The morning of Easter Monday was given to an inspection of Lady Emily's white farm--that farm which, next to her son, was the greatest pride and delight of her innocent and strictly rural life. Here, all buildings and all creatures were of an almost dazzling purity. White horses at the plough, a white fox-terrier running beside it, white birds in the poultry-yard, white cows in the meadow--cows from Lord Cawdor's old white Pembroke breed, cows from Blickling Park and Woodbastwick--white cottages for bailiff and farm-labourers, white palings, white pigs, and white donkeys, a white peacock sunning himself on the top of the clipped yew-hedge in the bailiff's garden, white tulips, white hyacinths in the flower-beds. To procure all this whiteness had cost trouble and money; but there are few home-farms which give as much delight to their possessors as this white farm gave to Lady Emily Carew. She had as much pride in its perfection as the connoisseur who collects only Wedgwood, or only Florentine Majolica, has in his collection. It is not so much the actual value of the thing as the fact that the thing is unique, and has cost the possessor years of patience and labour. Lady Emily would take a long journey to look at a white cow, or to secure the whitest thing in Brahmas or Cochin Chinas. It was a harmless, simple, womanly hobby, and although Lady Emily's farm was a somewhat costly toy, it served to give her status in the neighbourhood, and it provided labour for a good many people, who were well housed and well looked after, and whose children astonished the school-inspectors by the thoroughness of their education. No incompetent master or mistress could have held on in the schools where Lady Emily was a power. She cultivated a friendly familiarity with the man and woman who taught her cottage children; she asked them to quiet, confidential luncheons three or four times in a quarter; she sounded their opinions, plucked out the heart of their mystery, lent them books, stuffed them with her own ideas, and, in a manner, made them her mouthpiece. Intensely conservative as to her opinions and prejudices, and with an absolute loathing for all radical and revolutionary principles; she was yet, by the beneficence of her nature, more liberal than many a professing demagogue, and would fain have admitted all her fellow-creatures to an equal share in the good things of this life. Her warm heart was full of compassion for the hard lives she saw around her--hard even where the condition of the agricultural labourer was at its best--and it was her delight to introduce into these hard lives occasional glimpses of a happier world--a world of pleasure and gaiety, laughter and frolic. Lady Emily's Christmas and Whitsun balls for the villagers and servants; Lady Emily's May-day feast for the children; Lady Emily's midsummer picnic and harvest-home; and Lady Emily's fairy fir-tree, which reached to the ceiling of the boy's