handsome daughters, which made the number of his family amount to four, occasionally aided their brothers, dressed in men's clothes, and mounted upon powerful horses, which they managed as well as any grooms in the county. The reader must not think that, in this description, we are exercising indiscreetly our licence for dealing in fiction. We are painting a true picture of the family of which we speak, as they lived and acted some eighty or eighty-five years ago. The wife of the farmer had been dead ten or twelve years; and her children had done just what they liked ever since; but it must be admitted, that, even if she had lived to superintend their education, we have no reason to conclude their conduct would have been very different from what it was. We have merely said that they had done as they pleased ever since her death, because during her life she had made them do as she pleased, and beat them, or, as she herself termed it, "basted" them heartily, if they did not. She was quite capable of doing so too, to her own perfect satisfaction, for probably few arms in all Kent were furnished with more sinewy muscles or a stouter fist than hers could boast. It was only upon minor points of difference, however, that she and her children ever quarrelled; for of their general course of conduct she approved most highly; and no one was more ready to receive packets of lace, tea, or other goods under her fostering care, or more apt and skilful in stopping a tub of spirits from "talking," or of puzzling a Custom-House officer when force was not at hand to resist him.