Here a stout and smiling old lady entered the Captain’s little room: she was leaning on the arm of a military-looking man of some forty years, and followed by a number of noisy rosy children. ‘This is Mary Ancel,’ said the Captain, ‘and I am Captain Pierre, and yonder is the Colonel, my son; and you see us here assembled in force, for it is the fête of little Jacob yonder, whose brothers and sisters have all come from their schools to dance at his birthday.’ BEATRICE MERGER Beatrice Merger, whose name might figure at the head of one of Mr. Colburn’s politest romances--so smooth and aristocratic does it sound--is no heroine, except of her own simple history; she is not a fashionable French Countess, nor even a victim of the Revolution. [Illustration] She is a stout, sturdy girl of two-and-twenty, with a face beaming with good-nature, and marked dreadfully by small-pox; and a pair of black eyes, which might have done some execution had they been placed in a smoother face. Beatrice’s station in society is not very exalted; she is a servant-of-all-work: she will dress your wife, your dinner, your children; she does beefsteaks and plain work; she makes beds, blacks boots, and waits at table;--such, at least, were the offices which she performed in the fashionable establishment of the writer of this book; perhaps her history may not inaptly occupy a few pages of it. ‘My father died,’ said Beatrice, ‘about six years since, and left my poor mother with little else but a small cottage and a strip of land, and four children too young to work. It was hard enough in my father’s time to supply so many little mouths with food; and how was a poor widowed woman to provide for them now, who had neither the strength nor the opportunity for labour? ‘Besides us, to be sure, there was my old aunt; and she would have helped us, but she could not, for the old woman is bedridden; so she did nothing but occupy our best room, and grumble from morning till night: Heaven knows! poor old soul, that she had no great reason to be very happy; for you know, sir, that it frets the temper to be sick; and that it is worse still to be sick and hungry too.