I don't believe she liked him. She never seemed to want to hear about anything at Brocklebank. I don't think she ever took even to the girls, except Fanny. They all came to see me in turns, but Grandmamma said Sophy was only fit to be a country parson's wife; she knew nothing except things about the house and sewing and mending: she said fine breeding would be thrown away upon her. She might do very well, Grandmamma said, with her snuff-box elegantly held in her left hand, and taking a pinch out of it with the mittened fingers of her right--that is, Grandmamma, not Sophy--she said Sophy might do very well for a country squire's eldest daughter and some parson's wife, to cut out clothes and roll pills and make dumplings, but that was all she was good for. Then Hatty's pert speeches she could not bear one bit. Grandmamma said it was perfectly dreadful, and that her great glazed red cheeks--that is what she called them--were insufferably vulgar; she wouldn't like anybody to hear that such a creature was her grand-daughter. She wanted Hatty to take a lot of castor oil or some such horrid stuff, to bring down her red cheeks and make her slender and ladylike; she was ever so much too fat, Grandmamma said, and she thought it so vulgar to be fat. She wanted to pinch her in with stays, too, but it was all of no use. Hatty would not be pinched, and she would not take castor oil, and she would eat and drink--like a plough-boy, Grandmamma said--so at last she gave her up as a bad job. Then Fanny