character) one must have looked for; but it was confounding to find this mixed up with such eager curiosity and enormous knowledge of the tattle and scandal of the world they had so long left. Their tables were piled with newspapers from every corner of the kingdom, and they seemed to have the deaths and marriages of the antipodes at their fingers’ ends. Their albums and autographs, from Louis XVIII. and George IV. down to magazine poets and quack doctors, are a museum. I shall never see the spirit of blue stockingism again in such perfect incarnation. Peveril (a family name for Sir Walter) won’t get over their final kissing match for a week. Yet it is too bad to laugh at these good old girls; they have long been the guardian angels of the village, and are worshipped by every man, woman, and child about them.” The collecting mania grew upon the old women with the passing of the years. They had long converted their cottage from a labourer’s dwelling to the likeness of a curiosity shop, and had begged or bought all the ancient Elizabethan, Carolean, and Jacobean carved wooden four-poster bedsteads within a circle of twenty miles from Llangollen, to decorate the interior and exterior of Plas Newydd; but their passion for old oak was insatiable. The posts of the black oak porch and the other profusely carved oak decorations that front the house to this day were placed here by them. Here is still the famous carved frieze of cat and acorns that they went into raptures over, and opposite is the little dog, also in black oak, with which, after years of anxious waiting and searching, they matched the cat. So wedded to this passion for old oak did the Ladies become that no one was welcome as a visitor who did not bring with him an offering of this sort. They were proud of their house. “When we fust came home,” Lady Eleanor was wont to say, drawing a word-picture of the place, “then and afterwards, we had only bare walls and a roof.” Then they would point out the trees they had planted in the garden; and the laylocks that made so fragrant a bank of blooms in the spring. (They, in common with others of their order, continued to say “fust,” and “laylock,” and “obleege” when merely common people had adopted what is now the usual pronunciation.)