What would his lordship have said if he could have overheard that conversation between his betrothed and her friend with the sweet Miranda face? He would not have been more surprised, we suspect, than Mr. Lionel Hammerton, who was in India all this time, blissfully ignorant of all that was going on at Barton,--blissfully ignorant of the recent changes. If any one had told him that his thorough-going old bachelor brother was engaged to be married, he would have treated it as a good joke. And supposing the gossip had supplemented that statement with a true history of the case, he would have given him considerable credit for imagination, and pooh-poohed the whole thing. Amy Somerton discovered to be Christopher Tallant’s daughter, and Miss Tallant no other than the bailiff’s daughter!--changed in infancy by the bailiff’s wife! Old Tallant dead, and made Amy his heiress, cut off his son, not even with a shilling. And Earl Verner going to marry the young lady that Lionel had flirted with, and whose likeness was hung outside those mosquito curtains! Of course he would not have believed a word of it. He would more readily have accepted the incidents in the novel he had been reading than these. Besides, who could be expected to believe that those two girls had been changed in their cradles? It was such an old story, that; all very well in a poem or a romance, but it could never occur in the Vale of Avonworth. Perhaps, _chers amis_, you, too, may think in this wise. The idea is not a new one, we must confess; but if it is a fact, you will accept it as worthy of record, not for its own sake, but on account of the consequences arising out of Mrs. Somerton’s mistaken ambition. Remember, friends, there is no new thing under the sun. We have this upon the authority of the wisest of all men, and the preacher is verified in ten thousand ways. As far back as the thirteenth century one Friar Bacon, probably writing upon facts and traditions handed down from times long antecedent to his own day, anticipated in his works the railway, the steamship, the hydraulic engine, and the balloon. The Chinese were printers before the ancient Romans discovered Britain, and the Romans made gunpowder when there were naked savages living in the neighbourhood of Barton Hall. The Chinese had discovered gas long before we knew anything about it. Chloroform, photography, the telegraph, and a hundred other “new” inventions, were old things used and forgotten before we heard of them. Have not all the finest thoughts that can enter the brain of scholar or poet been thought before? and does not some classical writer anathematise the great men who had said all the good things before him? All that long race of thinkers and writers, and poets and orators, and tale-tellers and humourists, and playwrights,--what room have they left for a mere story-teller to interest and say something new?