Isoult Avery began to think that she was to spend the year 1548 in visiting. She had not been long back from Crowe, when a letter reached her from her own home at Wynscote, inviting her to the wedding of her brother Hugh with Mrs Alice Wikes, which was to take place on the fourteenth of May. Jennifer Trevor shook her head in her most ominous style at the date. But Hugh, though a sailor, was nevertheless not at all superstitious, so far as concerned the point in question; and he had already sturdily declined to change the date selected by Alice, though half the gossips round Wynscote prophesied all manner of consequent evil. For a maiden of the sixteenth century, Alice also was remarkably free from the believing in omens and the observing of times: so Hugh and she were married on the fourteenth of May, and Isoult Avery was never able to discover that any harm had come of it. On arrival at Wynscote, they found the house full and running over. Not only the family who ordinarily occupied it were there--namely, Mrs Barry, the widowed mother; Henry Barry, the head of the house, who was by calling a gentleman farmer, and by inclination the gentleman without the farmer; his wife Margaret, who would have made a better farmer than himself; and his three exceedingly noisy and mischievous boys, by name Michael, William, and Henry. But these, as I have said, were not by any means all. There was the bridegroom Hugh, who grumbled good-humouredly at being banished to Farmer Northcote's for the night, for there was no room for him except in the day-time; there was Bessy Dennis, the eldest sister, and John Dennis her husband, and William, Nicholas, Anne, and Ellen, their children. No wonder that Isoult told her husband in confidence that she did not expect to lose her headache till she reached home. Will Barry was the incarnation of mischief, and Will Dennis, his cousin and namesake, followed him like his shadow. The discipline which ensued was of doubtful character, for Bessy's two notions on the subject of rearing children were embodied in cakes or slaps, as they were respectively deserved, or rather, as she thought they were: while Mr Barry's ideas of education lay in very oracular exhortations, stuffed with words of as many syllables as he had the good fortune to discover. His wife's views were hardly better. Her interference consisted only in the invariable repetition of a formula--"Come, now, be good lads, do!"-- which certainly did not err on the side of severity. But the grandmother, if possible, made matters worse. She had brought up her own children in abject terror and unanswering submission; and Nature, as usual, revenged herself by causing her never to cross the wills of her grandchildren on any consideration. Accordingly, when Will set fire to the barn, let the pony into the bean-field, and the cows into Farmer Northcote's meadow, Grandmother only observed quietly that "Boys will be