Right well do I remember the look and figure of my Aunt Meetkerke, properly great-aunt-in-law. She was an admirable specimen of a squiress, as people and things were in that day. I suppose that there was not a poor man or woman in the parish with whose affairs of all sorts she was not intimately acquainted, and to whom she did not play the part of an ever-active providence. She always came down to breakfast clad in a green riding-habit, and passed most of her life on horseback. After dinner, in the long low drawing-room, with its faded stone-coloured curtains and bookless desert spaces, she always slept, as peacefully as she does now in Julians churchyard. She never meddled at all with the housekeeping of her establishment. That was in the hands of “Mrs. Anne,” an old maiden sister of Mr. Meetkerke. She was a prim-looking, rosy-apple-faced, most good-natured little woman. She always carried a little basket in her hand, in which were the keys, and a never-changed volume of Miss Austen’s _Pride and Prejudice_, which she always recommenced as soon as she had worked her way to the end of it. Though a very precise sort of person, she would frequently come down to breakfast a few minutes late, to find her brother standing on the hearth-rug with his prayer-book open in his hand waiting for her arrival to begin prayers to the assembled household. He had a wonderfully strong rasping voice, the tones of which were rarely modulated under any circumstances. I can hear now his reverberating, “Five minutes too late again, Mrs. Anne; ‘Dearly beloved brethren,’” ... etc., the change of person addressed, and of subject, having been marked by no pause or break whatever save the sudden kneeling at the head of the breakfast table; while at the conclusion of the short, but never missed prayers, the transition from “Amen” to “William, bring round the brown mare after breakfast” was equally unmarked by pause or change of voice or manner.