In addition to these guests at the Abbey, there were also present the Dowager Lady Woodstock and her four daughters, Anne, Sarah, Jane, and Mary. Lady Woodstock was the widow of a baronet, whose services in the navy the country had repaid with little more than a title; but we would not say a word in censure of such economical remunerations, nor, on the other hand, would be very censorious, if the recompense had assumed the more solid form of a noble pension. We have read, and have in our political feelings profited by reading, the fable of the old man, his son, and his ass, and we know how difficult it is to please every body. We know that if the government does not reward its servants liberally, they will be very angry; and we know that if it does reward them liberally, others will be very angry. But let that pass. It is, however, a fact, that Lady Woodstock and her four daughters lived at Hollywick Priory in very good style, considering the limited means which they possessed. They were also very highly respected, and very much talked about as being persons of very superior minds and most amiable dispositions. They had cultivated their understandings; and indeed the pursuit and enjoyment of literature was the only occupation in which they could engage. They had no house in town, nor had they the means of splendid hospitality in the country. But what is most to our present purpose, they were one and all great favorites with old John Martindale. Lady Woodstock was a woman of great delicacy of feeling, and was most scrupulously adverse to any thing like exhibiting her daughters, or as it were carrying them to market. It was only in consequence of the very earnest and almost angry importunity of the old gentleman that she would consent to share the festivities of Brigland Abbey. And when that paragraph appeared in a morning paper, announcing the approaching nuptials of the Hon. Philip Martindale and Miss Sampson; and when she knew that Sir Gilbert and his daughter were to be of the party, her reluctance abated. For though Lady Woodstock would have despised the use, and dreaded the repute, of stratagem to dispose of her daughters, she would not have been sorry to have them or any of them well settled. As to the report that old Mr. Martindale himself had any design of offering his hand to the widow, the lady herself had not the slightest suspicion of the existence of such design, or even of the circulation of any such report. Lady Woodstock was a person of good sense and extensive information; but, happily, free from every species of pedantry; totally unpretending and unartificial. She had pursued knowledge as the means of an agreeable occupation, and not as a medium of display or exhibition. She had read much, and had reflected more; so that her conversation was not the idle echo of others’ thoughts, but the result of her own mind’s movements and observation. Under such direction and tuition, her daughters had grown up to womanhood.