Because a man with a capital of ten or twelve thousand pounds chooses to invest that capital in a large farm, and consequently lives himself, and brings up his family, as he would be entitled to do if the same fortune was invested in any other speculation or profession; why should the small farmer, who can barely stock his forty or fifty acres, and by the utmost industry ought not to expect a profit much beyond the earnings of a good labourer, think himself called upon to emulate his richer neighbour? Like him he keeps his greyhounds to go coursing, or his nag to ride hunting; while his wife and daughters appear at church attired in the extreme of the fashion, and at home display in their best parlour the elegancies of a drawing-room; such as diminutive cupids bearing gigantic candlesticks, _petits objets_ on a small table, a flower-glass containing an artificial bouquet, and not unfrequently a piano-forte. Farmer Otley himself was not one to whom these remarks were applicable, but he had married a woman who was the very type of a fashionable farmeress. She had received a boarding-school education, could play on the piano-forte, spoke French, wrote a delicate hand with a steel pen, embroidered muslin, was really a pretty and not a vulgar-looking woman, and having brought him a decent fortune, felt herself entitled to be as refined as books and backboards could make her. She had been struck by Mr. Otley's personal beauty, and had fallen in love with him as being more fitted by his appearance to enact the hero than any one else with whom she associated. He was certainly a singularly handsome man; and although (after marriage) she sometimes reproved him for allowing his voice to go beyond what she thought the true pitch of romance, and his laugh to become too hearty, she consoled herself by finding many examples in novels and poems, where strength, manliness, and courage are the requisite attributes of the lover, and the delicacy and refinement are only indispensable in the lady-love. When she married him she imagined all farmers must move in the same sphere of gentility; and as Mr. Glover, who rented and cultivated highly a thousand acres in her native parish, drove his wife and daughters to church in a phaeton with two pretty ponies; as the Miss Glovers were dressed as well, or nearly as well, as the Lady Larkingtons; as Mrs. Glover frequently dined with the clergyman's wife, and Mr. Glover occasionally at Larkington Hall, she concluded that when she also was united to a farmer, Mrs. Otley would be as great and as genteel a personage as Mrs. Glover.