Although the reader is entertained by the portrayal of the Departments of Internal Navigation and Weights and Measures, the book hangs mainly on the plot, and the story is basically that of the six young people. Harry falls in love with the eldest sister Gertrude, but Alaric wins her away from him and earns his sustained hatred. Harry subsequently settles for the second sister Linda, who initially thought she was in love with Alaric, who was false with her as well as with Harry. In the course of the story the youngest sister Katie grows up from thirteen to seventeen and falls in love with Charley, who saves her life by pulling her from the water. Three brides for three friends: perhaps this wasn't so unusual in Victorian times when meetings, much less friendships, among eligible young people weren't always so easy to obtain. But then the results: the first two couplings are plausible enough, but Katie, the youngest, becomes chronically ill with unrequited love, and although the reader is reassured that the doctors who listen to her chest through wooden tubes find no evidence of consumption, the anxious reader fears that the author will let her die. Trollope became known as a skeptic of Shakespeare's dictum: "Men will die and worms will eat them, but not of love." We are reminded how Australia was populated as Alaric takes his family there for a fresh start after serving six months in jail for betraying the trust of a young woman for whom he was named trustee. And we see how Victorians did their insider trading, as Alaric is persuaded by the villain of the story, Undy Scott, to buy shares in mines that he is evaluating for the Department of Weights and Measures. And Trollope indulges in certain liberties. He satirizes the publishing world with Charley Tudor's writing serial novels, and here we find Mrs. Woodward reading _Crinoline and Macassar_ aloud to the young people: "The lovely Crinoline was sitting alone at a lattice window on a summer morning, and as she sat she sang with melancholy cadence the first part of the now celebrated song which had then lately appeared. . . ." Thirteen pages of Chapter XXVIII are devoted entirely to an impassioned defense of the Civil Service, particularly of the young men who work there. This chapter is absent from my small leather-bound edition published in 1878 but is restored in the Trollope Society edition of 1992, which follows the text of the first edition, published in 1858. The chapter is irrelevant to the story; it does, however, reveal where the author is coming from. He is coming from the Civil Service, which was his ticket to self-respect and financial independence.