Mr. Leslie, senior, in a shabby straw hat, was engaged in feeding the chickens before the threshold, and he performed even that occupation with a maundering lack-a-daisical slothfulness, dropping down the grains almost one by one from his inert dreamy fingers. Randal's sister, her hair still and for ever hanging about her ears, was seated on a rush-bottom chair, reading a tattered novel; and from the parlor window was heard the querulous voice of Mrs. Leslie, in high fidget and complaint. Somehow or other, as the young heir to all this helpless poverty stood in the courtyard, with his sharp, refined, intelligent features, and his strange elegance of dress and aspect, one better comprehended how, left solely to the egotism of his knowledge and his ambition, in such a family, and without any of the sweet nameless lessons of Home, he had grown up into such close and secret solitude of soul--how the mind had taken so little nutriment from the heart, and how that affection and respect which the warm circle of the hearth usually calls forth had passed with him to the graves of dead fathers, growing, as it were, bloodless and ghoul-like amidst the charnels on which they fed. "Ha, Randal, boy," said Mr. Leslie, looking up lazily, "how d'ye do? Who could have expected you? My dear--my dear," he cried, in a broken voice, and as if in helpless dismay, "here's Randal, and he'll be wanting dinner, or supper, or something." But in the mean while, Randal's sister Juliet had sprung up and thrown her arms round her brother's neck, and he had drawn her aside caressingly, for Randal's strongest human affection was for this sister. "You are growing very pretty, Juliet," said he, smoothing back her hair; "why do yourself such injustice--why not pay more attention to your appearance, as I have so often begged you to do?" "I did not expect you, dear Randal; you ways come so suddenly, and catch us _en dish-a-bill._" "Dish-a-bill!" echoed Randal, with a groan. "_Dishabille!_--you ought never to be so caught!" "No one else does so catch us--nobody else ever comes! Heigho," and the young lady sighed very heartily. "Patience, patience; my day is coming, and then yours, my sister," replied Randal, with genuine pity, as he gazed upon what a little care could have trained into so fair a flower, and what now looked so like a weed. Here Mrs. Leslie, in a state of intense excitement--having rushed through the parlor--leaving a fragment of her gown between the yawning brass of the never mended Brummagem work table--tore across the hall--whirled out of the door, scattering the chickens to the right and left, and clutched hold of Randal in her motherly embrace. "La, how you do shake my nerves," she cried, after giving him a most hearty and uncomfortable kiss. "And you are hungry, too, and nothing in the house but cold mutton! Jenny, Jenny, I say Jenny! Juliet, have you seen Jenny! Where's Jenny? Out with the old man, I'll be bound."