“I wore a plum-coloured cloth habit, faced with velvet, and sugar-loaf buttons, and a hat with a gold band on it,” said Mrs. Preston. “I believe, father, it was a morning to the full as bad as this, was our wedding; and yet didn’t all the folks come over from Appley Moor? To be sure they did, every one of them!” “And the road from Appley Moor to Rookwood Grange is worse than the road we should have to go, isn’t it, mother?” insinuated Sophy. “Couldn’t be worse than Binks’ Wold,” replied her father; and to spare himself any further aggravation from our faces of reproach and mortification, he marched away, after his ample breakfast, out of the room, and out of the house. Mrs. Preston disappeared also, and we three young ones were left alone to bewail our disappointment. And a cruel disappointment it was; perhaps more cruel to me than to my school-friends, for I was a town-bred girl, only staying my Christmas holidays at Ripstone Farm, and never in my life had I been to any entertainment more exciting than a breaking-up dance all of girls. The wedding at the Grange was known of before I came, and so I had been sent from home provided with crisp white muslin, tucked ever so high, with rose-coloured bows and sash; and only the Saturday previous, Anne’s and Sophy’s new frocks had come from the dressmaker’s, by the Winton carrier, and had been pronounced, with their sky-blue trimmings, so pretty, so _sweetly_ pretty! When Mr. Preston had said we could not go to the wedding-party, my first thought had been of my frock, and when we came to compare notes, Anne’s and Sophy’s regrets proved to have taken the same direction. With one consent we adjourned up-stairs, to indulge the luxury of woe over our sacrificed finery, but that mournful exercise palling upon us fast, Sophy and I found our way, by a swept foot-path, into the garden, where the two boys of the family were constructing a snow-man of grand proportions. Shovels were proposed to us to help, and we were cavalierly dismissed to find them in the tool-house for ourselves, when we unexpectedly met the foreman at the door. Sophia told him how that, on account of the snow, we could not go to the wedding-party at the Grange, and appealed to him if it were really and truly out of the question to attempt it. “Unpossible, Miss Sophy, quite unpossible for the pheyton an’ grey mear, but _I_ could get yo there,” replied foreman, with a confidential wag of his head. “How, John, how?” “Why, Miss, I’ll tell ’ee. I’ th’ broad-wheeled wagon wi’ fower hosses, an’ a tilt ower-head. Put a mattruss an’ plenty o’ rugs iv’ th’ insoide, an’ yo’d goa as cosy as cosy could be. Long Tom to lead, an’ me to foller.” “I’ll ask father if we mayn’t?” cried Sophy, and away she flew in search of him. In a few minutes she came speeding back, clapping her hands, and announcing that he would see about it; so in we ran to tell Anne.