schoolroom, every branch laden with benefits--these were events which broke the slow monotony of each laborious year, joys to dream of and to remember in many a dull week of toil. Second only to these festive gatherings in helpfulness were Lady Emily's coal and blanket society, savings bank, and mothers' meeting--the last a friendly, familiar gathering held in a spacious old building which had been a brewery in the days when every country gentleman's household brewed its own beer. Once a week, through the winter season, Lady Emily sat in the old brewery, with a circle of cottagers' wives sewing industriously, while she talked and read to them. Tea and bread-and-butter, a roaring wood fire, and a bright lamp, were the only material comforts provided; but these and Lady Emily's friendly welcome and pleasant talk, with the short story chosen out of a magazine, and the familiar chapter of the New Testament, read far better than vicar or curate read it in church, sufficed to make the mothers' meeting a cheerful break in the cottage matron's busy week. She went back to her homely hearth cheered and encouraged. Lady Emily had told her the latest news of the great busy world outside Fendyke, had given her a recipe for a new savoury pie of ox-cheek and twopenny rice, or a new way of making barley broth; or had given her a "cutting" for her tiny flower-garden, or had cut out her new Gari_bawl_di. Lady Emily had been to her as a friend and counsellor. The village remembered with a shudder that long dreary winter when the great house was empty, while Mr. Carew and his wife were in Egypt--ordered there by the doctors, after a serious illness of the squire's. Much had been done for the sick and the poor even in that desolate winter, for the housekeeper had been given a free hand; but no one could replace Lady Emily, and the gaiety of Fendyke had been extinguished. CHAPTER III. "A HOME OF ANCIENT PEACE." The hunting was nearly over by the time Allan Carew had established himself at Beechhurst and completed his stud. The selection of half a dozen hunters had given him an excuse for running up to London once or twice a week; and he had revelled in the convenience of express trains between Salisbury and Waterloo as compared with the slow and scanty train service between Fendyke and Cambridge, which made a journey from his native village a trial of youthful patience. London was full of pleasant people at this after-Easter season, so Allan took his time at Tattersall's, saw his friends, dined them, or dined with them, at those clubs which young men most affect, went to his favourite theatres, rode in the Park, and saw a race or two at Sandown, all in the process of buying his horses; but at last the stud was complete, and his stud-groom, a man he had brought from Suffolk, the man who taught him to ride, had shaken a wise head, and told his young master to stop buying.